Go Getters Go Get: How to get into On Becoming a God in Central Florida if you loved The Politician

It's no secret that we live in a high octane society that tells us to work harder, earn more, buy more stuff and achieve absolute success. We are constantly being fed an image of an ideal that shows if we just work hard enough, we can rise to the top of our respective field, regardless of luck or privilege or availability of opportunity. To go further than that, the idols we now worship have changed; while it used to be ancient, all-knowing Gods in the past, we now worship brands, celebrities and politicians with a ride-or-die instinct that has us following their every move. Hell, it's gotten to a stage where a person trying to make money on Instagram is not just a person, but rather an Influencer with a brand instead of a personality.

In times like these, you've just gotta step back, look forward and laugh about how ridiculous it all is. Thankfully, I have just the two shows that do this.

If you have a Netflix subscription and have been cooped up at home for the better part of last year, you may have seen The Politician pop up in your feed. Made by the brilliant minds of Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan, it follows an incredibly privileged teen named Payton Hobart making it quite clear to a Harvard dean that he plans to become President of the United States. The only thing is that Payton is still a senior in highschool, so he's a little ways off a presidential bid and is thus trying his hand at becoming student body president.

When the cracks in his veneer are exposed by this interviewer- that he can't cry, that he really only produces reactions that people want to see, that he really doesn't seem to be too concerned with anything besides winning- we see that this is a guy who will fit literally any mould he can if it means he can win the presidency and that he has eschewed his humanity in order to get there.

He's bolstered by his girlfriend and campaign managers, who seem to have not only stuck by him since childhood, but who also seem to be true believers in and partial creators of the cult of Payton. They're not just seeing as far ahead as the student body; their eyes are on the presidency also, making Payton's dream more of a shared experience rather than individual ambition. Throughout The Politician's two seasons, the group shows a voracious hunger for political power; while it's never stated what their party is or what their core values are, it doesn't stop them from analysing previous presidencies like scholars, calculating which move would secure them a points lead or choosing the perfect Vice President to garner sympathy points....even going so far as to resort to poisoning a candidate.

Season two shows Payton with his eyes set on the New York State Senate, running against long standing incumbent DeDe Standish, who has her eyes on the Vice Presidency of the United States. While there is the same brand of cloak-and-dagger treachery and mud-slinging, it shows Payton and Co. in way over their heads in trying to secure the state senate. Throw in a succession from the union, unplanned pregnancies, casual spycraft and a conscious un-throupling, and you have a campaign for the ages.

Now I won't lie, I am something of a Murphy and Falchuk fangirl. From Nip/Tuck back in the early 00s to American Horror Story to Pose to this, I am a sucker for how this pair brings a story to life. From the colour palettes of each scene to the snappy dialogue to the nearly farcical but relatable situations that the characters find themselves in, I like many others am well and truly under the spell of this creative team. However, while I was watching the Politician, I couldn't help but notice a lot of parallels to another show that I feel has not received the credit that it is very much due. A show that also deals with a cult-like adoration of a figure that doesn't deal in beliefs (at least, not of the religious kind) but rather, business.

On Becoming a God in Central Florida is that show.

Created by Robert Funke and Matt Lutsky, On Becoming a God starts off very similarly to The Politician with the dulcet tones of Ted Levine's Obie Garbeau II bringing the audience into their world, their sun, their stars. In Obie's case, it's the world of FAM, the multi level marketing scheme founded by himself where he not only produces home-brand products for all a person's daily needs, but records tapes with all of the tricks to success a person could need. And wouldn't you know it, the key to that success is buying and selling FAM products, attending the various rallies for FAM and sacrificing sleep, all for the promise of being one's own boss and reaping a massive payday for little to no work. Sounds simple, right?

Enter Travis and Krystal Stubbs, two working class parents to a baby girl who want what any young couple wants; a life free from the stresses of finances. However, the pair couldn't be more different as Travis is well and truly under Obie Garbeau's spell and has fallen hook, line and sinker for promises of wealth through committment to FAM. Krystal on the other hand is not convinced; she has seen the reality of their commitment in that they'd spent two years pouring in time and effort and had not seen FAM deliver on their promises. She still works a minimum-wage job at the Rebel Rapids water park while juggling caring after her baby girl and has only really seen her husband losing a lot of sleep for very little gain.

