Madam Secretary - Seasons 1 & 2 give us a new view of executive functioning.

Madam Secretary, the CBS series about an imaginary Secretary of State, presented itself as the one last binge watch to be squeezed in before the beginning of the school year.  After watching series created Netflix and HBO that are much shorter, a network binge proved more daunting.  With over twenty episodes per season, we only got through the first two seasons before we reached the time limit – I may or may not report on subsequent seasons as time and interest permit.

Madam Secretary is a continuing effort to use television dramas to better understand the federal government.  The reluctant son asked me to rate this relative to the previous ones (he was invited to binge with us, but chose not to participate, even though he is interested in going into government some day - maybe he just didn't want to hang with the O.G.'s).  I continue to believe that The West Wing is the best of the bunch, though it is not without problems.  I liked House of Cards more than The Newsroom until National Politics got wackier than this crazy show and one of its stars went down in flames. 

Madam Secretary does a nice job of describing aspects of the work of one of the important cabinet positions – but the first two seasons have some serious flaws that leave it at the bottom of this heap.  That said, I have learned a lot about the functioning of the Department of State and how it interacts with Defense – and a great deal about the power of the president and the executive branch to affect our functioning in the world.  All of which is sobering when we have a president who was probably as unfamiliar as I with all of this at the beginning of his presidency and one who, by many accounts, displayed a lack of interest in learning about it.  It is also important, and I will talk more about this later, that this is a dramatization, and I don't know how factual it is.  I feel a little like I am a citizen of Elizabeth the I's England, learning about how my country works by watching Shakespearean plays. 

Just as the President knew very little about State and other executive offices when he took office, Elizabeth McCord (Played by Téa Leoni) had not been groomed for the position nor was she angling for it.  A former CIA operative who worked under the President when was the Chief CIA officer, McCord had settled into a role teaching politics at UVA with her husband, Henry (Tim Daly), a professor of religious studies at UVA who, in his former life, was a marine fighter pilot.  McCord inherits the office of Secretary of State when the former Secretary of State dies (we learn in the first season that he was assassinated) in office.  She learns on the job, with her staff being inherited rather than hired by her.  Her chief of staff (played by Bebe Neuwirth, one of my all-time favorite wacky actresses who plays this role straight) has dedicated her life to the State Department and the rest of the crew is rounded out by a diplomat, a speech writer, a publicist – all in various stages of their careers – and her personal assistant – dapper man of uncertain sexual orientation.  The device of having her learn on the job is not as well exploited as it might be to help us learn - and not hiring her staff (a la Seven Samurai and its many imitators) could have been done, but we get to know them quickly enough.

Meanwhile, at home, Elizabeth and Henry have three children, a daughter who drops out of college at the beginning of the first season, and a son and daughter in high school.  The impact of the transition from having parents teaching in the local university to having one of them be one of the most powerful and influential people in the world is one of the many threads in this series.  It should be apparent, with all of the characters introduced thus far (and I haven’t included the President, his Chief of Staff and heads of other executive offices – not to mention sundry representatives and senators) that the number of subplots to manage by the writing staff (Barbara Hall is one of the main writers, a producer, and responsible for keeping the whole thing on track) are considerable. 

The structure of the series through the first two seasons is to have a major overarching plot that covers the season and then to have particular urgent problems that arise within each episode that need to be resolved.  These get wound around the development of the sub-characters and the building of understanding of the family, the office, and the office of the President.  It is a complex and ambitious undertaking that the writers have taken on, and I laud them for that – and, for the most part, the writing is crisp, the acting is well done, and there is an urgency to the arc and a likeability of the characters as well as enough cliff hangers that it makes for good binge watching – even if the seasons are long.

