Letters to the Editor
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Some of my best friends are democrats...
Cary Tennis is the only one who has it right. The west wing posits a happy, rational universe where well-meaning people will always win the day if they just wake up early enough and work really hard. The fact that there are still tons of people who identify with this ethos is why the democrats keep losing and losing. The show is offensive in its self-righteous prissiness in face of the nature of the enemy modern-day progressives have to face.
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Not to be too nitpicky, but . . .
While I liked Farhad Manjoo's piece, it should be noted that a) there was no death at the end of the first season, and b) the episode in which Martin Sheen yells at God in Latin ("Two Cathedrals") is widely regarded as one of The West Wing's best episodes, if not its best episode -- and, indeed, one of the best hours of television ever produced.
I myself ended my obsession with TWW when Sorkin was booted. Now I'm gearing up for his next show, Studio 7 on the Sunset Strip. Hope it's as great as TWW was in its second season!!
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wenslydale in the west wing
the west wing is the only show on television that dumbs up instead of down, and gives us an hour in the company of characters that we rarely find in our usual circles.
Contrast this to the usual fare. On any given day, execs from every network and movie studio sit down to review scripts and determine treatments, and their first step is to hit the " script macro" function, whereupon a list of the usual cliche plots, tired caricatures and emotional hot buttons pop up on the screen.
"conflict creates drama" the execs will intone, and search for ways to generate conflict between any random two characters.
more often than not, this results in a ridiculous and unrealistic exchange: e.g. "my wenslydale represents my freedom and my future. you have eaten it, and therefore robbed me of my right to be who i want to be."
the west wing does things the other way around. first off, it takes real, plausible situations- as often as not actual events. then, instead of manufacturing emotional collisions among unrealistic characters, hoping to generate extreme responses, it spotlights the genuine drama of real choices and real consequences, and offers at least one character who has practical and smart interpretations and logical solutions; someone who shows us that there is a better alternative than empty gestures and self interested manipulation.
If the "chewy" dialogue makes you feel inadequate, there are plenty of shows out there that cater to the monsyllabic.
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West Wing
I only watched "The West Wing" a few times, but found it pretentious and depicting more honor and decency than exists in the White House, regardless of who occupies it. I had a hard time accepting Martin Sheen as president, but an even harder time accepting Rob Lowe as an aide. He seems more real as an aide to Arnold Swarzenegger. Truth, though stranger than fiction, does better casting. Life imitating art can be great entertainment as well as tragedy.
"The West Wing" is still probably better than 99% of the shows out there. That still isn't good enough. I tend to watch only PBS, which, though a mixed bag, offers high quality drama and public affairs programming. Now, back to "Marley and me."
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West Wing
I only watched "The West Wing" a few times, but found it pretentious and depicting more honor and decency than exists in the White House, regardless of who occupies it. I had a hard time accepting Martin Sheen as president, but an even harder time accepting Rob Lowe as an aide. He seems more real as an aide to Arnold Swarzenegger. Truth, though stranger than fiction, does better casting. Life imitating art can be great entertainment as well as tragedy.
"The West Wing" is still probably better than 99% of the shows out there. That still isn't good enough. I tend to watch only PBS, which, though a mixed bag, offers high quality drama and public affairs programming. Now, back to "Marley and me."
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West Wing
I stopped watching The West Wing two years ago, because the comparison to the Bush administration made me depressed. The current story line got me watching again and the possibility of reality someday matching fiction has me hooked. How great it would be to actually feel like our leaders were intelligent, competent, and not out to line their own pockets. The West Wing made us see how good America could be if governed by people who cared less about ideology and more about Americans.
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The truth, the whole truth, and I watched it backwards
I was a bit of a latecomer to the show, didn't start watching it until I think the third season and had to catch up backstory. I've always been a bit disorganized about TV. I have often wondered what it would have been like to get the whole arc as an arc, instead of in bits.
The truth: I developed a crush on John Spencer.
But I think NBC is right: it's done. Everything really good deserves to have a dignified ending.
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Miss it? I've been missing it for the last few years!
I haven't watched WW regularly since the first half of the first post-Sorkin season. It was too horrible to see writers with no clue about the characters make them go through the motions like a small tribe of Frankenstein's monsters.
Sorkin is a playwright, that's why his dialogue is as snappy as it is, why his characters can walk and chew gum at the same time, and why the walls of the tv and -- during the best eps -- the walls of your house vanish the way a theater vanishes around you as you fall into the world of the play.
In the Sorkin years, the worst eps were better than anything on tv. It was not reality, I doubt it was ever meant to be taken as reality. It feels like American Mythology, like the stories of the Christian Bible or any other mythology that moves me -- truths told in story form, ideals examined, a picture of what I always thought this nation could be if we all tried real hard, Republican, Democrats and everyone else.
Now, in these days when Red State doesn't mean a Communist nation and a Blue State isn't where Union soldiers came from during the Civil War, I don't know what we think we should be, or whether we could get there if we all come to a consensus.
My DVDs of the Sorkin years are among the treasures of my small collection. They give me hope, and I'll be having a West Wing festival on the day Dub-yuh stammers and smirks his ways through his delulsion of the State of the Union.