Madam Secretary reaches out to Clinton, Powell and Albright

Pick of the day: Madam Secretary, 9.40pm, Ten.

Hillary Clinton, Tea Leoni, Colin Powell and Madeleine Albright on set. Picture: CBS

Pick of the day: Madam Secretary, 9.40pm, Ten.

American showrunner Shonda Rhimes (Scandal, Grey’s Anatomy) has hypothesised in the past that television dramas need to offer audiences a counterpoint to the times.

It rests on her observation that Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing was so significant because it presented an idealistic fictional Democratic president during George W. Bush’s administration, an era that featured the 9/11 attacks and the start of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Equally, audiences flocked to seven seasons of her dark and crooked Washington, DC, set show Scandal, in part because the Obama administration was synonymous with high-minded and uplifting rhetoric.

That is not to suggest Rhimes’s first effort under her new $US100 million ($140m) deal at Netflix will be an inspiring political drama; rather, it recently was revealed to be an adaptation of Blake Crouch’s upcoming sci-fi novel, Recursion.

In any case, for those wishing for progressive American political escapism, we have Madam Secretary, returning for its fifth season tonight.

Executive producer Lori McCreary has openly attributed the show’s inspiration to Hillary Clinton’s testimony to congress about the Benghazi attacks in Libya in 2012.

And in tonight’s episode they up the ante, guest starring Clinton along with fellow former US secretaries of state Madeleine Albright and Colin Powell to advise the fictional holder of that office played here by Tea Leoni.

“I was at Hillary Clinton’s husband’s (former president Bill Clinton) birthday party last summer, and she came up to me and was talking about the show and how much she loved it,” McCreary told the Tribeca TV Festival last month. “Hillary asked if we would consider writing a little role for her. She could … maybe play a spy? It was a birthday party, so I thought, ‘Maybe she was being nice.’ But then we asked if she would play herself and she said yes.”