The problems, though, are also significant.  Especially in the first season, the characters are very two dimensional.  Madam Secretary is just about perfect in her role.  Every week she is confronted with some new crisis that threatens to end civilization as we know it, and she, MacGyver-like, with bailing wire and a bit of chewing gum, figures out how to come up with an out of the box solution to an insoluble problem.  While this allows for sampling various aspects of the responsibilities of the State Department, it feels formulaic – right down to starting many of the episodes with an individual in peril who becomes known to the secretary who, in turn, drops everything to fix the person's problem.  While this makes for good television, it probably, in so far as it happens at all, happens at various places in the state department rather than at the top.  That said, one of the most orienting things I read about becoming the chair of my department was a statement that said something like – “If you are the kind of person who likes coming to work and having a set agenda and going through and checking things off, this probably isn’t the job for you.”  A lot of my work involved putting out whatever fires cropped up on whatever days.

I think that we struggle with reconciling global issues with the individual constantly on a political stage and in our personal lives.  Presidents are famous for bringing the cop who brought somebody to justice to stand up during the state of the nation and represent all of our first responders.   I think that the whole idea of a community - of a city and then of a state and a nation - grows from our sense of family - from feeling connected to those that we care about intimately.  The teeming hordes are hard to empathize with - and it has been very hard for us as a culture to translate numbers into meaningful emotional reactions to what is going on as the result of the use of, for instance, too much paper.  So a story about an individual person - or, in the case of the book The Overstory - about an individual tree, can be more moving than talking about thousands of people - or trees - dying. 

As much as I get that the days of executives get derailed by the crisis of the moment, I do hope that our executives are also working over the course of time to craft long term strategies, not just reactive responses to crises.  Shouldn’t we be thinking about how to manage the distribution of automatic weapons (I realize this is a domestic issue, but it is very salient this week) on an ongoing basis rather than simply in the wake of this week’s mass shooting?  The closest that Madam Secretary gets to this is the background story about the assassination in the first season and a story involving nuclear weapons and terrorism in the second.  There is very little reference to a set of principles - except in the form of various moral codes that emerge from Henry McCord's encyclopedic knowledge of world religions.

One of the problems with the backstories is that while they tie together the individual episodes – each of which is fraught with danger - they don’t provide respite from that danger.  Especially when binge watched, this show, despite being toned down for network TV, has a powerful impact on my dreaming life, with lots of dreams about calamitous situations – my own life, filled with its dramas (and the dramas in the lives of my patients) get a boost of oomph from my watching this show.  Elizabeth and then Henry have to go to treatment for PTSD, but I feel like I have to return to the couch for a tune up after too many episodes back to back.  Even though I know it is manipulative, real emotions are evoked by each of these melodramatic episodes.

The family backstory is filled with its own drama.  Stevie, the eldest daughter is, a bit like Madam Secretary herself, very much her own person, and she gets into perilous work and romantic relationships and manages to provide complications at home.  Ali, the middle daughter, gets a bit lost in the shuffle, which creates its own problems, and Jason, the anarchist younger son (and a not very likable character) bring his own complications - like exposing the dean of the Quaker school to be part Nazi.  Part of the issue in the first season that gets better in the second is that Henry is just too damn perfect.  I feel woefully inadequate in comparison to him.  He is supportive, does what needs doing around the house, takes care of the kids, teaches, writes a book, and stays on an even keel while his wife is solving the problems of the world at all hours of the day and night.  When I acknowledged my concerns about not living up to the standard that he sets as a husband to the reluctant wife, she gave me a partial pass, acknowledging that it is an unrealistic standard that he sets and acknowledging that she, herself, is no Elizabeth.

In the second season, the home life gets a little more real as both parents display their parenting and partnering flaws and the strains between them emerge more clearly.  In addition, both Elizabeth and Henry’s families of origin are on display.  Elizabeth comes from a background of protestant privilege, on the one hand, and deprivation on the other as her parents died when she was young.  Henry comes from a Catholic working class background – his father was a union organizer in Pennsylvania and their ability to partner and support each other across moderately wide ethnic divides – seems both less fantasy laden and also more authentic - though they are still unrealistically supportive of the others engagement with the foibles of their family.  That said, they become more likable with their vulnerabilities and shortcomings on display.

