The West Wing
Aug. 18th, 2014 05:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerSo I'm watching season five of The West Wing. I just re-read the book of selected scripts from seasons three and four, and after reading the huge cliffhanger on which season four ended, I had to watch the episodes in which it was resolved, and I just went on from there.
I don't know if I judge post-Sorkin WW too harshly. I mean, yes, it's like watching ballet with the sound off, seeing the characters he created but not hearing the music of his dialogue, but my raised expectations should not bias my judgment of what that fine cast and crew did once he was gone. I'm more than halfway through the season now and I'm still not sure.
The last three seasons of WW are a story of failure. Right from the outset, the world into which we look is different; Bartlet and his team are smaller, the enemies larger, the many defeats a foregone conclusion, the few victories won at huge cost. Before there was hope for real change; now there is just getting through the days, hoping to survive. It's like the difference between the dream and the reality of Obama's presidency. And maybe that's the clue.
I always wanted WW to take off into the fantasy it aspired to be in those early days, to show what could happen if a good man became president, not what would happen. I wanted Bartlet's America to become all that America could be in the world. I'm not talking rainbows and unicorns, I'm talking about what could happen if democracy could really become a set of tools for making people's lives better, instead of a dismal compromise. I think that's what fiction is for; to show us how life could be, not how it is. We already know how it is.
The producers and writers, after Sorkin left, opted not to do that. And I think that's a shame.
Sometimes, on my more tinfoil hat days, I think the knife went in while Sorkin was still there, when Bartlet was railroaded into a morally abhorrent action that the character I'd come to know would never even have considered for a moment; and then I think that the impetus behind the knife may have come from outside, from a real-world regime which saw a fictional president's approval ratings justly outstripping those of the actual occupant of the White House at the time. I'm probably wrong, as most paranoid conspiracy nuts are...but I'll never know one way or the other, and I'm not American so it doesn't matter what I think.
I'll finish season five and maybe watch season six; I don't have the last one, but that's okay because I'm not interested in what happened after Bartlet. I watched enough of it when it was on telly to know how it ends; exactly where it began.
Aaron Sorkin created a magnificent ensemble of characters and made me love each and every one of them, and he put them through hell and made me forgive him for doing it. The least, the very least, he or his successors could have done, in my opinion, was allow their effort, their suffering, to be in some measure rewarded; to let them fulfil even a few of the hopes and dreams with which they embarked on their journey.
They didn't. And I think that's a shame.
I don't know if I judge post-Sorkin WW too harshly. I mean, yes, it's like watching ballet with the sound off, seeing the characters he created but not hearing the music of his dialogue, but my raised expectations should not bias my judgment of what that fine cast and crew did once he was gone. I'm more than halfway through the season now and I'm still not sure.
The last three seasons of WW are a story of failure. Right from the outset, the world into which we look is different; Bartlet and his team are smaller, the enemies larger, the many defeats a foregone conclusion, the few victories won at huge cost. Before there was hope for real change; now there is just getting through the days, hoping to survive. It's like the difference between the dream and the reality of Obama's presidency. And maybe that's the clue.
I always wanted WW to take off into the fantasy it aspired to be in those early days, to show what could happen if a good man became president, not what would happen. I wanted Bartlet's America to become all that America could be in the world. I'm not talking rainbows and unicorns, I'm talking about what could happen if democracy could really become a set of tools for making people's lives better, instead of a dismal compromise. I think that's what fiction is for; to show us how life could be, not how it is. We already know how it is.
The producers and writers, after Sorkin left, opted not to do that. And I think that's a shame.
Sometimes, on my more tinfoil hat days, I think the knife went in while Sorkin was still there, when Bartlet was railroaded into a morally abhorrent action that the character I'd come to know would never even have considered for a moment; and then I think that the impetus behind the knife may have come from outside, from a real-world regime which saw a fictional president's approval ratings justly outstripping those of the actual occupant of the White House at the time. I'm probably wrong, as most paranoid conspiracy nuts are...but I'll never know one way or the other, and I'm not American so it doesn't matter what I think.
I'll finish season five and maybe watch season six; I don't have the last one, but that's okay because I'm not interested in what happened after Bartlet. I watched enough of it when it was on telly to know how it ends; exactly where it began.
Aaron Sorkin created a magnificent ensemble of characters and made me love each and every one of them, and he put them through hell and made me forgive him for doing it. The least, the very least, he or his successors could have done, in my opinion, was allow their effort, their suffering, to be in some measure rewarded; to let them fulfil even a few of the hopes and dreams with which they embarked on their journey.
They didn't. And I think that's a shame.