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West Wing seasons 3 and 4
After someone pointed me straight to the direction of a reasonably priced seven seasons set, I caved and bought it, still feeling in an optimistic political vein. (And btw, Hillary for Secretary of State? Makes me happy. Also, I now have region 2 seasons 1 and 2 of the West Wing doubled, and would be happy to trade.) Having just finished them, I'll give it a break of a week or two before continuing with the post-Sorkin era.
Now, on to detailed viewing impressions.
First of all, even without the immediate 9/11 reaction episode, Isaak and Ishmael, starting the third season, and without looking the original broadcast date up, I would have figured out that from season 3 onwards, we're in the post-9/11 era. You can tell Sorkin & Co. had a big problem: obviously, 9/11 didn't happen in the West Wing universe, but on the other hand, if they continued to write as if it hadn't, letting the fictional administration face only the type of problems it did before 9/11, the sense of disconnect in the viewers might have been too extreme. So we get the fictional Muslim state of Qumar, various smaller-than-9/11 terrorist attacks and one prevented one, and instead of invasions of Aghanistan and Iraq, we get Bartlet ordering an assassination of a foreign member of goverment who also doubles as a terrorist leader. I'm not sure the parallels/contrasts completely work as intended, because Qumar resembles Saudi Arabia more than it does a Taliban-led Afghanistan, and as I said to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
skywaterblue once, we all know no American president, either Republican or Democrat, will ever break with the House of Saud, and we all know why. Still, I think from a writing pov, ignoring the Middle East realities would have been worse, and I appreciate that the matter of the assassination hasn't been presented in a gung-ho shoot 'em up manner but a hard decision and something Bartlet still regards as murder even as he comes to the conclusion it's necessary.
The "out of continuity" 9/11 episode Isaak and Ishmael is visibly a hastily written last minute job, but so painfully earnest and well-meant it caused a lump in my throat. Especially with the awareness that in the reality of the Bush administration, the Arab-American would have ended up in Guantanamo for the next two years before the matter of his name being confused with someone else's could or would have been cleared up.
In the regular continuity, season 3 struck me as as slower and more uneven than both the previous seasons and season 4, where the pacing was back. (And Sorkin started using other scriptwriters as well.) It did some great stuff with Abbey promoted from recurring to regular character - and I really liked the episode focusing on her, in particular the scenes with CJ, Amy and Donna - Bechdel test gold stars for that one - and I liked all the new characters, Bruno, doomed Simon, and Donna's first Republican boyfriend - but there also were some let-downs. To wit: the way Toby suddenly diagnosed the President having Daddy issues and these being the cause for his being an overachiever and alternating between tough leader and folksy please-like-me uncle was sloppy writing. Not the issues per se - it's not startlingly original, but the excellent s2 finale, Two Cathedrals, which was also the first serious Jed Bartlet character exploration episode, laid the groundworks with the casual way Bartlet Senior strikes Jed in one of the flashbacks (clearly indicating this isn't the first time and is expected behaviour at this point). But for Toby to suddenly come up with "your father hit you, didn't he?", he'd have to be telepathic, considering it's not something he could have been told before. (Jed wouldn't, Abbey, who probably knows, wouldn't, same with Leo.) I suppose one could fanwank it with Toby making an educated guess given that Jed Bartlet belongs to a generation where physical punishment, especially for boys, was the rule, not the exception, but I still thought it was a writerly shortcut and just lazy. Plus the immediate follow-up with the psychiatrist was pointless (as opposed to the Josh Christmas episode in s2); I like this actor as much as the next viewer who has seen Life and likes him as Ted, but the brief scenes he has with the President don't reveal anything, and I couldn't help but thinking that it would have been more ic if Jed had used the option one has as a Catholic - which would have made all the secrecy with flying in a psychiatrist superfluos, too - go to confession.
