“What, did I shoot you down too hard in there?” she asks in a neutral voice after one of their many policy disagreements: Strip away the show’s amateurish, “ripped from the headlines” narratives and what’s left is a working woman too busy doing her job to climb atop the soapbox. She’s a workhorse, not a show horse, rarely going in for grandstanding monologues and high-volume harangues, and her clashes with White House Chief of Staff Russell Jackson (Željko Ivanek) exhibit the quotidian tension of the cubicle, the water cooler, the break room. Against other political do-gooders on television in recent years (Martin Sheen’s Josiah Bartlett on The West Wing, or Geena Davis’s Mackenzie Allen on Commander in Chief), McCord is refreshingly understated in her competence. As such, “motherly pragmatism” turns out to be an asset rather than an insult. Her sarcastic denial of a student’s request for an extension, in the opening moments of the pilot, crackles with a bright, irreverent energy that buoys even the most boilerplate exchange. analyst and university professor, highest-ranking diplomat in the land) with much-needed rough edges. Leoni, in a deft performance, invests the seemingly superhuman McCord (wife, mother of three, former C.I.A. It’s ardently conventional, even corny-and yet, against all odds, it’s sort of winning too. (“Arms for A’s!” McCord calls the agreement, in what may be this year’s most cringe-worthy bit of screen dialogue.) By the way, if you’re pissed that I spoiled the plot, then Madam Secretary isn’t the show for you. The triangular deal McCord works out is risible: Pakistan releases the agent in return for a Russian missile defense system, provided that McCord’s husband, Henry (Tim Daly), awards the Russian envoy’s daughter a GPA-maintaining incomplete in the ethics course he teaches at Georgetown. When it comes time to secure the release of a covert operative exposed by the leak and imprisoned in Pakistan, June Cleaver diplomacy prevails.
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She endures a Beltway journalist’s petulant tirade as one might a child’s tantrum, confident it’ll run out of steam, and later wins a staffer’s loyalty with an unexpected act of kindness.
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In the third episode of Madam Secretary, Secretary of State Elizabeth McCord (Téa Leoni) confronts a damaging leak of classified information with what might be called motherly pragmatism.