Series and politics: from the Cold War to the post-truth era

You have to try everything. Even keeping your enemies close. In the world of high politics, cretins seem sympathetic, and criminals flit in and out of legality, key links in the machinery because obstacles pose a permanent diplomatic challenge, and, as Borges said, fate can be merciless with the slightest distraction. It's a universe plagued by official and unofficial meetings, confidential agendas, suspicions and scapegoats, camouflaged bigwigs and fugitives, traps upon traps. On an immense global chessboard, friction is the rule, and ethics, a complicated matter.

One false step and every plan is ruined in a second: the delicacy of international politics, amidst classified and declassified files, amidst the mist of unknown languages ​​and cultures, circulates around intelligence services, informants, and movements that come—or go—from the presidential office. This is what Kate Wyler, the outstanding protagonist of The Diplomat (Netflix), knows, as she begins to play in the major leagues when she is appointed United States ambassador to Great Britain. Frantic dialogues and heated corridors with a tightrope walker in a world of madness, under the aftermath of the Cold War, with officials at the center of power hanging by a thread in a pressure cooker. “You don't know until you know. And then, finally, you know,” is one of the many dialogues, those catchphrases that in the series combine, with an air of tragicomedy, everyday, domestic life with public missions, female leadership—as a counterpart, watch The Regime (HBO Max), with an autocratic Kate Winslet entrenched in her European wall, or Bodyguard (Netflix), where an ambitious and cold Minister of the Interior enters the scene—new crises of representation and strategic roles in a geopolitics as fascinating as it is unstable.

"Bernardo did everything we asked," a trusted advisor tells Carlos Menem, who responds: "We have to give something to the press, especially the friendly press." In the background, people can be heard dancing to the song "Ritmo de la Noche" (Rhythm of the Night), while in the inner circle, the "Yomagate" erupts, one of the first political covens of the Menem administration. Bernardo is Bernardo Neustadt, a journalistic ally who, on television, tooth and nail defends a Riojan president who still seems a somewhat extravagant figure to the general public. The journalist moves his pieces and then announces a Cordoba economist, also a relative outsider to the audience, as the man of financial stability.

Shortly before, Menem had faced his first challenge: he ordered the suppression of the Carapintada uprising led by Mohamed Alí Seineldín , one of his silent enemies. In his first years, the Riojan leader was plagued by scares: inflation soared and the dollar was on the rise. The astrologer who advised him at the Casa Rosada suggested family moves, and his new Minister of Economy, Domingo Cavallo, arrived with an innovative phenomenon: Convertibility.

These are dizzying images of Menem (Prime Video), Ariel Winograd 's series that breaks with the rhythm of classic political series, predominating a comedic tone and music video aesthetic closer to narratives such as Magic Johnson's California epic Lakers: Time to Win , and his previous series Coppola, The Representative , stripped of the solemnity of the historical biopic although criticized for leaving the slow social degradation of unemployment and poverty in the background. Not coincidentally, there are abundant shots of an idle yet solitary Menem in his residence, meeting at a dizzying pace with his advisors amidst his scandals, campaigns and dramas, playing tennis or golf and holding private parties in Olivos. Politics as spectacle, the series as a period fresco and the 90s as a leap of continuity since the government of Javier Milei, where Menemism and its busts returned to the Casa Rosada.

“Argentina is a machine of rupture and continuity,” analyzes journalist Martín Rodríguez, in an opinion that seems to paint a complete picture of the series. For Rodríguez, the democratic period that was refounded in 1983 exploded in the crisis of 2001, and nothing is more pertinent than revisiting the episodes of December 2001 (Disney+) to relive the end of the Convertibility, the uprising of December 19 and 20, and the chaotic succession of five presidents in one week. “Politics today speaks of a country that no longer exists,” says another columnist, Diego Genoud, about a current era where advertising spots from recent campaigns are often repeated. This is not an essentially Argentine phenomenon: specialists speak of an inbreeding of the old politics, of an alarming disconnect with ordinary citizens reflected, in part, in massive electoral abstention and disenchantment with political officials.

These reasons led, among others, to a meteoric rise of the far right, with a global advance of electoral autocracies and the erosion of liberal democracies, as historian Steven Forti wrote in his book Far Right 2.0 . Without military coups or civil unrest, the democratic hollowing out, according to Forti, is brought about "from within": more or less populist or far-right leaders win elections and gradually centralize power in the executive branch, the separation of powers disappears, rights for the minority are curtailed, and informational pluralism also evaporates.

This entire fabric of contemporary politics is represented in both high- and low-budget scripts. It appears in mainstream plots, such as Robert De Niro 's performance as an ambivalent former president summoned by the White House to uncover a universe of conspiracies, cyberattacks, and intrigue in Zero Day (Netflix), or in the equally "presidential" Paradise (Disney+), in which the president of the United States is assassinated in his bedroom and tension shifts to his main custodian around a dispute between high-ranking officials, thermonuclear weapons, secret services, catastrophic events, and a giant dome covering an underground city.

Politics and its labyrinths also emerge in the context of political thrillers, black comedies and spy strips , under their mysteries, codes and an indecipherable time in the era of post-truth and dangerous times as in the intricate stories of The Agency (Paramount +), The Jackal (Disney +), Slow Horses (Apple TV) or even The Old Man (Disney +), with a past that returns for an old spy and makes us think about legacies and mandates. Tech moguls who control the pulse of realpolitik, civil rights that are swept away in order to provide urgent answers to turbulent societies, conspiracy theories, parallel realities and a very high price for information in the social broth of hatred and intolerance of central and peripheral countries.

In this returning past, the remarkable Sherwood (Flow) rises, somewhat unnoticed by the average audience. While in recent decades the working class has undergone a transformation, fragmented into a thousand pieces and deeply precarious, whose unions no longer carry the weight they once did, Sherwood intertwines, in a detective-like tone, several stories that reconstruct the strikes during Thatcherism and their impact on a small English community riven by loves and hates, offenses and loyalties.

In these times of perpetual present and memory loss, the series is a perceptive exploration of the tense coexistence between police and neighbors—in one dialogue, a central character says, "They invaded the community, came to our birthday parties, drank, and in the meantime, they were documenting us"—between family members and strikers. Everyone seems to harbor secrets, and revenge is hidden in the forest, that space as geographical as it is mystical, highly relevant in the series as it was in Twin Peaks (MUBI). Surrounding the bitterness and possible redemptions are accumulated anger and resentment, the defeat of the dispossessed, and an old mining town projected into the painful legacy of the new generations, shattered by the consequences of post-industrial capitalism and its iron grip.

“We need to stop living in the past,” a police officer tells an old comrade when he discovers her double face, but he knows that's impossible: the past lurks with all its baggage, like industrial steel beams. Betrayals, resentments, alliances, and suspicions exist both within and outside of the groups they belong to, as taught by those series that have become something of a classic, including House of Cards, Borgen, Boss, The Newsroom, The Crown , and Game of Thrones.

“That people vote is a miracle,” says anthropologist Pablo Semán , analyzing today's democracy. Considering that politics is everywhere, one could venture that series expand omnisciently to suit all tastes: perhaps none like Succession (HBO Max), a masterclass in power and Shakespearean atmosphere without showing elections or a single official in the foreground. From old strategies and new tactics, from the traditional that languishes but dies slowly and the future that has yet to be born, the cunning of politics and nods to Machiavelli and Gramsci hover from the micro to the macro, from the whispers at the back of the table to the media scandal, from the fascinating to the unsettling, on the effervescent small screen.