Vision: Madame Secretary

Madam Secretary (MS) is addictive. If you liked West Wing (WW), you should like MS. Like WW, it is full of honourable, engaging characters you wish you knew and worked with, and you wish even more, were in charge of their country. MS is of interest theologically for any number of reasons: its conscious attentiveness to religious aspects of life, its emphasis upon raising ethical issues (private and global), the attention to the complexity of work/life balance and the often hidden ethical hurdles in a powerful institution, its affirming of women as equal participants in the workplace, and the exposing of the cost to all personal lives of public service. It is a prolonged reflection on the nature, limits and possibilities of democracy as a force for good in the world.

In MS, the work and family lives are just problematic enough to keep you interested and to enable you to suspend disbelief for all the ways in which everything ‘works’ so well. Cynics should stay away. MS is Elizabeth (Bess) Adams McCord (Téa Leoni), an ex-CIA agent, and ex CIA colleague of the President. She has three teenage children and a husband, Henry, who is a theologian and ethics professor at Georgetown, though he takes on other roles as the series progress. The President, Conrad Dalton (Keith Carradine), is a firm but kind man, who knows he needs someone who thinks outside the box, who is well connected and knowledgeable, and when the previous Secretary is murdered on the job, he goes looking for her. Completing the inner circle, in almost every episode, is Nadine, MS’ chief of staff—inherited from the previous Secretary; Russell Jackson, POTUS’s acerbic—and one would now say bullying--Chief of Staff; Matt, her young and endearing speech writer, from a Pakistani immigrant family; Daisy, her effervescent and highly competent African American Press Coordinator; Jay, her thoughtful and idealistic policy advisor, as well as Blake, her impeccably turned out and slightly anxious personal assistant. It takes a lot of full-time talent to make MS run smoothly, and of course, roles and personnel change slightly as the five long series run their course. Guest appearances by Hilary Clinton, Colin Powell, and Madeleine Albright add to the surprise on occasions.

The producer (Barbara Hall) and writer (Joy Gregory) of this series are both Roman Catholic, and they hoped to portray women and religion in public life in non-clichéd ways. They wanted to let religion in where it is normally obscured. They succeed. In most cases, you wouldn’t know you were getting an education in how the workplace would change if women were in charge, or if religion were understood as an essential aspect of human nature, but you are.[1] Not only is MS one of the most powerful women in the world, she uses her charms, problem-solving prowess, and huge accumulated social capital to enlist (mostly) the help of Foreign Secretaries in Russia, China, and around the world – all while mothering her children and maintaining a close and harmonious marriage. Lest this be seen as the only model for family, most of her staff have very different situations—Nadine is a single mother to a now estranged son, Matt is a first-generation Muslim American, devoted to his elderly Muslim mother. Jay is the divorced but adoring father of a young child. So, while MS manages to juggle everything, it is quite clear that for some families, the balancing act becomes unsustainable. Childcare arrangements are not always perfect and more than once Jay’s child is present in the workplace at the State Department. Daisy falls pregnant with a covert spy who dies on the job, and she goes through with the pregnancy, leaning on both her own family and that of the deceased partner to get her through when she returns to work. The first reaction to her pregnancy is congratulations from a suspecting male co-worker. Bess gives her a pep talk on the wonders of motherhood. Interestingly, a termination was not discussed. On the other hand, it was also clear that Daisy had the resources and family backup that would be required to make an unintended pregnancy work. The moral of the story: humans flourish and lead honourable lives in any number of different family configurations.

MS does and has to run a hierarchical organization (at one stage her chief of staff uses her military ranking to good effect) but she does it with a light touch, with huge appreciation for work well done, and at the right time, with hugs and affirmation. There is one memorable scene where her assistant has just confessed to her at the end of a long trip that he is ‘bi’. He blurts it all out and she gets out of her limousine and embraces him. No more needs to be said. Not only does MS deal with alternative gender designations, the characters navigate break ups, pregnancy, disillusionment and so on while professionally never missing a beat. When a low-level woman mentions her experience with sexual harassment, it is quickly investigated, and the perpetrator swiftly let go. They are a working unit and a community; when one of them is facing possibly having to leave, he laments that this is his world and his family and he doesn’t want to go anywhere.

