Bartlet4America News Archive

‘West Wing’ dialogue is too racy

By D.L. Stewart
Dayton Daily News

No matter how many Emmys it wins, I just can’t understand The West Wing.

I don’t mean to sound disloyal. Half the cast, after all, is from Dayton, and if we don’t support them, eventually North Carolina will claim they were born there and it will put Martin Sheen’s picture on its license plates.

Nor do I want to appear ungrateful. My wife and I had a chance to visit the set when cast members were taping the program a few years ago, and all the stars were as gracious to us as they could possibly be.

And I certainly hope this won’t upset anybody’s parents. The fathers of Rob Lowe and Allison Janney still live here and are acquaintances of ours, although they probably would not want to be identified as friends of mine.

But, in spite of all those connections, I still can’t understand The West Wing.

I’m not saying the story lines are too complicated for me to follow. I’m not questioning all the awards the program receives, either.

What I’m saying is that I can’t understand The West Wing.

Literally.

Every Wednesday at 9 p.m. my wife and I sit down in front of the television to watch the show. And every Wednesday by 9:10 we’re looking at each other and asking, “What’d they say?”

Just about the only word we consistently can make out is “yeah.” Which, fortunately, constitutes about 50 percent of the script. I’ve heard rap songs that were easier for me to understand.

I’ll be the first to admit that my hearing is not as good as it once was. So when The West Wing comes on, I turn up the volume until the bar at the bottom of the screen is all the way to the right. But it doesn’t help. I still can’t guess what they’re saying.

Besides, it’s not just me. My wife has trouble figuring out what the characters are saying, too. And she can hear me twist the top off a bottle of Bud Light from three rooms away.

My wife thought maybe it was because the actors aren’t always facing the cameras when they deliver their dialogue. So, during a commercial one week, I switched from The West Wing to a baseball game. Not only could I understand the play-by-play announcer, who was never on camera, I could make out what the hot dog vendors in the bleachers were saying.

Another thought I had was that maybe the speakers in our television are going bad. But we have five sets in our house and The West Wing dialogue is unintelligible on all of them.

The biggest problem, I think, is the speed of the dialogue. The program’s creators apparently believe the show will have a more authentic feel if the lines are delivered at twice the speed of sound. In fact, I have an acquaintance who says all government workers talk that fast. I don’t know if that's true. One of my sons is a government worker in Washington, D.C., and I can understand him. Or, at least, as much as I ever could.

All I can guess is that the producers have intentionally made The West Wing’s dialogue impossible for my wife and me to follow due to the fear shared by all network programs that someone over the age of 30 might tune in.

So it could be that the only solution for us will be to turn on the closed captioning.

As soon as we finish our speed-reading class.