The main problem with The First Lady, the Showtime series focused on three past presidents’ wives – Michelle Obama (Viola Davis), Betty Ford (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Eleanor Roosevelt (Gillian Anderson) – is evident in the first few seconds. The pilot, directed by The Night Manager’s Susanne Bier, opens with a camera flash sometime in the late 2010s. Michelle Obama sits for a photoshoot by the portraitist Amy Sherald in a pose familiar to most Americans – long, flowing gown with a geometric print, hair in loose waves, chin resting on the back of her hand. Asked by Obama why she didn’t want to paint her husband’s portrait, Sherald responds: “I don’t want to just paint the official. I am in interested in the real.”
That “real” is doing a lot of heavy lifting, both here and over the course of 10 episodes that struggle to find anything interesting, thorny, complicated – one might say authentic – under history-class pull-quotes, chaotic timeline shifts and ill-fitting accents. There’s the difficulty of narrativizing real events, particularly the very recent history portrayed by the Obama third of the show. The 2018 Sherald portrait is classic Obama iconography – stately yet inviting, intellectual, a delicate balance. That balance is off in The First Lady; as any viewer knows, it is not Michelle Obama in this famous pose but an actor pretzeling herself into the role. Suspension of disbelief is difficult when the character is a well-known figure, and nearly impossible with one as publicly vibrant, oft-photographed, and still relevant as Michelle Obama. It’s an awkward fit from the jump, and perhaps the best example of a recent-history performance that’s simply too soon.
