‘Madam Secretary’’s Hillary Clinton Problem

CBS’s “Madam Secretary” is three episodes into its first season, and creatively, the show is a total mess. It’s a Frankenstein’s Monster, a disorganized Voltron of more popular, better shows. It tries to give us the witty banter and occasional populism of “The West Wing,” the corporate intrigue of “The Good Wife” and the political “cynicism” of “Veep.” The problem is that those are three incredibly different shows, and trying to purée them together turns “Madam Secretary” into a weak-stew version of each of them. There’s an old sports joke that if your team has two potential starting quarterbacks, you in fact have none. “Madam Secretary” is trying to be three things, and thus it is none of them.

But the most confusing aspect of “Madam Secretary” has been the widespread assumption that Tea Leoni’s Secretary of State character, Elizabeth McCord, is somehow supposed to be a fictionalized version of Hillary Clinton. This may have started by the show’s creators claiming it was “inspired” by Clinton’s time as Secretary of State, but watching the show, that sounds about as believable as when the Coen brothers said Fargo was “inspired by a true story.” McCord and Hillary are both blond, they are both women, and they both breathe human air. (Unless either’s pantsuits are hiding gills.) That’s about it.