Should we blame pop culture for giving voters a warped sense of how politics works in the real world? As Alex Mell-Taylor writes, TV shows like The West Wing and House of Cards, and movies like Swing Vote and Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, & Blonde, have a bad habit of depicting politics as a reductive binary of two extremes: optimism vs. nihilism.

Fictional characters either leverage “the system” for good or they exploit it in their own self-interest. Nuance rarely makes a cameo in these narrative arcs, so long as the show’s political hero can solve world peace by the end of a 42-minute episode.