Right afterwards I tuned to another vision of the American West, in this case the Western part of the White House where the staffers sit, and played the final West Wing episode off the TiVo. I've always been a spotty viewer, usually tuning in for the beginnings and ends of seasons, and had obviously saved this one for a month or so since it aired.
There's no doubting it's one of the great shows of all time, celebrating with many warts and some requisite melodrama service to our great nation at the highest level of our democratic government. Casting Martin Sheen was a stroke of brilliance, and his leadership through decision-making is always, as I've written about Kirk on Star Trek, at the core of the most major and compelling conflicts.
So why not be a completist? It's a little wariness at the Liberal wish-fufillment aspect of the show, which on one hand provides a startling and instructive contrast with the one we're stuck with -- perhaps the lessons of President Josiah "Jed " Bartlet will be of use to a future and more circumspect real world President -- but which I worry blinds the eye to the actual horrorshow that's going on, an all too comforting fantasy that might in the end soften the fighting sense needed, say, for the fast-approaching autumn blood-battle.
In that realpolitik sense the American construct of Deadwood is maybe more to my taste, American fighting it out in the mid-street mud, mano-a-mano, dirty and to mortal conclusion.
But what The West Wing provides in this final episode is powerful closure, seven years in the making, a hell of a lot of sweep.
This is a closure where one where real life loss, the death before the last episodes were filmed, of series anchor John Spencer as Leo McGarry, Bartlet's Chief of Staff and incoming President Santos' VP running mate, adds unassailable heft to the story and performances.
The show's staff writers have now acknowledged that the GOP candidate, Alan Alda as Senator Arnold Vinick, was originally scripted to win the election, but when Spencer died last December they decided that the double-dip tragedy of Santos (Jimmy Smits) having his running mate die and also lose the election wouldn't work for the audience dramatically, or maybe be too much of a crushing blow to bring down the curtain on.
I like the look inside the workings of the White House and the humanizing of the details. I guess I'm glad it was a Democrat they portrayed, certainly the kind I'd like to see, someone with wisdom but humility, someone who cares for common folks but is respected by heads of state, someone who know great literature but can quote chapter and verse from the Bible, someone with the greatest grasp of diplomacy but without fear using -- prudently but unequivocally -- our military might.
The last moments of the series has a dramatic resonation back to the moment Leo McGarry proposed to Jed Bartlet that he run for President. Then when asked by his wife, the now First Lady emeritus (Stockard Channing), what he is thinking about, Bartlet answers as he gazes out the window of Air Force I for the last time, "Tomorrow."
Here's to November, baby.
2 comments:
West Wing's feeble attempt to address 9/11 killed the show for me.
In the episode one of the staffers explains terrorism to a group of students who are stranded in the White House by a security lockdown after the attack. It's painfully obvious that the students are meant to act as surrogates for an American public stunned and confused by the events. A public, I'm led to beleive from the remedial and pandering nature of epidsode's discussion, that the writers and producers of the show must believe are ill-informed, slack-jawed morons.
Maybe they are, but that's not a group I care to be a part of.
Ah, that's interesting as that was one of the rare episodes I watched. I was a lot more forgiving in the wake of 9/11, as the enormity of the event put them in a bind peculiar to that show. In a sense, West Wing is sci-fi, i.e. an alternate reality contemporaneous to and parallelling ours. So onr of the oddities of that episode was stepping out of the fictional universe without atomizing it. Not an easy task, given the circumstances.
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