Fact and fiction merge. Internal politics aside, the raison d’etre of the State Department is the wider world. Seemingly intractable, and sometimes dangerous problems emerge each week/episode and yet they are solved with the cleverest of solutions, a great deal of background knowledge, the resources of the wealthiest country on earth, almost indomitable optimism, and at times, personal courage. At one stage, MS and her entourage enter a rogue nation only to be the unwitting witnesses of an execution. The global problems of women’s empowerment and trafficking are all dealt with as they relate to emerging crises, but so also are issues from climate change to vaccination hesitancy. The willingness to use lethal force is a qualification for this job, but MS works at every point to prevent violence and to anticipate and foreclose on the possibility of escalating tension, all while reflecting on the ethics and limits of just war. Even if you are a pacifist – perhaps especially if you are – you might hope that Bess is in the Situation Room, Henry is close by, and that President Conrad is listening.

Sometimes I felt that the drama of the day became a little too real, and not only because Hilary Clinton is a guest. The invasion of Ukraine happened just as it was in danger of occurring on screen. Seeing double was doubly traumatic. In the television case, it was all averted by Bess’s special powers of diplomacy and expert pressure (along with an awkward betrayal). Bess always has just the knowledge or the trick up her sleeve, that might make a difference in complex negotiations. More than once she got the Chinese on her side and at least once the Russians. If only she were in charge, or more likely, the writer and producer were advising in these days. The real-life tragedy now playing out on the world screen does make one realise the very sophisticated and expert knowledge the writer brings to this task. And it is said that Clinton, Powell, and Albright before she died, not only appear in the program but watch it avidly.

Religion is understated, but everywhere. The McCords are not a “religious” family, but Henry is a believer and they are all informed, and perhaps more importantly, ethically imprinted. Religious dimensions are a mostly hidden factor in almost every conflict in the world, and in this series, they become visible in all the complexity they have out there. Henry McCord’s expertise is valued so highly, he is brought into the inner circle of the presidency, and more than once he is sent on a dangerous intelligence mission because of his wide knowledge of middle eastern religion and history.

Of course, we want to know how private life works out for someone so powerful and completely committed to work. Bess’s children do interrupt business as usual, in all sorts of ways. At the beginning of the show, the oldest has dropped out of University because it was too hard to navigate with a mother who is MS. She later drops back in, but lives at home, and has a succession of marginally, outrageous, romantic liaisons. Home life is a tad unreal. There is some real cooking and eating of family meals but there is also a seemingly endless supply of white pots of unknown food substance, which emerge out of their fridge. The middle child goes off to University to study fashion, but again ends up living in the family home. The youngest is a boy and he is an anarchist. He really doesn’t want to go to University when it is his turn, in spite of stellar results, because that would mean giving in to the military/industrial complex. Bess (and Henry) deals with all that, only sometimes arriving late to school events. The moral of the story: a mother who is almost never home for dinner, and a father who is often away on a dangerous mission does not necessarily lead to moral failure; the children are compassionate, curious, self-reliant and better informed on a wider stage than their peers.

MS can of course be faulted. Bess McCord believes in American democracy, for all its problems, and one suspects so do Hall and Gregory. Bess, as MS, goes about doing good in the world, and mostly it is good, even if the threats and give and take have the warrant and threat of a super-power behind them, even if the doing of good could be faulted from a post-colonial point of view; the US and MS get to define the good and bad. She shows that the American system works when trust and social cohesion are high and the people in office are of good character. In that sense, although the global issues are very realistic, the dissolving social cohesion in America is less in evidence; MS acts as a counterpoint to all of that. In other words, MS works as a vision of what America could have become, rather than what it has become. Alas. In that sense it is escapist. Alas.

Nicola Hoggard-Creegan is an Auckland based theologian and is co-director of New Zealand Christians in Science

[1] Heidi Schlumpf, “‘Madame Secretary’ Writer Seeks to Bring Faith to TV,” National Catholic Reporter (July 2, 2018); Amy Frykolm, “Writing about Faith in the Golden Age of Television,” Christian Century (Dec 7, 2018).