The Politician season 2 premieres this summer, but season 3 will probably be delayed
After conquering FX, Ryan Murphy’s slow takeover of Netflix began with last year’s debut of The Politician. The satirical dramedy series stars Ben Platt as an aspiring high school politician in the vein of Election’s Tracy Flick, and features a star-studded cast that includes Gwyneth Paltrow and Murphy fave Jessica Lange. Murphy’s latest Netflix series, Hollywood—a revisionist take on the eponymous industry’s Golden Age—premieres this Friday, May 1, and boasts a similarly exciting ensemble: Darren Criss, Laura Harrier, Samara Weaving, and Patti LuPone, to name a few. During a chat with Collider about the new series, the prolific producer revealed that we won’t have to wait very long for more Murphy on Netflix: In news that will not come as a surprise fans of the exceptionally productive TV mastermind, The Politician season two is arriving this summer.
Murphy said that the series’ second season will likely premiere in June and picks up with Payton (Platt) as he continues his elaborate scheme to become President of the United States—a fight that pits him against Bette Midler and Judith Light’s characters:
I love how Payton has grown up. He’s now in college, and the best thing about the season is the Ben Platt versus Bette Midler and Judith Light aspect. It feels very adult, it feels very topical. It’s sort of a story about baby boomers asking themselves, “Is it time for us to pass the power that we have onto the next generation or are they too dumb to figure it out yet?” And I think you can see that battle playing out daily in our political landscape.
As for continuing the story beyond the second season, Murphy said that he and co-creators Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan have a plan for three seasons, with the third centering on Payton’s eventual run for the presidency:
[W]hat I would love to do is take a couple of years off and have Ben Platt get a little bit older for his final race. That would obviously be a presidential race, right? That’s always what we had designed, and I think that’s what our plan is. I’m going to wait. Ben is young, so I want to wait a couple of years to figure out how we age him up a little bit.