http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/09/arts/television/tv-presidents-heroes-schemers-and-buffoons.html 2016-10-07 18:44:56 TV Presidents: Heroes, Schemers and Buffoons Nick Nolte is just one of the latest actors to portray a fictitious commander in chief on series television. Here are other administrations past and present. === This fall, as one of the most dramatic presidential elections in recent memory unfolds, television audiences are finding themselves overrun with fictional commanders in chief. On ABC’s “Designated Survivor,” Nick Nolte cuts a considerably less superhuman figure as a former president seeking redemption on Epix’s new comedy series Over seven seasons on “The West Wing,” Martin Sheen’s Jed Bartlet valiantly battled multiple sclerosis while outwitting his congressional enemies, enacting banking reform and gun control, and securing a peace deal in the Middle East. A decade later, the Bartlet administration remains so powerful in the public imagination that six of the actors who played aides recently reunited to On “24,” the stoic David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) protected the homeland against threats both foreign and domestic and steadfastly supported the tactics of the counterterrorist warrior Jack Bauer (Mr. Sutherland). But not every heroic president proves popular with viewers. Geena Davis’s Mackenzie Allen on “Commander in Chief,” an independent, Nobel Prize-winning scholar who balanced managing global crises with being a wife and mother, was so dull and one-dimensional she was voted off the air after only a single season. Gregory Itzin’s Charles Logan on “24” could well be the most diabolical of chief executives, masterminding the plot to kill off the beatific former President Palmer. On “House of Cards,” Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood has gotten away with murders, staging an alcoholic congressman’s suicide and pushing an investigative reporter in front of a subway train. He has since stabbed his first lady, Claire (Robin Wright), in the back (figuratively speaking) by undercutting her congressional campaign and sacrificed an American hostage to deflectattention from his political misconduct. And on “Scandal,” Tony Goldwyn’s Fitz Grant has spent as much time pursuing his paramour, Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington), as he has running the country, even going to war with the fictional country of West Angola to save her life when she was held hostage. That was the least he could do after ordering the shooting down of a civilian aircraft carrying Olivia’s mother. Selina Meyer, Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s accidental ex-president on HBO’s “Veep,” may consider herself a brilliant political player, but her stratagems rarely succeed. She inadvertently tweeted an offensive comment about her opponent, then blamed it on hackers from China, going so far as to impose sanctions on that rival superpower to cover her tracks. She can’t even lose an election right: The helicopter taking her away from the White House on Inauguration Day was forced to land on the National Mall, leaving Selina to sit sadly in the rain within earshot of her successor’s parade. As the title character in Fox’s ’80s sitcom “Mr. President,” George C. Scott embodied a politician so dim that he was blind to the fact that his sister-in-law (Madeline Kahn) was in love with him, even after she moved into the White House in the wake of his wife’s abandonment. And in the more recent NBC flop “1600 Penn,” Bill Pullman played the clueless President Standrich Gilchrist, who was constantly embarrassed by his first family. Whether he was chasing his man-child son, Skip (Josh Gad), out of his chair or threatening his daughter’s apparent baby daddy (“I have robots that roam the skies!”), he seemed like a typically hapless sitcom father. As Mr. Nolte’s character clashes with his own grown children, you can only hope “Graves” doesn’t meet with a similarly grim fat