western wingnuts
Dec. 1st, 2006 09:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacTime to return to the library the DVDs of West Wing first season that I've had for the last two weeks.
Watching, in relatively short order, a lot of episodes of a series you hadn't seen before is a different experience from re-watching those of a series you'd gotten week by week when it was first broadcast. In the latter case, you're just revisiting something you already know. In the former, everything is being tossed at you new, at once. I find the crash course a little exhausting at length. It's not the fault of the show, but I stopped before half the season ended.
Let's be clear before I start to carp: this is a good show. I like the crispness of the directing and acting, I like the focus on real issues and the willingness to take sides while acknowledging real differences. (Political fiction is too apt to be either ranting polemics, in which one side gets all the good lines and the other side only sputters, or else is weirdly vague and you have to burn a candle to Eris to figure out what's actually going on. West Wing sometimes falls into the first trap, but never, as far as I've seen, the second.)
I like to see the characters working hard but sometimes screwing up. I like that, despite making mistakes, they are good at their jobs, even if they mess up their private lives. I like to see them actually working. The speechwriters tend to be shown working by scribbling on papers and then tearing them up, but the policy people think on camera without pulling things out of a hat. I like the realistic detail, and the fact that the writers actually listened to the real-life former WH aides they hired as technical advisors. I really like that despite occasional friction, the WH staff work together as a team.
I like the delicacy of the relationship between the President and his chief of staff. They're longtime buddies, but now they're the President of the United States and his principal aide. How do they handle that? It's really interesting to watch. (Point of fact: Robert Kennedy, as Attorney General, not only addressed his brother as "Mr. President" as everybody else did, at least when anybody else was present, he called him "the President" when discussing him.)
I like that characters make factual errors and other characters jump on them. ("Arthur Murray didn't need the NEA to write 'Death of a Salesman'." "It was Arthur Miller, and yes he did, only it was called the WPA then.") My favorite mistake that a character makes, though, is not about external fact at all: it's the one about the goldfish.
What I don't like:
I don't find Josh credible as a deputy chief of staff. He's good at the job, but doesn't seem to me to have the gravitas of anyone who'd actually be given it. He might make a sober decision to decline the instruction to be one of the few staff members to be evacuated in case of a nuclear attack, as Josh declines. But I find less credible that he'd be as weirded out by the whole idea as Josh is. I also find the actor's voice just a bit petulant. If there's anything actually in the show that got on my nerves and pushed me towards not continuing, having to keep listening to him was it. (On the other hand, I could listen to Richard Schiff, who plays Toby, all day.)
I don't find credible that, with these staffers shown as bright and fast as they are, that the President could find in a roomful of aides only one who'd ever heard the phrase "Post hoc, ergo propter hoc." (I also find astonishing the fact that the writers expect the audience to be able to keep in mind all the unfamiliar characters thrown at you bang-bang-bang at the start of the first episode, yet apparently not know the well-known acronym POTUS.)
The scene where the President explains to his teenage daughter his real fear about her going out unescorted - that she might get kidnapped by terrorists and he'd be a basket case instead of the President - would be a lot more powerful and effective if I didn't know, from reading about this show, that in a subsequent season exactly that happens. There's a tendency in continuing action dramas to keep escalating the stakes of the action as the years go on. This can be bearable in a fantasy show like Buffy which sets the rules of its own universe, but West Wing is supposed to be hard-nosed reality. Events like those in the episodes I've seen: they happen in real life all the time. The climatic event of the season (yes, I know what that is too, though I haven't watched the final episode) or the kidnapping are distinctly out of the ordinary, especially in the form they're presented in.
I don't like it when the show does fall into the trap of putting all the argument on one side. This is irritating enough when I don't agree with them - their argument in favor of census sampling is just full of holes - but it's worse than irritating, it's embarrassing, when I do agree with them. The episode with the potential Supreme Court nominee who doesn't believe in the right to privacy - the counter-arguments against him are spot on, but there's more to the question than that. A top legal scholar and former editor of the Harvard (was it?) Law Review, which is what this nominee is, shouldn't sputter in a conversation like this.
I don't like it when the show makes mistakes that are not corrected. Josh is right when he tells the President that, under the Antiquities Act, the President can protect land from drilling and development at the stroke of a pen. (Jimmy Carter did just that to huge swathes of Alaska, and didn't the Republicans howl.) But what the President makes this way is a National Monument, not a National Park.