Nonetheless, she plays the part of a FAM wife- she attends the rallies, goes to the image meetings (that honestly look more like a Bible Study mixed with a Mary Kay party), she risks her personal relationships with her boss and neighbours in order to build Travis's business and juggles her daughter throughout. It's not that she doesn't have dreams of a better life, it's that she's not entirely convinced that FAM is the right way to go.

She clashes with Travis regularly on this, but despite her valid concerns, she is regularly dismissed by loyal FAMites such as his upline manager, Cody. It all comes to a head when Travis ends up trading in his steady job for full time FAM, basking in short-lived, delusional glory before his lack of sleep leads to a freak alligator attack.

This throws Krystal's world into a tailspin; she is swimming in debt and has no way to access Travis's benefits from his old job, nor does Obie Garbeau want to compensate her for her loss. Instead, he ends up turning Travis's funeral into a FAM rally. Faced with a baby, a garage full of FAM junk and no money to support either, she's forced to use her moxie and wit to hustle her way up the ranks so she can expose the ugly truth of FAM and provide for her daughter.

Honestly, this has to be one of the best shows I've seen in a long time.

The reason I am here, writing this now is because I feel that The Politician and On Becoming A God showcase a fight for the American Dream from two different ends of the economic spectrum; while Payton Hobart vies for the presidency by any means possible, Krystal Stubbs is dragged onto a mouse wheel of wanting vast amounts of wealth for little to no work, peppered with revenge. They're both tenacious, resourceful individuals, despite the vast economic differences between them. Payton eschews his family's wealth as a means to get ahead, opting for studying past presidents and playing the campaign trail like a numbers game where if he just does the right extracurriculars and gets into the right college, he'll be on his way to the White House in no time.

While Krystal is worlds away from the privilege Payton lives with, she is nonetheless just as smart and hungry for success. While she tries to initially earn money via legitimate means (only to get screwed over by calling out a creep), she decides to play the FAM game to pay off her debts, finding that she is not only a natural salesperson but also capable of coming up with her own unique business idea in the process.

In the end, isn't that what the American Dream comes down to? Clever marketing of oneself to accrue enough riches and fame to leave the game altogether?

The second element that unites these two shows is that they show the cult-like worship of a figure that has no real religious ties whatsoever. In The Politician, you see it from when the first bell rings and Payton's campaign managers/friends/closest confidantes are already running through the numbers at a level that almost seems like they are more invested than he is at securing the presidency. This only carries on throughout the series, when his girlfriend Alice decides to orchestrate a breakup in order to secure him a point lead and then cheats a polygraph tests when his opponent, Astrid Sloane, goes missing. Beyond that however, they seem to be driven by this idea that Payton is genuinely invested in making the world a better place when really, we see little to no evidence of that. He picks and chooses hot-button issues to stand behind based on what will curry more favour with voters rather than what he truly believes in and he's called out on this in the very beginning. It's as if he has tailored his personality to fit being a politician for all seasons, at the cost of just being Payton.

In On Becoming a God, the religious elements are evident from the get-go. From the round-the-clock listening of Obie's tapes to quoting the hokey catchphrases to the image meetings, there is an air that this isn't just your garden variety MLM. It reads more like a cult that's not only invested in capitalism but also Obie himself. For the first half of the series, the image we have of him is that of a seemingly omniscient, all-powerful, charismatic being who has the keys to the kingdom of wealth and success. When Krystal starts utilising her idea of Splashercise (think of it like Aquarobics but with more rhinestones) as a FAM recruiting tool, Obie sends his shoeless henchman Roger Penland to shut it all down, calling it an apostasy and telling Krystal that she is charged with duplication, not improvement. It is only about halfway through the series when we get to see the real Obie; a cranky old man with a heart condition, fighting against his own mortality (and his fancy heart health diet) because it is at odds with his megalomania- how can he be ill when his image, his brand is immortal?

Even when Carol and Carole Wilkes, a couple of silver Washington-level FAMites manage to win a coveted meeting with the great Garbeau himself, they share their concerns that their turnover is lower than what they had expected, despite 60 hours per week of output. Just as Nero fiddled while Rome burned, in the face of his followers' suffering, he just tells them to work harder before instructing them to clean up the giant mess of fruit and vegetables he'd smashed into the front driveway earlier.

