It took me a couple of years to get around to season two of "The Politician". I enjoyed the first season, if I perhaps felt that it lacked a bit of focus and a standardisation of tone. Despite letting it sit for almost two years, I finally got back to it and was rewarded with an improved season, where the state senate race provided a much more natural home for the absurdity and hypocrisy than the school council did.
Payton Hobart (Ben Platt) and his campaign team have moved to New York to run an unlikely campaign against 30-year political veteran Dede Standish (Judith Light). A savvy political operator and with a veteran campaign manager in Hadassah Gold (Bette Midler) Hobart appears to have little chance, until he learns a personal secret about Standish and must decide whether or not to release it.
As I say, what were absurdity's in the school district race, polling data, negative campaigns rallies and events, etc, feel much more at home in the State Senate race. There is one, not quite a bottle episode, but almost a standalone one, where a mother and daughter, played by Susannah Perkins and Robin Weigert argue over the election and then spend the day in the proximity of the candidates. But this is a much tighter story about the race and the secondary stories feed back into it, rather than distract from it.
I still feel the characters are likely to annoy as many people as are interested in them. There's remains a world of privilege and if your dead against the political themes of the show then it's really not going to win you over.
I enjoyed it though and am interested in the idea that they might come back to it in a couple of years to see how the presidential campaign might go.