Political Animals: When Women Rule the World    • 8comments
Political Animals S01E03: "The Woman Problem"  At one point
during this installment of USA’s limited six-episode miniseries,
I had to stop and ask myself what idealized alternate universe
the Hammond family exists in. Sure, from the very beginning,
Political Animals was meant to exist in a vacuum of its own
creation, its own world with its own rules that occasionally
nodded to those of us on the other side of the television with
some reference to some real event or figure that we can use to
get our bearings in this strange new world with such over-the-
top people in it.  Political Animals does a lot of telling and
not a lot of showing. We were told that Elaine’s approval rating
skyrocketed after she divorced Bud, but no one has stopped to
consider why. This week, in flashbacks to her first presidential
race, we learned that Elaine indeed faced the very real “woman
problem” in her professional appearance: If she sat on her
hands, she was “timid,” and