As with any kind of cult figure, power does not come without criticism and these two shows have that in spades. For one, Payton is in the firing line constantly just by virtue of being a politician in a campaign for a seat in power; being the subject of slander comes with the turf. The only rub here is that often, Payton's grand plans of winning over the hearts and minds of the voters tends to dig him into an even deeper hole. He enlists Infinity Jackson, a classmate burdened with illness to accrue as much sympathy as he can....only to find that Infinity might be faking her illness altogether. We the viewers are then stuck in the very uncomfortable terrain of being disgusted by this clear display of tokenism, yet invested in making sure that Payton's campaign isn't compromised by such scandal.

Obie draws criticism in different ways. From the get-go, you see he has no intention of taking any kind of responsibility for the people whom have bought his snake-oil secrets of success, even when lack of sleep leads them into trouble. It only becomes evident later on at a dinner attended by state senators and congressman that you see how much of a joke Obie Garbeau and the Garbeau system is amongst the upper crust. He has to pay for his table at the back of the room, he isn't taken seriously and despite all of the money and admiration from his loyal followers, he isn't respected at all amongst the real power brokers in that room. He is to wealth what Donald Trump is to real estate: he's simply a poor person's idea of success.

Another thing that unites these two shows is the recurrence of privileged, sheltered type-A's in both. The Politician is full of them, not just in Payton but in most of the cast, save for maybe Infinity. These are kids who constantly crunch the numbers for Payton's (and on the other side, Astrid's and later, DeDe's) best route to the presidency, adamant that their efforts are doing to change the world without really seeing the forest for the trees. They're so concerned with success that they don't bother to step out of their little privileged bubble for five minutes to really see what people who exist outside of it want out of their local government.

All of this is done with a knowing wink from Murphy, Falchuk and Brennan as in each series, there's episodes that show the perspectives of undecided voters and how they live, shining an even bigger, righter light on how ludicrous the campaigning process is. Season one has a voter who truly is not invested in the campaign whatsoever, which becomes evident as he is relentlessly hassled by both candidates, leading to him to punch one square in the face. Season two shows a mother and daughter backing two different candidates and slowly becoming disillusioned by them as they see just how much of their supposed hardline values are really just clever PR spin.

While it does end with one conceding and backing a different candidate, two interesting things happen. First, we see a picture of what it's like being either undecided or butting horns with a loved one over politics- you see that they're both good people with very different ideals and concerns, seeing firsthand how their preferred candidate handles them. Payton tends to talk his way out of criticism like he's coated in teflon while DeDe falls back on her achievements, all the while masking a view that's very much stuck in a bygone era. The second is that Payton and DeDe are exposed not as people trying to stand up for the common good but rather people trying to stand up for themselves; their constituents are all pawns in a chess game being played for the prize of power.

It is particularly interesting in the case of Astrid, Payton's season 1 opponent turned season 2 campaign assistant/campaign mole. From the get-go, she is very much a very beautiful, popular girl who has all of the desires of a highshooler; the gorgeous boyfriend, money, looks, wit beyond her years. And from the get-go, you can see that she is so very, very bored by it all. She ends up orchestrating her own kidnapping and in essence, sets herself free from this boredom, at least for a few weeks. She is really the only one who actively decides to venture out of her bubble and see just how colourful the world outside is. She's so enamoured by it that she decides to leave it behind altogether to pursue a life in New York away from the drudgery of privilege.

In On Becoming a God, this archetype comes in the form of Cody Bonar, Travis' upline manager turned Krystal's upline manager, yet another FAM true believer and all-round Obie Garbeau fanboy. He is arguably the catalyst for the series as he is the one who recruited Travis into FAM to begin with, he is the one who convinces Travis to leave his job and under Garbeau's advice, convinces Krystal to take over from Travis after his death.

Throughout the series, you see that out of all of the loyal FAMites, he is probably the most devoted of the bunch; going so far as to listen to Obie's tapes to mitigate stressful situations and kill a pelican just to earn Obie's approval. He is 100% committed to the cause of not having to work a 9 to 5 job to just pay the bills, only here's the rub... He's never actually worked a day job in his life. We find that he actually comes from incredibly old money and hence, already belongs to that cashed-up upper class that the rest of the FAM aspires to. However, it seems that he has been largely rudderless in his upbringing; his mother doesn't respect him, much less relate to him and his father (whom Cody had played a part in imprisoning) won't speak to him at all. While it makes sense that he'd attach himself to FAM and Obie to have a sense of family and by extension fatherhood, one thing is clear: he is a tourist amongst the lower-middle class and he's arrived simply because he's looking for a greater sense of fulfillment that money cannot really buy.

