I’ve written before about Political Animals, the USA Network that’s a thinly-veiled retelling of Hillary Clinton’s journey from First Lady to Secretary of State. Now, we’ve got some new plot information about the show: while we knew before it would be in part about a First Family, the Secretary of State is going to be divorced from her former-President husband. So for all of those folks who admire Hillary Clinton but can’t understand why she didn’t kick Bill and his cheatin’ heart (among other things) to the curb years and mistresses ago, this show may be the chance for you to live out your fantasy.

Whether Political Animals works at all will hinge on who ends up playing the FLOTUS-turned-Secretary of State. I adore Judith Light, who is a year younger than Hillary and can also rock the hell out of her haircut, and would love to get her back on television, so she’d be my vote. Greg Berlanti, who created Political Animals, hasn’t had a hit in a while, but he at least exhibited some creative thinking in Jack & Bobby, a futuristic reimagining of the childhoods of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. Lots of details remain, but I’m feeling cautiously optimistic.

Thanks to the vast expansion of our cable news industry, you could spend hours tonight watching talking heads speculate about the potential results of the Iowa Caucuses tonight. But fortunately, you don’t have to! You can keep hitting refresh on Twitter or the news site of your choice while watching any one of these movies, which actually get the mechanics of politics right in a way that most others don’t, and that most snap-judgment analysts won’t.

1. Primary Colors (1998): Unlike most political movies, which set up a dichotomy between often-unnamed but clearly defined members of opposite parties, the vast majority of Primary Colors takes place during the Democratic primary. That means you get tough debates, hilariously incompetent campaign volunteers who get whipped into a professional fighting force, the entrance of a late-breaking messiah candidate who turns out to be not-so-messianic, and best of all, a deeply cranky conversation about a meeting with the Lubavitcher Rebbe. This is politics as informed and presented by people who have actually been there.

2. Definitely, Maybe (2008): This movie may be disguised as a romantic comedy, but it’s a savvy look at the disappointment of the Clinton years that draws its small dramas from an actual understanding of political pressure points. Fundraising gets you places. Both candidates and journalists have a dangerous desire to be liked. Not putting union bugs on Democratic paper goods during a campaign is disastrous. The president probably will not remember his early volunteers years down the road.

3. The American President (1995) and Thank You For Smoking (2005): It’s sort of amazing how naive Aaron Sorkin is about lobbying in The American President, a movie that makes the profession look so sexy and principled it’s sort of shocking it wasn’t a product of the influence industry itself. Thank You For Smoking is a loopy tonic to that misconception. Watch this double-header as we gear up for a Super PAC-filled election year, and vow not to get fooled again.

4. Contagion (2011): In the hysteria of an election year, it can be easy to forget that there’s life beyond politics and elected officials. But a lot of what’s important about presidential candidates is the people they’d appoint to serve under them, and any administration is limited in the changes it can make by layers of existing bureaucracy, regulations, and the time it takes to turn a ship much bigger than the Titanic around. Contagion‘s a critically important reminder that in crisis, it’s not always a matter of whose finger is on the button.

5. All the President’s Men (1976) and Dick (1999): These two very different retellings of the same essential story make two different but critically important points. First, journalism is hard, and it’s difficult to do it even when you have all the right breaks and time in which to do it: so how hard must it be to nail down true stories on the campaign trail, where everyone is sleep-deprived and exhausted, and events are moving extraordinarily rapidly. Second, politicians are people, often eccentric, obnoxious people. They want power, but they want other things too, including pot brownies and to kick their dogs.

The Ides of March, George Clooney’s adaptation of the play Farragut North by Beau Willimon, is the kind of movie that will be mistaken for a profound meditation on the state of American politics. This strikes me as deeply unfortunate, not just because it’s not a particularly good movie, but because what few ideas it has back up a reactionary idea of what makes someone good at governing. Spoilers to follow.

Gov. Mike Morris, the Democratic frontrunner, may be the silliest Hollywood conception of a politician since The American President. He is, apparently, a veteran of President Bush’s Gulf War, an opponent of President Bush’s son’s incursions into the same reason, a genius who’s managed to dramatically improve the educational performance of Pennsylvania students (take that, skeptics of education reform!) and balance his state’s budget in a recession. When he’s asked about how he’d feel about the death penalty if his wife (the always welcome but woefully under-used Jennifer Ehle) were murdered, Morris says he’d kill the killer himself and then accept the consequences. These are no positions that have a basis in political reality. If Andrew Shepherd’s speech and declaration of ACLU membership in The American President is a parody of liberal dreams of progressive toughness

the idea that a candidate could declare in a debate “I’m not a Christian…my religion, what i believe in, is called the Constitution of the United States of America,” and win over an electorate that isn’t even close to electing a Jewish president, that’s skeptical of a Mormon, much less an atheist, is just woefully out of touch. Saying, as one character does, that “we know they’ve nominated a jackass,” in response to a question about whether Democrats have nominated an atheist is not an answer to that plausibility problem. It’s just smug.

Morris is a paper man, composed of position papers rather than blood and guts, and that’s a problem when we’re supposed to believe that a moment of marital infidelity is utterly damning. We have no idea what his relationship with his wife is like. If the movie made an argument that Morris’ relationship with his family is a repudiation of an idea that Christianity is a necessary guarantor of values, his decision to sleep with an intern might be momentous. Joe Klein’s Primary Colors and the movie adaptation of the novel made the argument that the emotional profligacy that led fictional candidate Jack Stanton to sleep around was also critical to his success because it bound potential supporters to him for life. But we have absolutely no sense of what Morris is like as a human being, so it’s hard to know what his infidelity means. Is his aura of control a facade? Was it just a stupid mistake? Do we actually want to promulgate the idea that your personal life is a litmus test for your ability to do meaningful political work?
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Maybe? Because it sounds like we’re about to get a whole bunch of government-centered shows. It’s not clear whether it’s the run-up to the election, or the entertainment industry’s obsession with Scandanavia, but non-law enforcement government-themed shows suddenly seem to be a thing!

First, there’s CBS’s show about a one-term president who goes home to work at a law firm that will let him take only legal cases that resonate deeply with him. Sounds like some network has an idea for what a certain law-professor-turned-senator-turned-recession-cursed president should do with himself in January 2013! In all seriousness, though, ex-presidents are the one set of public figures that pop culture has never really figured out. There’s My Fellow Americans, which essentially says that it’s probably a good thing more former Commanders in Chief don’t go the George W. Bush brush-clearing-memoir-writing route because otherwise things can only end in wacky road-trip hijinks. Also, tears. Folks like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have given us the sense that presidents who leave office fairly young should do worthy things, but it’s hard to structure a relatable show about peace negotiations or running the Clinton Foundation, and brush-clearing, is, let’s face it, relatively dull to watch on-screen (though accidentally shooting your hunting partner in the face has comedic potential in an era where we like to consume other people’s pain). So apparently, running a law office it is. I really hope said president at some point joins forces with Leslie Knope, decides to put her in the path of his former campaign manager, and the rest is history.

Second, NBC, which really should have pursued the former show so that crossover can actually happen, is adapting Denmark’s Government, the trailer of which sounds exactly like one of the voiceovers in the German television shows Liz Lemon was supposed to watch and summarize for Jack on 30 Rock:

In between this and HBO’s Veep, we’ve got a nice little crop of female-politician shows. My one concern is that rather than serving the valuable purpose of showing us smart, competent women holding extremely important government positions, these shows will have dippy women who in vastly over their well-coiffed little heads and mine a lot of comedy from that proposition. Which I am…not so excited about. In all likelihood, Leslie Knope will just remain the Best At Everything.