Mind you, I did like the subsequent chess playing episode, and thought the respective matches against Toby and Sam were a neat contrast of those very different relationships. Relationships between the President and Josh, Sam, even CJ are pretty paternalistic, i.e. he's a replacement father figure (made most explicit in the case of Josh), and Leo of course is his BFF, but Toby falls between those categories, and not simply because they're far too close in age for the fatherly thing to work, and they don't have the best buddies background, either. But Toby gets assigned the role of challenging better angel more often than not, and the fact that he's the main speechwriter is perfectly fitting for that, working in a meta way - he "writes" Jed Bartlet and sometimes butts heads with his character and his character's tendencies, and gets pretty possessive about it.
Speaking of Toby: now I've been aware for years that two biggest pairings in West Wing fanfiction are Josh/Donna and CJ/Toby. I hadn't seen any CJ/Toby tendencies in the first two seasons but assumed there might be in later seasons. So far, I still see no sign. They're friends. Toby is still clearly very much in love with his ex-wife (who btw is a great character), and CJ, between the flirting with Danny, the doomed not-affair with Simon and the one night stand at her high school reunion showed no signs of having the remotest non-platonic interest in Toby, either.
Season 4's opening two-parter is my favourite season opener so far. Maybe because I have a soft spot for road movies, but the Josh, Toby and Donna lost in Indiana subplot had me on the floor on a regular basis, and the political main plot was suspenseful and well-executed. The combination of the reelection campaign story with the introduction of new regular and future Sam replacement Will Bailey and the Orange County campaign was a great idea; Sam gradually moving out of the story felt very natural this way. Also, given that the result of the reelection campaign is obvious - even a first time viewer must have known the show wouldn't end with s4, and hence Bartlet had to win - I was pleasantly surprised how captivated I was anyway. It also occured to me during Toby's "smartest kids in the class" speech that of course a President like Jed Bartlet is wish fulfillment in an era where it looked like education and intelligence were a downside to a politician, that, in high school movie terms, the jocks would always win over the nerds; Bartlet wiping the debate floor with Republican Richie is the blatant revenge of the nerd, and I can see the manipulation, but damn, it totally works for me! (Also, I'm still basking in the afterglow of the real life victory of someone whose intelligence and education didn't prevent him from getting elected.)
Richie aside, Sorkin is pretty good in including sympathetic Republicans and the occasional dastardly Democrat to make it clear things aren't black and white, though I was sad to see, or rather, not to see since we're told long after the fact, Ainsley leave. Kudos to him for that. On the other hand, seasons 3 and 4 also contain two examples of Sorkin being a jerk, which were so infamous I had heard about them at the time of the original broadcast when I wasn't watching the show. The one in season 3 turned out to be better than its reputation suggested, the one in season 4 every bit as bad and worse. The former was the result of Sorkin getting into a flame war on the West Wing boards of Television Without Pity. The reason why this turned out to be better than I had thought was because Josh, who gets into a flame war on a forum dedicated to him, is mocked as much by the writing as the "dictatorial" webmaster, and being sarcastic on your own expense and aware enough to depict the absurdity of your behaviour is a saving grace. However, the other example, again with Josh as a kind of authorial alter ego, made me headdesk a lot. Here, we have Josh lecturing a Star Trek fan (overweight, glasses) on a) the impropriety of displaying her ST insignia in the White House, and b) on how to be a fan properly, because, you see, he's a Sports fan, and that's okay, but getting excited about pairing up "your favourite Cardassian with your favourite Klingon, that's not being a fan, that's having a fetish". Good grief.