I can't really talk about these shows without mentioning the relationship dynamics in each. Specifically, both The Politician and On Becoming a God showcase non-traditional relationships that end up becoming central to their respective series. The Politician shows this in a multitude of ways; while there is the odd 'break up with A, get into bed with B' dynamic in there, there's also polyamory. While season 1 mostly showed these dynamics between younger, more conventionally attractive people, season 2 shows a throuple taking centre stage; mostly because state senator DeDe Standish is in the middle of it, but partly because the main participants are older. This relationship also serves as a device to show how deep Payton's hypocrisy runs; when it suits him, he uses DeDe's throuple as additional dirt in the mud-slinging that is a political campaign but when he himself enters a polyamorous relationship with Alice and Astrid, it's almost a non-issue outside the three participants. As a counterpoint, this affinity for polyamory is also what makes Payton and DeDe so similar, despite being such adamant adversaries; they just want to be in the middle, loved and adored by all, even if the audience is of only two other people.

On Becoming a God however, being set in the 90s, does not show such a dynamic. While the relationships are very much monogamous for the most part, the show does share a dynamic of an older woman being with a younger man in The Politician. What is more prevalent however is just how Krystal and Cody's relationship changes through the course of the series. In the beginning, Cody patronises Krystal repeatedly when she critiques the Garbeau system and expresses her desire to leave and when his actions subsequently lead to her husband's death, he is more concerned with losing her and her downline than he is with the fact that his actions ultimately left a widowed single mother without access to her late husbands' benefits from his steady job.

However as the show goes on and Krystal begins to use FAM and the Garbeau system to her own advantage, we see Krystal and Cody developing a sexual relationship with dominant and submissive undertones. It's almost ironic that this is catalysed by Cody's patronising, dismissive behaviour as within seconds, that front of being a cool, money-savvy businessman is completely slapped out of him and a new god takes Obie's place: Krystal. From the moment their relationship turns, he drops a major percentage of the cocky bravado he had previously and you see him as he truly is- a young man who is trying to make his way in the world but is somewhat clueless and is looking for someone worthy to show him the way.

If we read a little deeper into this, it's like all of the approval he was seeking as a cog in the FAM machine, all of the approval he missed out on while in his little bubble of wealth and privilege, is found in Krystal as she utilises him to get Splashercise off the ground. He nonetheless advances through the ranks of FAM, ultimately becoming a close confidante of Obie and subsequently suffering a crisis of faith when Krystal decides to leave FAM for good.

Now, there's many, many more parallels that The Politician and On Becoming a God share: there's a criminal element to both that makes both relevant and relatable to today. In The Politician, Infinity Jackson's story indirectly satirises that of Gypsy Rose Blanchard while On Becoming a God's FAM follows a similar pattern to that of Amway in the 90s and later Herbalife and LuLaRoe today. Coupled with the very real-world experiences of working a tedious job or voting for a disingenuous politician, these shows strike a nerve in the centre of the human psyche that strives for success on one's own terms. To ultimately be your own boss where you don't have to answer to anyone but yourself is something that many people dream of but few achieve. Nonetheless, it's pleasing to see this fight for success wrapped up with a biting wit, free from the constraints of morality and good taste; if you weren't bound by the need to uphold social graces, what depths would you yourself sink to if it meant getting ahead in life?

To conclude, The Politician and On Becoming a God in Central Florida are both excellent shows that highlight the farcical nature of not just the American Dream but the whole idea of pursuing success. While it is gratifying to see Krystal using her sheer wit and determination to drive a dagger into FAM, Payton is also a sympathetic figure, despite sounding absolutely awful on paper. He's a young man without much of an idea of who he is and what he stands for outside of becoming president and when things go wrong for him, he begins to claw a little it of his humanity back. I think it is also pertinent for people to see the level of sacrifice that goes into success; Payton says and does all of the right things and plays the game to an absolute tee and still, he gets waitlisted or rejected or dismissed. Krystal on the other hand is the little guy in a big man's world; someone who does work hard, who looks after her daughter, who does everything that we're told will lead us to success and is still at the mercy of wealthy bastards with no concern for anyone but themselves and their bottom line.

At the end of the day, sometimes the odds don't swing in our favour when it comes to clawing our way to the top. However, the most important this is to not sacrifice so much that we end up losing our sense of self completely; while some are happy to assimilate to an awful system that's never been challenged, history is dedicated to the trailblazers and the rebels, not the blind followers. After all, go getters go get.