‘The First Lady’ Enlists Gillian Anderson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Viola Davis to Tell Three Stories With Little Rhyme or Reason: TV Review
variety.comCaroline Framke Chief TV CriticAs Chicago lawyer Michelle Obama becomes First Lady Michelle Obama in Showtime’s newest drama, her predecessor Laura Bush offers some words of advice and comfort. “You may think you have nothing in common with the First Ladies before you,” Laura tells her, “[but] trust me when I say we all felt that way.” Here, Laura Bush acts as both some benign voice of reason (an odd choice) and also as a mouthpiece for “The First Lady” writ large (odder), which tackles the stories of three First Ladies who share little beyond the fact of living in the White House (oddest, by a mile).There’s Michelle, played by Viola Davis with Obama’s familiar cadence (if also some very exaggerated stenciled half-moon eyebrows).
In the timeline that comes closest to working is Betty Ford, embodied by an especially sharp Michelle Pfeiffer. Rounding out the cast is Gillian Anderson’s Eleanor Roosevelt, whose defining characteristic is a distracting set of false teeth.
The high wattage trifecta of Davis, Pfeiffer, and Anderson makes for an undeniably impressive lineup. But not even they, nor showrunner Cathy Schulman (“Crash”) or director Susanne Bier (“The Undoing”), can make up for the fact that the series often feels like a dramatization of several Wikipedia pages all at once.
From creator Aaron Cooley’s scattered pilot onward, each episode toggles between its timelines seemingly at random. Occasionally, a unifying theme like “marriage is hard” or “gay rights?” (question mark intentional) presents itself.
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