I mentioned in an earlier post that, while jumping ahead to watch the episode with Harry Groener in it, there was another character called Lord John Marbury, who is also called Lord Marbury, and this just isn't possible under the terminology rules of the British peerage. You can't be both Lord John and Lord Marbury at the same time. It is a credible mistake for the characters to make - but on this show, when characters make mistakes, somebody corrects them, and nobody corrects them on this one. So I think it's the writers who made the mistake, not the characters.
Well, it turns out to be worse than that. Lord whomever also appears in the previous episode, and we hear the press secretary describe him as "the heriditary Earl of Sherborne" (only she pronounces it more like "Sherlborne"). Buzz! In that case he'd be Lord Sherborne, and neither Lord John nor Lord Marbury at all. (He could only be Lord Marbury if his title was the same as his last name: Earl of Marbury or Baron Marbury or something like that.) Some lords prefer to use their real names rather than their titles - for instance the historian Lord Dacre kept bylining himself Hugh Trevor-Roper - but he couldn't, and wouldn't, call himself either Lord Hugh or Lord Trevor-Roper, and neither would Lord Sherborne call himself Lord John Marbury. That's just wrong, wrong, wrong, and not a mistake even ignorant Americans are prone to make. Yes, the terminology rules of British nobility are complex, but they are also learnable, and a fiction writer should either learn them or not create characters who are British noblemen in the first place.
Watching, in relatively short order, a lot of episodes of a series you hadn't seen before is a different experience from re-watching those of a series you'd gotten week by week when it was first broadcast. In the latter case, you're just revisiting something you already know. In the former, everything is being tossed at you new, at once. I find the crash course a little exhausting at length. It's not the fault of the show, but I stopped before half the season ended.
Let's be clear before I start to carp: this is a good show. I like the crispness of the directing and acting, I like the focus on real issues and the willingness to take sides while acknowledging real differences. (Political fiction is too apt to be either ranting polemics, in which one side gets all the good lines and the other side only sputters, or else is weirdly vague and you have to burn a candle to Eris to figure out what's actually going on. West Wing sometimes falls into the first trap, but never, as far as I've seen, the second.)
I like to see the characters working hard but sometimes screwing up. I like that, despite making mistakes, they are good at their jobs, even if they mess up their private lives. I like to see them actually working. The speechwriters tend to be shown working by scribbling on papers and then tearing them up, but the policy people think on camera without pulling things out of a hat. I like the realistic detail, and the fact that the writers actually listened to the real-life former WH aides they hired as technical advisors. I really like that despite occasional friction, the WH staff work together as a team.
I like the delicacy of the relationship between the President and his chief of staff. They're longtime buddies, but now they're the President of the United States and his principal aide. How do they handle that? It's really interesting to watch. (Point of fact: Robert Kennedy, as Attorney General, not only addressed his brother as "Mr. President" as everybody else did, at least when anybody else was present, he called him "the President" when discussing him.)
I like that characters make factual errors and other characters jump on them. ("Arthur Murray didn't need the NEA to write 'Death of a Salesman'." "It was Arthur Miller, and yes he did, only it was called the WPA then.") My favorite mistake that a character makes, though, is not about external fact at all: it's the one about the goldfish.
What I don't like:
I don't find Josh credible as a deputy chief of staff. He's good at the job, but doesn't seem to me to have the gravitas of anyone who'd actually be given it. He might make a sober decision to decline the instruction to be one of the few staff members to be evacuated in case of a nuclear attack, as Josh declines. But I find less credible that he'd be as weirded out by the whole idea as Josh is. I also find the actor's voice just a bit petulant. If there's anything actually in the show that got on my nerves and pushed me towards not continuing, having to keep listening to him was it. (On the other hand, I could listen to Richard Schiff, who plays Toby, all day.)
I don't find credible that, with these staffers shown as bright and fast as they are, that the President could find in a roomful of aides only one who'd ever heard the phrase "Post hoc, ergo propter hoc." (I also find astonishing the fact that the writers expect the audience to be able to keep in mind all the unfamiliar characters thrown at you bang-bang-bang at the start of the first episode, yet apparently not know the well-known acronym POTUS.)