While we're talking of Sorkin failings: Jean-Paul. Firstly, to repeat myself, I really don't get the Anglo-Saxon complex about the French, in either the English or the American variation. (Though back when the "freedom fries" renaming happened, Neil Gaiman cracked me up on his blog when remarking that the Americans clearly didn't know how to properly hate the French, because the proper way was by loving their food, being fannish about their actresses, having your holidays in their country, smoking their cigarettes and endlessly remaking their films.) Secondly, I hate it if in romantic comedies one romantic rival is set up to be despised by the audience by being a paper-thin collection of bad attributes without redeeming graces. Among other things, it makes the person considering said rival look stupid. So here we get a useless member of the French nobility who is mean to Charlie and slips Zoe some ecstasy against her will; I'm just waiting for the revelation that he's also secretly in league with her kidnappers. The thing is, Sorkin can do better, and he does, on this show. Donna's beaus, whether it's the principled Republican congressman (who saves Leo's butt) or the Republican pilot, are all presented as likeable and it's easy to see why she would go out with them; and Amy Gardner, Josh's main focus of romantic attention throughout season 3 and most of s4, has been shown as clever, competent, vivacious (not to mention dead-on with her assessment that Josh likes to be hit on the head), and again, one can understand people who fall in love with her. All of this simultanously to Sorkin inserting more and more romantic subtext in the Josh/Donna relationship. So why on earth the boo, hiss cheapness of Jean-Paul?
Back to the good stuff again: seems we get a flashback episode to the early campaign or early White House days once a season, and they're always good to watch. One standout episode in s4, however, The Long Goodbye (aka the one with CJ and her Altzheimer-ridden father) was also a standalone, and written by Jon Baitz who wrote one of my favourite Alias episodes, In Dreams, a season 4 Sloane character study. Both episodes come across a little like self-contained plays and are superbly acted.
Lastly: poor Hoynes. One can't help feeling the VP really was screwed over, and not in the literal sense, ever since he agreed to take the job. Early on, everyone suspects him of scheming, then he finds out the subtext with which Bartlet lured him (be my Vice President, and oh, btw, I have MS, and you know what that could mean for you!) isn't true, his support doesn't even get his name in the laws he helped forge, during the relection campaign everyone but Bartlet is eager to get rid of him, including Leo whom he helped with the AA meeting, and then his mistress writes a tell-all. I mean, I knew due to various comparisons during the Obama campaign that Hoynes would never be President after Bartlet, but sheesh. Mind you, I'm not saying those were bad storytelling choices; Hoynes was an interesting character and the fact the Bartlet White House was less than stellar - sometimes downright petty - in their behaviour towards him kept them from appearing too good to be true.
In conclusion: I want a well-written DW/WW crossover more than ever.
Now, on to detailed viewing impressions.
First of all, even without the immediate 9/11 reaction episode, Isaak and Ishmael, starting the third season, and without looking the original broadcast date up, I would have figured out that from season 3 onwards, we're in the post-9/11 era. You can tell Sorkin & Co. had a big problem: obviously, 9/11 didn't happen in the West Wing universe, but on the other hand, if they continued to write as if it hadn't, letting the fictional administration face only the type of problems it did before 9/11, the sense of disconnect in the viewers might have been too extreme. So we get the fictional Muslim state of Qumar, various smaller-than-9/11 terrorist attacks and one prevented one, and instead of invasions of Aghanistan and Iraq, we get Bartlet ordering an assassination of a foreign member of goverment who also doubles as a terrorist leader. I'm not sure the parallels/contrasts completely work as intended, because Qumar resembles Saudi Arabia more than it does a Taliban-led Afghanistan, and as I said to
skywaterblue once, we all know no American president, either Republican or Democrat, will ever break with the House of Saud, and we all know why. Still, I think from a writing pov, ignoring the Middle East realities would have been worse, and I appreciate that the matter of the assassination hasn't been presented in a gung-ho shoot 'em up manner but a hard decision and something Bartlet still regards as murder even as he comes to the conclusion it's necessary.The "out of continuity" 9/11 episode Isaak and Ishmael is visibly a hastily written last minute job, but so painfully earnest and well-meant it caused a lump in my throat. Especially with the awareness that in the reality of the Bush administration, the Arab-American would have ended up in Guantanamo for the next two years before the matter of his name being confused with someone else's could or would have been cleared up.
