The First Lady is a star-studded, soapy affair

Apart from Jackie and [Googling…], um, Guarding Tess, there aren’t a whole lot of movies or series about the institution of Presidential spouses. Showtime’s ten-part anthology The First Lady is here to fill that hypothetical niche, spinning uneven drama around three famous rulers of the East Wing.

Early on, the series lays its cards on the table. The first episode opens with Amy Sherald (Tiffany Denise Hobbs) taking preparatory photographs of Michelle Obama (Viola Davis), the basis for her famous portrait. “I don’t want to just paint the official,” the artist murmurs between camera flashes. “I am interested in the real.” Michelle chuckles knowingly. Next, Betty Ford (Michelle Pfeiffer) sits demurely for her portrait in 1977, noting, “I don’t think all women can adjust to this type of life.” Last comes indomitable, starchy Eleanor Roosevelt (Gillian Anderson) delivering a radio address that celebrates a woman’s strength by comparing her to a tea bag: “You never know how strong it is until it’s in hot water.” Message received: FLOTUS ain’t for the weak of heart.

A similar blend of sympathy and pandering runs throughout the series as it dutifully excavates each woman’s family, marriage, and ascent to the White House in three braided timelines with some thematic overlap. A less campy version of the Ryan Murphy formula (American Politics Story?), showrunner Aaron Cooley’s intercutting approach has its strengths, refreshing the palate every ten or so minutes, but also weaknesses, such as flattening story arcs and scattering them across the hour. We find ourselves jumping from high-pressure Inauguration Days in 1933 and 2008, then to the last gasps of the Nixon Administration in 1974—and then rewinding back to the 1920s and early 2000s for backstory on each future White House couple.

Betty’s battle with alcohol and prescription drugs is the most visceral personal thread, with Eleanor’s glacially slow sexual awakening coming in second. Unless you slept through U.S. history or the last fifteen years, few of the political plot points should come as a total surprise: the Great Depression, World War II, our first Black President. True, less is known about each First Lady, who all envisioned a better future for themselves than organizing state dinners or becoming Redecorator-in-Chief. Free-spirited Betty dreamed of dancing with Martha Graham; a pioneering feminist, Eleanor was groomed for politics by FDR’s own advisor, Louis Howe (Jackie Earle Haley in an elegant turn); and of course, Michelle put her leadership role at the University of Chicago Medical Center on hold.

Not surprisingly, the Obamas emerge as the model partnership. Compared to the other two—marred by addiction or, in FDR’s case, a series of affairs—Michelle and Barack come off as loving, enlightened and humorous. As a cocky recent graduate (Julian De Niro) and older, warier Presidential candidate (O-T Fagbenle), Barack has a laid-back, almost stoner approach to life, but also deep political ideals. Michelle grew up on Chicago’s South Side in a working-class family and watches her MS-afflicted father (Michael Potts) decline from inadequate medical care and predatory insurance; the experience drives her zeal for public health. Davis’ transformation is scrupulous. She exudes passionate integrity, enunciating every word in that emphatic Michelle style, leavening serious moments with a dash of slang or a joke. She is the heart of the series, the modern woman who fiercely defends her children while balancing marriage and career, showing America its better self.

Pfeiffer and Anderson also do solid work as the women who helped pave the way by sheer tenacity and resourcefulness. Pfeiffer gets some of the flashiest material, as Betty turns to booze and pills to relieve a shoulder injury and daily humiliations of being First Lady (younger Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are her dickish adversaries in the Ford Administration), while Anderson (after The Crown) continues her intensely focused portraits of women in politics (lots of clenched jaw and accent work). Pfeiffer makes it look easy and Anderson makes it look a bit painful, but both are fun to watch, whether it’s Eleanor helping the country through World War II or Betty trying to salvage the reputation of the besmirched office of POTUS.

As the series progresses, one begins to sense that each wife was her husband’s “better half” in a real, almost policy sense. Michelle sells the need for healthcare (nutrition and childhood obesity) to the American public more effectively than Barack and his boys; Betty has a popular touch that stiff Gerald (Aaron Eckhart) lacks; and Eleanor shows more spine and vision than the dignified but vacillating FDR (Kiefer Sutherland). The night Ford pardons Nixon on national TV, Betty refuses to share a bed with him. “I thought you were going to bring some of your goodness to the office,” she says in disgust.

Susanne Bier directs all ten episodes, capturing vivid performances from each of her leading ladies. The design and cinematography of each timeline is appropriately stylized, with warm, woody lighting for the Roosevelts, a funkier palate and camera work for the Fords, and a brisk, bright, contemporary sheen for the Obamas. Still, for all its glossy production values and talented leads, a few episodes in The First Lady starts to show fatigue, like three highly padded made-for-TV movies spliced together. Its dialogue, too, often lapses into expository clunkiness (the Roosevelt segments begin to sound sub-Gilded Age).

For those still binging West Wing seasons, The First Lady might scratch a Sorkinish itch for patriotic pomp and liberal sound bites, but it’s too diffuse and self-satisfied to really challenge a viewer. Deeper political debate would have been welcome, or more generous helpings of humor and camp. A similarly conceived series on Vice Presidents through the ages would have been, unavoidably, a joke. But it might also be more purely entertaining than this reverent pageant. Marx may have written that historical entities appear “first as tragedy, then as farce,” but in this case, the relevant genre is soap opera.