The scene where the President explains to his teenage daughter his real fear about her going out unescorted - that she might get kidnapped by terrorists and he'd be a basket case instead of the President - would be a lot more powerful and effective if I didn't know, from reading about this show, that in a subsequent season exactly that happens. There's a tendency in continuing action dramas to keep escalating the stakes of the action as the years go on. This can be bearable in a fantasy show like Buffy which sets the rules of its own universe, but West Wing is supposed to be hard-nosed reality. Events like those in the episodes I've seen: they happen in real life all the time. The climatic event of the season (yes, I know what that is too, though I haven't watched the final episode) or the kidnapping are distinctly out of the ordinary, especially in the form they're presented in.
I don't like it when the show does fall into the trap of putting all the argument on one side. This is irritating enough when I don't agree with them - their argument in favor of census sampling is just full of holes - but it's worse than irritating, it's embarrassing, when I do agree with them. The episode with the potential Supreme Court nominee who doesn't believe in the right to privacy - the counter-arguments against him are spot on, but there's more to the question than that. A top legal scholar and former editor of the Harvard (was it?) Law Review, which is what this nominee is, shouldn't sputter in a conversation like this.
I don't like it when the show makes mistakes that are not corrected. Josh is right when he tells the President that, under the Antiquities Act, the President can protect land from drilling and development at the stroke of a pen. (Jimmy Carter did just that to huge swathes of Alaska, and didn't the Republicans howl.) But what the President makes this way is a National Monument, not a National Park.
I mentioned in an earlier post that, while jumping ahead to watch the episode with Harry Groener in it, there was another character called Lord John Marbury, who is also called Lord Marbury, and this just isn't possible under the terminology rules of the British peerage. You can't be both Lord John and Lord Marbury at the same time. It is a credible mistake for the characters to make - but on this show, when characters make mistakes, somebody corrects them, and nobody corrects them on this one. So I think it's the writers who made the mistake, not the characters.
Well, it turns out to be worse than that. Lord whomever also appears in the previous episode, and we hear the press secretary describe him as "the heriditary Earl of Sherborne" (only she pronounces it more like "Sherlborne"). Buzz! In that case he'd be Lord Sherborne, and neither Lord John nor Lord Marbury at all. (He could only be Lord Marbury if his title was the same as his last name: Earl of Marbury or Baron Marbury or something like that.) Some lords prefer to use their real names rather than their titles - for instance the historian Lord Dacre kept bylining himself Hugh Trevor-Roper - but he couldn't, and wouldn't, call himself either Lord Hugh or Lord Trevor-Roper, and neither would Lord Sherborne call himself Lord John Marbury. That's just wrong, wrong, wrong, and not a mistake even ignorant Americans are prone to make. Yes, the terminology rules of British nobility are complex, but they are also learnable, and a fiction writer should either learn them or not create characters who are British noblemen in the first place.
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no subject
Date: 2006-12-01 06:58 pm (UTC)In general, I thought the Lord Marbary episodes were weak, though they had their moments. It doesn't surprise me at all that Sorkin (or his characters) don't know how to address British royalty. Marbary himself (in the show) is weird enough that they could just be doing it to annoy him, and he would not be annoyed just to annoy them back. But that's probably reading too much into it.
The show does a lot of things for dramatic purposes (like having a Supreme Court nominee sputter). Face it, watching actual politics is boring. Watching actual police/doctor/family activities are boring.
And yes, the whole potential-for-kidnapped daughter thing was handled very poorly. A similar plot thread helped bring down the show with the first female president.
I'm pleased that the show was so good that carping is about some fairly minor aspects. For the most part, The West Wing was one of the best shows on tv, and I look forward to seeing it when there's a real president in the Oval Office. It was annoying seeing Presidential president on The West Wing and a joke who can barely speak English on the news.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-01 07:29 pm (UTC)The dialogue on this show is so fast that the English language captioning resembles a précis more than a transcription. So that's no good.
An antagonist who actually argues back would be more dramatically interesting, as well as more credible, than one who sputters.
On your last point, yes. Many jokes to the effect of "I'd rather be voting for Martin Sheen" have been seen in this quarter.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-01 07:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-02 12:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-02 01:21 am (UTC)