The Politician episode 2: Overwhelmed by subplots, it loses the thread

The second episode of “The Politician” takes a big step away from Payton’s election, focusing on two fairly bizarre subplots that aren’t as engaging as Ben Platt’s journey to the White House.

With episode one of The Politician ending on a cliffhanger, there’s a major question mark looming over Infinity’s illness: Is she actually sick, or are she and Nana scamming everyone for free trips to Legoland?

It feels ridiculous to suggest that Munchausen by proxy is old hat, but in a year that has seen not one but two series and television movies about maternal figures forcing or tricking their daughters into pretending to be terminally ill, it’s safe to say that we have both been there and done that.

We’re so familiar with the concept that honestly, the bigger surprise would have been if she was actually sick. (She isn’t — how much Infinity actually knows about her fake diagnosis is yet to be determined, but she definitely doesn’t have cancer.) And Nana is not exactly helping her case.

Jessica Lange is a delightful but cartoonish villain, and one that can’t help but behave incredibly suspiciously whenever Infinity’s illness is brought up. Furthermore, Infinity isn’t as innocent as she seems. During a dinner with Nana and Payton, she sneaks away to meet her secret, dim-witted boyfriend Ricardo.

Meanwhile, Payton faces some problems on the home front. His mother (Gwyneth Paltrow at her most bizarrely likable) has fallen in love with their horse trainer, and her request for a divorce leads her husband (a criminally underused Bob Balaban) to jump out of a window, leaving him in a medically induced coma. With him incapacitated, the issue of inheritance is brought up. Payton’s older twin brothers (a weird hybrid of the Winkelvoss twins from The Social Network and Eric and Donald Trump Jr.) seize the opportunity to get their mother and Payton written out of the will, with them inheriting everything.

Things get out of hand, mistakes are made, and the twins come pretty close to committing patricide.

Their father is only saved by fortuitously walking from his coma and scheming with Payton to set a trap for the twins. This whole scenario is, to be frank, more than a little ridiculous, swiftly turning the twins from douchey morons into mustache-twirling monsters. It takes up a lot of screentime but serves very little purpose except to establish that Payton will inherit the GDP of a small seafaring nation when his father dies, and to remind us that he has a certain Machiavellian streak in him.

The Politician really has a spark when it focuses on Payton and his absurdly over-the-top political campaign. Although the family drama has an appealingly Wes Anderson vibe, it’s difficult not to feel that it’s a mere distraction from the part of the show we care about the most. And it’s this lack of focus, as we bounce around from Dusty and Infinity to Payton’s borderline sociopathic siblings and their messed-up family dynamics, that makes this episode have such a significant drop in quality.

Succession and The Act and Veep are all wonderful shows in their own right, but there’s a reason they’re separate programs. If you try to shove that all into an 8-episode Netflix series, you’re just going to make a mess. And that’s what this episode is. A stylish, likable mess, but a mess nonetheless.

The Politician is streaming on Netflix now.