This has been described as a political satire, but it's a bit difficult to see that when you watch it. It's not really funny and it doesn't seem to have any witty critiques of politics. This is just a political drama with a few overly wacky jokes sprinkled in.
The premise is creative, and Jack Tanner and TJ Cavanaugh are great characters. Everyone else though is either forgettable or immensely unlikeable. Deke, Molly, and Andrea are perhaps the most annoying. Deke, the cameraman, always manages to be creepy and shove cameras in people's faces for avant-garde documentary footage. The news reporter Molly shows up ready to fly off the handle over not getting a good story. While Andrea, a Tanner campaign employee, does toughen up, she never looses that underlying whiny naivety that makes you wonder how she wound up working for a political campaign in the first place.
In addition, the plot lines of episodes don't seem all that focused. They will usually pick up with the aftermath of what the last episode closed with and then move to something else, with the aftermath being dealt with in the following episode. It seems like each episode contained two halves of a different story. The end of the former episode and the beginning of the latter should have all just been one episode.
And yet, Tanner '88 seems to have moments that pull you back in when you've gotten annoyed with it. There's the speech at the end of the first episode (which may be the best episode), the cameos with other candidates and notable figures, and numerous scenes where TJ, always the commanding workaholic, is deftly managing a difficult campaign.
By no means is this a bad show. However, I definitely expected more from it, especially considering that this was an inspiration to the superior political drama: The West Wing.