In the regular continuity, season 3 struck me as as slower and more uneven than both the previous seasons and season 4, where the pacing was back. (And Sorkin started using other scriptwriters as well.) It did some great stuff with Abbey promoted from recurring to regular character - and I really liked the episode focusing on her, in particular the scenes with CJ, Amy and Donna - Bechdel test gold stars for that one - and I liked all the new characters, Bruno, doomed Simon, and Donna's first Republican boyfriend - but there also were some let-downs. To wit: the way Toby suddenly diagnosed the President having Daddy issues and these being the cause for his being an overachiever and alternating between tough leader and folksy please-like-me uncle was sloppy writing. Not the issues per se - it's not startlingly original, but the excellent s2 finale, Two Cathedrals, which was also the first serious Jed Bartlet character exploration episode, laid the groundworks with the casual way Bartlet Senior strikes Jed in one of the flashbacks (clearly indicating this isn't the first time and is expected behaviour at this point). But for Toby to suddenly come up with "your father hit you, didn't he?", he'd have to be telepathic, considering it's not something he could have been told before. (Jed wouldn't, Abbey, who probably knows, wouldn't, same with Leo.) I suppose one could fanwank it with Toby making an educated guess given that Jed Bartlet belongs to a generation where physical punishment, especially for boys, was the rule, not the exception, but I still thought it was a writerly shortcut and just lazy. Plus the immediate follow-up with the psychiatrist was pointless (as opposed to the Josh Christmas episode in s2); I like this actor as much as the next viewer who has seen Life and likes him as Ted, but the brief scenes he has with the President don't reveal anything, and I couldn't help but thinking that it would have been more ic if Jed had used the option one has as a Catholic - which would have made all the secrecy with flying in a psychiatrist superfluos, too - go to confession.
Mind you, I did like the subsequent chess playing episode, and thought the respective matches against Toby and Sam were a neat contrast of those very different relationships. Relationships between the President and Josh, Sam, even CJ are pretty paternalistic, i.e. he's a replacement father figure (made most explicit in the case of Josh), and Leo of course is his BFF, but Toby falls between those categories, and not simply because they're far too close in age for the fatherly thing to work, and they don't have the best buddies background, either. But Toby gets assigned the role of challenging better angel more often than not, and the fact that he's the main speechwriter is perfectly fitting for that, working in a meta way - he "writes" Jed Bartlet and sometimes butts heads with his character and his character's tendencies, and gets pretty possessive about it.
Speaking of Toby: now I've been aware for years that two biggest pairings in West Wing fanfiction are Josh/Donna and CJ/Toby. I hadn't seen any CJ/Toby tendencies in the first two seasons but assumed there might be in later seasons. So far, I still see no sign. They're friends. Toby is still clearly very much in love with his ex-wife (who btw is a great character), and CJ, between the flirting with Danny, the doomed not-affair with Simon and the one night stand at her high school reunion showed no signs of having the remotest non-platonic interest in Toby, either.
Season 4's opening two-parter is my favourite season opener so far. Maybe because I have a soft spot for road movies, but the Josh, Toby and Donna lost in Indiana subplot had me on the floor on a regular basis, and the political main plot was suspenseful and well-executed. The combination of the reelection campaign story with the introduction of new regular and future Sam replacement Will Bailey and the Orange County campaign was a great idea; Sam gradually moving out of the story felt very natural this way. Also, given that the result of the reelection campaign is obvious - even a first time viewer must have known the show wouldn't end with s4, and hence Bartlet had to win - I was pleasantly surprised how captivated I was anyway. It also occured to me during Toby's "smartest kids in the class" speech that of course a President like Jed Bartlet is wish fulfillment in an era where it looked like education and intelligence were a downside to a politician, that, in high school movie terms, the jocks would always win over the nerds; Bartlet wiping the debate floor with Republican Richie is the blatant revenge of the nerd, and I can see the manipulation, but damn, it totally works for me! (Also, I'm still basking in the afterglow of the real life victory of someone whose intelligence and education didn't prevent him from getting elected.)