The final part of the show is the interactions among the members of the executive branch and between them and emissaries from other nations.  I continue to be amazed at the ability of Hamilton and our other founding fathers to craft a constitution that allowed a government they designed to morph and change and yet use the same basic elements to handle the level of complication in our current world.  I suppose the metaphor here would be the ability of our minds to develop across our lives into the complex entities that they need to be in order to manage the myriad duties and responsibilities that our modern lives entail – duties that could hardly have been foreseen by the Darwinian environment that selected us to become the organisms that we are.

In both the case of the government and of our own minds, we have the capacity to know and not know what it is that we are about.  Within the office, the specialized skills of the staff, while they overlap a lot, seem like the aptitudes that we can call up to deal with different situations.  We are, as individuals, consistent between interactions, but also organized differently when we talk with the boss versus when we talk with those who work for us, versus when we talk to our kids, versus when we putty that window that got broken when we were moving furniture last weekend.  But we also have the ability for the right hand not to know what the left hand is doing.  We keep things hidden from ourselves – the consequences of our actions – otherwise we might not act at all.  We can also over ruminate on our actions, and paralyze ourselves as we realize what we have done.  Or, like Madam Secretary, we can get swept into the next vortex without really having taken the time to appreciate what has happened just a second ago.

Also, like the mind, our government is not an isolated object.  The government interacts with other governments as we interact with other people.  The shadow player in this series is China – the player that seems always to be threatening us and holds the winning cards.  But the interactions with other "lesser" countries also seem to play out in such a way that the US is always on the losing end of every bargain – but we know that is not the case.  We are the dominant superpower.  I think we imagine ourselves to be the helpers and supporters of the world, but we certainly profit from the use of the rest of the world’s resources and labor.  And yet we seem, in most of the interactions portrayed, to be getting the short end of the stick and to secure what we do on sheer talent and ingenuity.

I think this describes our functioning as people – social psychologists point out that we have a self-serving bias.  We imagine that what we have accomplished we have done by hard work – what we have failed at has been due to bad luck.  Interestingly, we make the exact opposite attributions for others – when they do well it is because of good luck, but when they fail it is because they haven’t tried hard enough. 

But I think there is another issue at play in this series – and in all of the series about the federal government that were mentioned at the beginning.  Despite the multiple characters and subplots, the complications of this series are child’s play compared to how complex the actual state department is and the issues that are dealt with there and at the employee’s homes – on a daily basis, in much the same way that every character depicted on stage or screen is simple compared to the complexities involved in the psychological functioning of any actual, living person (thank God the actors are people and bring their own personalities to the parts that they play).

As brilliant as our founding fathers were, it is incredible that so much power – the power to determine the shaping of the planet and whether humans and many other organisms live or die – is concentrated in the hands of so few people.   It is sobering to realize how much we depend on the good will and hard work of a very few people.  At the same time, it is also the case that the organic entities that support those few decision makers are huge – and the complexity of the organic whole that we are can’t be represented.

The end of the second season is very nicely done – it calls attention to the tension between the few and the many – and emphasizes that, in an era when many of us are looking to be widely known, much of the most important work is being done by people who labor in the dark, in anonymity.  I am aware of the irony involved in posting anonymously in the hope of having my voice heard.  Analytic work, by its very nature, involves supporting the efforts of others to know their own minds so they can use them effectively to make the world a better place.  It is like being a mechanic for a race car driver or the executive assistant to the secretary of state – we are here to help others engage in their lives in a more fruitful fashion.

Addendum:
OK, so I have gone on to watch the first show of the third season and the centerpiece of it is to rework our foreign policy in a way that is consistent with our ideals as a country.  This leads to havoc on the campaign trail, but I trust that this will be addressed, because I know there are more seasons.  My question is, if the networks can air something that has a long run and has enough popular support to keep it on the air in a prime time slot - not hidden in some online niche - and it is presenting a radical middle course alternative that is ecologically conscious and politically responsible, why do our two parties seem to have so much trouble doing this?  Why does appealing to the base seem to mean appealing to the baser instincts?  As a psychoanalyst, I know how Freud would answer, that we are made up of baser instincts - but as a reluctant analyst, I would hope that our higher functions could outweigh those base instincts in the voting booth.

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