The Politician: Everything We Know About Ryan Murphy’s First Netflix Show With Gwyneth Paltrow, Zoey Deutch, and Ben Platt
Remember Scream Queens? Remember Glee? Well, it looks like Ryan Murphy, showrunner extraordinaire and wedding officiant, is taking everything he learned from both of those shows, putting them in a cauldron, and heading back to high school with his new Netflix series The Politician. On Friday, the cast members Zoey Deutch and Ben Platt, work husband and wife, posted the show’s first poster to their Instagrams, announcing the release date: all the way out on September 27, more than six months away (a pretty long-lead assignment, for the notoriously tight-lipped streaming service).
The long-germinating project, which was first announced early last year, also stars the longtime Murphy collaborator Jessica Lange, Gwyneth Paltrow (the nonactor wife of Murphy’s professional partner Brad Falchuk, who is credited as a writer on the show), Lucy Boynton, and Bob Balaban. The erstwhile Broadway sensation Platt, of Dear Evan Hansen, plays the titular “politician,” Payton Hobart, a high school student in Santa Barbara, California, who’s decided he’s destined to be president—of the United States, and also of his high school student body. The series will purportedly follow the character as he runs a series of campaigns throughout his life, season by season, but a button on the poster reveals that it does all indeed begin in school.
Among the up-and-comers listed on the show’s first poster are Rahne Jones, for whom The Politician is her first credit; David Corenswet, who looks like your prototypical Murphy man; Benjamin Barrett; Theo Germaine, a Chicago-based trans actor and painter; and Julia Schlaepfer, of the forthcoming Manson Family movie Charlie Says. The cast list on IMDb also includes actors playing historical figures such as senators Ted Kennedy and Thomas Eagleton and the former presidential candidate Walter Mondale, which could indicate some Elvis-in-True Romance-style dream sequences. January Jones is also set to appear for nine episodes, because Netflix loves Mad Men.
Some reports have indicated that the show is going to feature musical numbers (duh, because Ryan Murphy; also duh because Ben Platt), though a pilot script obtained by Vulture apparently made no reference to song and dance. “The script does include some gory teen death, however,” Vulture reported.
Last year, Murphy signed a deal with Netflix worth an estimated $300 million; the first show to emerge from that deal, the upcoming Hollywood, will begin shooting this summer, Murphy announced on Instagram. Meanwhile, you’ll find the Politicians in Disneyland.