Richie aside, Sorkin is pretty good in including sympathetic Republicans and the occasional dastardly Democrat to make it clear things aren't black and white, though I was sad to see, or rather, not to see since we're told long after the fact, Ainsley leave. Kudos to him for that. On the other hand, seasons 3 and 4 also contain two examples of Sorkin being a jerk, which were so infamous I had heard about them at the time of the original broadcast when I wasn't watching the show. The one in season 3 turned out to be better than its reputation suggested, the one in season 4 every bit as bad and worse. The former was the result of Sorkin getting into a flame war on the West Wing boards of Television Without Pity. The reason why this turned out to be better than I had thought was because Josh, who gets into a flame war on a forum dedicated to him, is mocked as much by the writing as the "dictatorial" webmaster, and being sarcastic on your own expense and aware enough to depict the absurdity of your behaviour is a saving grace. However, the other example, again with Josh as a kind of authorial alter ego, made me headdesk a lot. Here, we have Josh lecturing a Star Trek fan (overweight, glasses) on a) the impropriety of displaying her ST insignia in the White House, and b) on how to be a fan properly, because, you see, he's a Sports fan, and that's okay, but getting excited about pairing up "your favourite Cardassian with your favourite Klingon, that's not being a fan, that's having a fetish". Good grief.
While we're talking of Sorkin failings: Jean-Paul. Firstly, to repeat myself, I really don't get the Anglo-Saxon complex about the French, in either the English or the American variation. (Though back when the "freedom fries" renaming happened, Neil Gaiman cracked me up on his blog when remarking that the Americans clearly didn't know how to properly hate the French, because the proper way was by loving their food, being fannish about their actresses, having your holidays in their country, smoking their cigarettes and endlessly remaking their films.) Secondly, I hate it if in romantic comedies one romantic rival is set up to be despised by the audience by being a paper-thin collection of bad attributes without redeeming graces. Among other things, it makes the person considering said rival look stupid. So here we get a useless member of the French nobility who is mean to Charlie and slips Zoe some ecstasy against her will; I'm just waiting for the revelation that he's also secretly in league with her kidnappers. The thing is, Sorkin can do better, and he does, on this show. Donna's beaus, whether it's the principled Republican congressman (who saves Leo's butt) or the Republican pilot, are all presented as likeable and it's easy to see why she would go out with them; and Amy Gardner, Josh's main focus of romantic attention throughout season 3 and most of s4, has been shown as clever, competent, vivacious (not to mention dead-on with her assessment that Josh likes to be hit on the head), and again, one can understand people who fall in love with her. All of this simultanously to Sorkin inserting more and more romantic subtext in the Josh/Donna relationship. So why on earth the boo, hiss cheapness of Jean-Paul?
Back to the good stuff again: seems we get a flashback episode to the early campaign or early White House days once a season, and they're always good to watch. One standout episode in s4, however, The Long Goodbye (aka the one with CJ and her Altzheimer-ridden father) was also a standalone, and written by Jon Baitz who wrote one of my favourite Alias episodes, In Dreams, a season 4 Sloane character study. Both episodes come across a little like self-contained plays and are superbly acted.
Lastly: poor Hoynes. One can't help feeling the VP really was screwed over, and not in the literal sense, ever since he agreed to take the job. Early on, everyone suspects him of scheming, then he finds out the subtext with which Bartlet lured him (be my Vice President, and oh, btw, I have MS, and you know what that could mean for you!) isn't true, his support doesn't even get his name in the laws he helped forge, during the relection campaign everyone but Bartlet is eager to get rid of him, including Leo whom he helped with the AA meeting, and then his mistress writes a tell-all. I mean, I knew due to various comparisons during the Obama campaign that Hoynes would never be President after Bartlet, but sheesh. Mind you, I'm not saying those were bad storytelling choices; Hoynes was an interesting character and the fact the Bartlet White House was less than stellar - sometimes downright petty - in their behaviour towards him kept them from appearing too good to be true.
In conclusion: I want a well-written DW/WW crossover more than ever.
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