Best TV Show/Movie Involving Politics (Fiction Only)

[angus]

The sitcoms from the Golden Age were good for political debate.  My parents used to watch them when I was young, and I'd watch them too.  (Houses didn't have six or seven televisions back then, so we watch what our parents watched.)  M*A*S*H, which was ostensibly about Korea but was actually about Viet Nam, was incisive.  Government policy was routinely ridiculed, although few attempts at overt manipulation of policy were staged.  All in the Family was another good show, although it wasn't so much directly about policy as about attitude.  Good Times was another one.  It dealt more with the experience of being black in urban impoverishment in the 70s, but it also dealt with policy.  Remember Penny's abuse, and the response?  That was certainly an unveiled suggestion for state intervention.  Or when Sweet Daddy Williams didn't want to take Thelma's locket because it reminded him of his mama?  That was a metaphor for social policy, wasn't it.  And Michael was smart and overtly political.  A crusader always causing trouble in a system that set him up for failure.