"Madam Secretary"

That's the title of a new drama on CBS, which first aired on Sunday. Téa Leoni has the lead role as secretary of state Elizabeth McCord. The show has kind of a The West Wing vibe to it. In the pilot, McCord is a college professor and former CIA analyst who is asked by the President Dalton (played by Keith Carradine) to be Secretary of State when her predecessor is killed in a plane crash. Dalton was a high-ranking official in the (wait for it) CIA when McCord worked there.

I recorded it and watched it last night. My rating: A solid "Meh."

Here is where I think it is going to suck: The pilot episode has already jumped into the Land of Shadowy and Nefarious CIA Conspiracies. Some guy who McCord knew from her CIA days came to her home in the middle of the night to warn her that her predecessor was running some sort of unsanctioned operation and that he had oodles of cash stashed away in an offshore account and that the plane crash was no accident. Then, at the end of the pilot, that same guy dies in a one-car crash into a telephone pole, which McCord immediately pronounces as "that was no accident".

Really, folks? You can't do a show anymore about government without it being shaked and baked in conspiracy theory horseshit? What idiot pitched that-- "Ohh, I know what will make this series work: We need to have an overarching off-the-books CIA conspiracy which Our Heroine will try to uncover!" The sad thing here is that, instead of taking that clown out back and tuning him up with a sap, they bought the idea.

That is where Madam Secretary parts company with any similarities to The West Wing, which was a show that, at its core, had as its premise a Rooseveltian ideal that government can be a force for good. Madam Secretary, at least from the pilot, is showing signs that it will be "the brave crusader and her compatriots in battle against an evil gummint conspiracy". Which is a premise that is cheap, easy, trite and, by now, so overdone.

I guess it would be too difficult to write a show about a high-ranking government official trying to do her job in spite of a Congress that is heavily invested in partisan bickering and with a press that cares far more about style than substance. And not without turning it into a pseudo commercial for Hillary Clinton.