You'll want to see Sigourney Weaver and hear her lusty laugh toward the end of Sunday's pilot episode of Greg Berlanti's "Political Animals." It's one of the more memorable things you'll see in summertime TV.
I can't explain in detail why that's so, because to do so would tell you so much about the show that it would spoil it for you. Suffice it to say that Weaver's big, acerbic yawp as the episode draws to a close is probably reflective of the audience's feelings about the show itself - and the real-life people that clearly inspired it.
"Political Animals" on USA is the six-part limited series that's loosely based on everyone's favorite presidential fun couple, Bill and Hillary Clinton.
In other words, we have Elaine Barrish, a woman who's currently secretary of state and was, just before that, an unsuccessful presidential candidate. And before that, of course, she was the first lady, married to a popular president universally known for compulsive and vigorous philandering.
Barrish is played sympathetically and well by Sigourney Weaver, and that's great news for both Weaver, at the age of 62, and the secretary of state who seems to provide something of a model. Why?
Because Weaver has been, by and large, forced to be one-dimensional every time she steps in front of the camera - tough, angry and kicking butt (as Ripley in the "Alien" movies), dramatic ("Ice Storm"), melodramatic ("Death and the Maiden"), heroic ("Gorillas in the Mist"), or funny ("Ghostbusters").
It's taken her this long in movie and TV to show her range and use everything she can do in one part. Brava.
There are differences between the character and her inspiration, of course.
Our heroine, Secretary of State Barrish, decided on the very night her presidential bid failed that she was going to divorce her husband, the randy ex-president. And this former first couple has two children, not one - both boys, one of whom is engaged to be married and is Mom's chief of staff, and the other who's gay, troubled and a survivor of a suicide attempt.
And that's where the audience's big gust of ironic laughter comes in.
Here, we think at first, is TV's newest attempt to get into the "West Wing" sweepstakes, wherein the Clinton presidency was so romanticized that it became the dream presidency of American liberals everywhere. (That show's President Bartlet, you remember, won his Nobel Prize before becoming president, not after, a la Obama, when cynics might argue that the fix is in - well, a little anyway.)
Not so fast for the wonks and believers and liberal fantasists.
"Political Animals" does as much "West Wing" messing around as it has the heart and the brain for - which really isn't all that much. After that, it's going for pure "Dallas," where the big hoo-ha in the pilot episode isn't necessarily how the current president and his secretary of state will extricate two journalists imprisoned in Iran but rather how the former first couple will keep an intrusive member of the press (Carla Gugino) from sticking her nose too far into the life of their deeply troubled and precariously balanced younger son.
Secrets do what secrets are wont to do in tales like this.
But it's all pretty good fun, especially as you watch its higher ambitions sink into soap opera and the undeniable Sunday night pleasures of a Big Wallow.
(There is the problem that Sunday at 10 p.m. has become jam-packed with really good television; "Political Animals" is on opposite Aaron Sorkin's "The Newsroom" on HBO - in which Jane Fonda roared back into the action at the end of last week's episode - and the return of "Breaking Bad" in its new and final season on AMC.)
"Political Animals" gives us a good deal to watch, none of it better than the relationship between Weaver, as Elaine Barrish, and Ciaran Hinds, the great Irish actor waggling his cigar and his Southern drawl over all of his lines and leering at every available and semi-available woman. The ex-president's current main squeeze is an arrestingly buxom actress clearly modeled on Sofia Vergara.
Soap opera and fantasy, of course, prevail.
And never mind that the mopey president who seems to regret ever winning the job is played by Adrian Pasdar and bears the last name "Garcetti." (A Los Angeles in-joke; Gil Garcetti, you remember, was the genius D.A. who decided that it was perfectly OK to have the O.J. Simpson case tried downtown and heard by a city jury. Garcetti's son is a current L.A. councilman.)
The obvious thing to say about one good viewing of "Political Animals" is "surely they can't be serious."
Well, they're almost certainly not.
And don't call them Shirley.
