Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Does it seem to you like the 2016 election had been happening for the last decade? And now that we’re merely FOUR INTERMINABLE MONTHS away from its completion, we could use a healthy break from Hillary and Trump and getting angry about Hillary and Trump? While Showtime’s The Circus has absolutely proved itself to be the best docu-series on TV about the electoral process, the very current-ness that makes it so great also makes it less than ideal as escapism. No, if you’re looking for a fun docu-series about the way America does elections that won’t make you look at Donald Trump’s giant tangerine visage, look to the CNN-produced Race for the White House, currently streaming on Hulu.
Slickly packaged into hour-long installments, each episode covers a different U.S. presidential election, from Kennedy v. Nixon to Jackson v. Quincy Adams to Clinton v. Bush. It’s that slick packaging that makes Race for the White House so familiar and inviting. It’s very CNN to take something as potentially chewy as presidential electoral politics and lacquer over it with a bunch of glossy sheen, and that’s exactly what they do here. This is not especially rigorous reporting. This isn’t the political equivalent of ESPN’s 30 for 30, unearthing new angles or unexplored stories. The episode on Kennedy/Nixon covers televised debates and dead people voting in Chicago. The Bush-Dukakis episode confirms popular notions that Dukakis lost through wimpiness. Interviews with campaign strategists, biographers, and occasionally even the candidates themselves (hey, what else does Dukakis have going on?) tell a good story, but you’re not exactly going to emerge with a wealth of new information.
What Race for the White House does have going for it in spades is dramatic portent and bombast. And nowhere is that more evident than in the voiceover narration from a certain two-time Academy Award winner, Kevin Spacey. Spacey seems to have settled into a phase of his career where he’s incredibly comfortable being synonymous with his most famous character, House of Cards‘ Frank Underwood. He’s not the first actor to so fully embrace a villainous character, though listening to Spacey perform the Race to the White House voiceover essentially as Frank without the accent is a bit like watching Anthony Hopkins in character as Hannibal Lecter endorsing Goya brand fava beans. It’s a lot of fun, though. Frank’s sneering cadence adds a lot of spin to seemingly innocuous decisions like Harry Truman attempting at adjust a microphone at the Democratic Convention.
The other shlocky element that adds a lot of fun to Race for the White House are the dramatic recreations. The episodes that cover more recent elections have the benefit of archival footage and news broadcasts to augment their stories. But the episodes about the pre-TV era of politics have no such advantage, and so the producers turn to dramatic reenactments. It’s a tactic that has fallen out of fashion in documentaries lately, and I have to admit that after watching a few seasons of Drunk History, I can’t ever look at dramatic reenactments the same way again. As a result, these episodes teeter just on the edge of parody, which in the end, is perhaps what American politics deserves.
