The First Lady should celebrate its subjects, but it undermines them instead

The Atlantic

The Showtime series' focus on Viola Davis as Michelle Obama, Michelle Pfeiffer as Betty Ford and Gillian Anderson as Eleanor Roosevelt hurts, rather than enhances, our understanding of the three distinctive first ladies. "Focusing so much on the women’s superficial similarities hampers the show’s ability to fully examine any single character," says Shirley Li. "Instead, it zooms through career highlights, relying on motivational-poster-worthy dialogue, and making obvious, if not insulting, parallels." Li adds: "With 10 hour-long episodes and an ensemble of elite actors, the new weekly series could have been not only an opportunity to showcase women who rarely lead historical dramas, but also a chance to illuminate how the vagueness of their unelected post belies a unique soft power. Yet The First Lady seeks to do little but superficially celebrate its subjects. Consequently—and ironically—it undermines each woman’s individuality, muddying the role it set out to clarify and repeating the history it’s trying to correct."

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• Judy Greer saves The First Lady: Greer appeared on Sunday's episode as Nancy Howe, an old friend of Betty Ford's. "Judy Greer doesn’t have a big role to play in the episode, much less the show, but she infuses every second she’s on screen with real pizzazz," says Meghan O'Keefe. "Greer might be the only actor in the whole cast who is able to make the didactic, obvious dialogue sound natural and fun. For a few short scenes, Judy Greer comes close to making The First Lady good. Fun, even. Judy Greer (almost) saves The First Lady from itself."
• The First Lady has too many "cringe-worthy, distracting, and deeply embarrassing mouths": "Showtime’s new biographical series about Michelle Obama, Betty Ford, and Eleanor Roosevelt is shooting for the not-that-lofty status of awards-bait hagiography and only manages to achieve choppy melodrama, hamstrung by its own clunky writing," says Gabrielle Bruney. "Still, the show could have passed through my brain as just another entry in the long list of glossy-but-ultimately-disappointing prestige TV series, alongside The Gilded Age, The Morning Show, and Nine Perfect Strangers, if it weren’t for one thing: Those f*cking mouths."
• How Viola Davis' dialect coach prepped her to play Michelle Obama: "The big thing was that no one knows what she sounds like in her private life, so we made a big, artistic leap in terms of figuring that out," says veteran dialect coach Joel Goldes. "I took this wealth of audio and video information and distilled it into a one-page breakdown of how Michelle talks. One mystery for me was solved from her memoir because she’s quite careful in her speech in some ways. In the book, she says that her parents were on her about finishing her words, and changing her speech — it was aspirational in some ways to act, to speak, to sound (like) she didn’t come from the south side of Chicago. It was very useful to find that."
• O-T Fagbenle prepared to play Barack Obama by listening to many of his impersonators: “I started listening to a lot of his impersonators, because what impersonators do is they kind of a lot of times hook on to the most idiosyncratic parts of someone’s speech patterns, someone’s idiolect, and exaggerate them and do them over and over,” he says. “And so that was a useful starting point for someone who knew nothing about how to do a specific person’s idiolect. I actually reached out to a couple of his impersonators who gave me some tips, and then as I became better and more accustomed to the act, I started working with actual dialect coaches and getting into the nuances of the nitty gritty.”
• Fagbenle doesn't care about The First Lady criticism: “It’s going to sound flippant a bit, but I don’t care. I’m an artist and I’m trying to do my best expression," he says. "I’m not trying to imitate. The example I’d give is like a painter painting a forest. He’s not trying to make a facsimile of the forest. He’s trying to say, ‘This is not (how) a forest makes me feel. This is my experience in the forest.’ And I told my experience of Barack Obama and Viola painted this wonderful image of Michelle Obama,” he explains. 
• Fagbenle also practiced his Obama while playing a virtual reality game
• The First Lady had teams of researchers scour historical documentation to ensure the period outfits were correct: The Showtime series also got Jason Wu, who designed both of Michelle Obama's inauguration gowns, to re-create the first one for Viola Davis.