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#Post#: 672--------------------------------------------------
WEST WING
By: agate Date: March 2, 2015, 7:41 pm
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Seasons 1 -3:
Having watched only a couple of episodes of this series when it
was running on TV, I finally got around to seeing the entire
West Wing. So far, it’s been well cast and well acted, with
witty, fast-paced dialogue, realistic situations and likable
characters, though I keep hoping that Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe)
will get his comeuppance and fade into the background.
I don’t really like President Bartlet or the First Lady much
either. Martin Sheen as the President does an excellent job, and
maybe I just can’t see his appeal. Stockard Channing as Abby
Bartlet just doesn’t work for me. She is supposed to be a
medical doctor with some credibility in her field, but she
doesn’t get into the role, it seems to me.
One problem with running a TV series about the White House must
have been that the producers felt obliged to respond to the 9/11
attack on the World Trade Center without actually dealing with
it directly. So, most unfortunately, season 2 opens with the
peculiar “Isaac and Ishmael” episode, where the main characters
are no longer themselves but function as teachers lecturing to
an attentive group of teenagers about terrorism. The whole
episode is so out-of-whack and wrong-headed that it’s
embarrassing to watch it, and I understand that the series came
in for harsh criticism at the time.
However, while giving us an absorbing story, West Wing also
manages to score a few points for people with disabilities and
chronic health conditions. We have the deaf Joey Lucas (played
by the actually deaf Marlee Mattlin) in a position of
considerable authority, and the President himself–diagnosed with
multiple sclerosis some seven years before running for President
and not letting it get in his way (he seems to have a quieter,
more easily remitting case, so far)–and even taking the flak
about not having revealed this fact to the public. These
aspects of West Wing help to make it clearer that a disability
or a chronic disorder is a condition some people happen to
have–and they usually can go on with their lives, making
adjustments as needed. Joey Lucas, for instance, has had to
become proficient in sign language and goes about with an
interpreter. People must face her when talking to her so she can
read their lips.
In the third season, in the “Manchester II” episode, Toby
Ziegler tells Sam Seaborn: “Did you realize MS [advocates] often
advise people with MS to hide the illness because it’s so
misunderstood?” When the question whether President Bartlet
defrauded the public by concealing his MS from them arises, it
is this aspect of the disorder that may be his best defense–that
it is so often misunderstood. And since his MS wasn’t crippling
him appreciably, why should the public have needed to know about
it?
There is much that the public might want to know but whether
they ought to know is another matter. Just after this series
ended, we were treated to series like Mad Men, which shows
frequent intimate couplings among the characters. West Wing
never gets past an occasional chaste kiss. The recent trend of
revealing intimate details of characters’ lives is disturbing
and puzzling. Why would a couple want their intimate moments on
display? They are intimate moments, something those two people
share between themselves. Unless they’re exhibitionists, why
would they want to put them out in the open? To prove to
themselves and others that they are not ashamed or inhibited?
OK, point made. Made in Mad Men. Made in The Wire. Made in
Treme. Made in many movies. Did the point need to be made? Most
older folks survived Henry Miller and other frankly explicit
works, long ago. We had Kerouac, Anais Nin, Masters and Johnson.
If you’ve witnessed a few explicit couplings, the chances are
you’ve pretty much covered that territory. Now could we move
on?
It is refreshing, after a diet of explicit movies and TV shows,
to find one that makes an attempt at preserving some dignity by
not invading bedrooms and bathrooms.
Some of the music could have been better. There is a magnificent
scene were Toby arranges a military funeral for a homeless vet
who came to his attention–a man who had waited 45 minutes for an
ambulance. This otherwise moving spectacle is marred by its
background music–the very syrupy and much-too-often-heard
“Little Drummer Boy.”
Season 3 ends with bits of music from a musical the President is
attending, War of the Roses, apparently all of Shakespeare’s
“Henry” plays set to music. The parts we hear make it sound
embarrassingly bad, almost as if someone has made a pathetic
attempt at imitating Les Misérables.
And one more tiny quibble. The President’s displays of erudition
can be so tiresome that his staff members make jokes about them.
They are also wrong sometimes, as when he mentions Beowulf as
originally in Middle English--when in fact Beowulf is in Old
English, a language more like German than English.
Seasons 4-7:
A personable, dynamic US President with an appealing wife and
children gets replaced by an even more personable and dynamic US
President with an equally appealing wife and children–this is
the visionary world given to us in West Wing as it unfolds a
little beyond the 8 years of the Bartlet Presidency.
Some couples are neatly paired off by the end, and President
Bartlet’s multiple sclerosis has remained conveniently offstage
throughout most of his two terms.
Lily Tomlin does an especially fine job as the President’s
secretary, and most of the acting is superb in the entire
series. The actress playing Commander Kate Harper, however,
seems miscast, or else the entire character should have been
different. In the first episodes where she appears she seems
much too young, sporting a ponytail and a fresh young face, to
have as much responsibility as she has. Later the ponytail is
replaced by a chignon, but she almost always looks more like a
fashion-magazine model than a person to be entrusted with the
most sensitive matters of state, involving the potential for
nuclear war.
And the diminutive actress who plays Annabeth, also in what
seems to be a responsible position, is less than credible,
mainly because of her very chirpy voice, which makes her seem
like a caricature of herself.
Near the end of the last season, we have appearances by Jon Bon
Jovi and Ben Affleck, involved in the campaign to elect Matt
Santos for President. This might be taken as chilling evidence
of the increasing importance of the US celebrity culture
although that isn’t the way it is spun in this series. It’s
positive, impressive, cool.
–It’s also a long way from the kind of thought and skill that
should be going into genuine statesmanship and the carving out
of international relations.
On balance, though, West Wing must have had a couple of very
important effects. For one thing, it demonstrates just how busy
and problem-ridden any US government scene probably is, while
showing us the very detailed attention that must always be
given to protocol.
Another positive effect of this show might have been to call
attention to multiple sclerosis as sometimes not necessarily
disabling–or as only moderately disabling. This corrective is
especially welcome at a time when the media have been full of
accounts of Jacqueline Du Pré, Richard Pryor, and Annette
Funicello–all of whom were much more severely affected than
President Bartlet.
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