Bartlet4America News Archive

'West Wing' fans: Who needs Sam?

The Cleveland Plain Dealer

There are two kinds of women who love "The West Wing": Sam women and Josh women.

Charlie's too young, Toby's too prickly, and Leo doesn't seem to do anything but nod his head once and growl, "Right."

However, media analysts swear that Sam, and only Sam, played by Rob Lowe, is why women in my demographic group tune into "West Wing." They insist we are now mourning Lowe's departure like a woman whose man done did her wrong and then flicked his cigarette at her before dumping her at the Greyhound bus station.

Sam, spam. It's us Josh women of the world who will keep "West Wing" afloat long after Rob Lowe discovers he has no career to go back to.

Here's some background for those of you who don't watch "The West Wing," which is a shame because it's a great way to learn how to engage in pithy, life-altering dialogue while walking through an endless string of hallways.

Lowe is leaving because they won't raise his $70,000-per-episode salary to match President Martin Sheen's $300,000. (If Martin Sheen isn't really our president, please don't tell me because it's the only way I sleep at night.)

Lowe plays Sam Seaborn, deputy communications director at the White House. Bradley Whitford is Josh Lyman, deputy chief of staff.

Sam is button-down and gorgeous, but his face is always awash in angst because, well, why, really? I don't get it. Women drop at his feet like pine cones from a rotting evergreen. Even the hooker he slept with was a law student. (Only the best for Sam.)

He gets to write the State of the Union address; he has terrific hair, which you know smells like strawberries; and just last week, the president told him, "Sam, someday, you're going to be president."

What did Sam do? He sighed.

I am not a Sam kind of woman. In fact, a Sam would never even look at me unless he wanted someone to toss his carry-on bag in the overhead compartment. I don't mind, really. I'm too insecure to date someone who is prettier than I am, and I'd want to pull that knot on his rep tie a little too tight if I were on the receiving end of one of his chest-pounding diatribes.

"I'm a magna cum laude graduate of Princeton and editor of the Duke Law Review," he says in one episode. "Tell her I've worked for congressmen and D-triple-C. I have seven years at Gage Whitney, and for the last four I've served as deputy communications director and senior counsel."

Oh-kaaaay then.

Josh, on the other hand, is so openly neurotic that he's almost an honorary girlfriend. One look at his impish what-did-I-do-now grin, and we women know: He needs us.

He trips over his words and the corner of his desk. His receding hairline resembles the shoreline of the New York Finger Lakes, but he doesn't hide it, which real women love. No sissy shampoo for Josh, either. I imagine him yelling from the shower, "Honey, we're out of Prell. Could you hand me the dishwashing detergent?" (Down, goose bumps, down.)

Josh is smart, but he's clueless, too, in that cute way. "I studied a lot in school," he says. "I studied hard in high school and at Harvard and in law school. My IQ doesn't break the bank, and I wanted to do this so I studied all the time. And I missed something . . . I never learned what you do after you think you like somebody . . . what you do next."

Oooooohhhhhhh.

Makes you just wanna pull his confused little head into your bosom and give it a big hug, which you could never do with Sam because he would immediately pull back and say, "Uh, uh, uh, not the hair. Never. Touch. The hair."

We've known since last spring that Sam is leaving. But we didn't know when. Week after week, month after month, we waited, we watched, we wondered. That is so Sam, and so not how Josh would handle it.

Josh would just stick his face outside the shower curtain, his head brimming with the suds of Lemon Fresh Joy, and say, "Hey, uh, the-ah, the show? I'm leavin' it, 'kay?"

And then he'd slide on a bar of soap and land with a thwump.

Oooooohhhhhhh.

AFI AWARDS 2002

Distinguished AFI Juries Select Ten Most Outstanding Motion Pictures and Television Programs of the Year
LOS ANGELES, December 16, 2002–The American Film Institute (AFI) today announced the official selections of AFI AWARDS 2002, AFI’s almanac which records the year’s most outstanding achievements in film and television as well as significant moments in the world of the moving image.The selections were made through AFI’s unique jury process in which one chair, three scholars, three artists, three critics and three AFI Trustees discuss, debate and determine the most outstanding achievements of the year and provide a rationale for each selection.Two AFI Juries–one for motion pictures and one for television–convened at the Park Hyatt Hotel in Los Angeles, California for two days of deliberation. The jurors have remained confidential until today. (Complete list attached.)AFI AWARDS 2002 is the only form of national recognition that honors the film and television creative ensemble as a whole–those people in front of and behind the camera–acknowledging the collaborative nature of film and television."We salute the collaborative team of artists that created these American landmarks and their place in our rich, cultural legacy," commented Jean Picker Firstenberg, AFI Director and CEO.
AFI will honor the creative ensembles for each of the honorees at a luncheon on January 16, 2003 at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles, California.

THE West Wing
CREATIVE ENSEMBLE:
CREATOR Aaron Sorkin
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER Aaron Sorkin, Thomas Schlamme, John Wells
CO-EXECUTIVE PRODUCER Alex Graves, Kevin Falls, Christopher Misiano
PRODUCER Paul Redford, Kristin Harms, Neal Ahern, Jr., Llewellyn Wells
ASSOCIATE PRODUCER Mindy Kanaskie, Patrick Ward
PRINCIPAL CAST Rob Lowe, Stockard Channing, Dulé Hill, Allison Janney, Janel Moloney, Richard Schiff, John Spencer, Bradley Whitford, Martin Sheen
DIRECTOR Christopher Misiano
WRITER Aaron Sorkin
EDITOR Russell Denove
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY Thomas Del Ruth
PRODUCTION DESIGNER Kenneth Hardy
COMPOSER W.G. Snuffy Walden
RATIONALE: Week after week, THE WEST WING projects a heroism that America yearns for in its political system. Heightened by its extraordinary use of language, THE WEST WING puts American civic life in a dramatic context, placing the White House in the national conversation and often bringing pertinent global issues to the watercooler on mornings after a broadcast.

Malina Will 'Wing' Regular Gig

By Josef Adalian
Reuters

HOLLYWOOD (Variety) - "Sports Night" alum Joshua Malina is reuniting with scribe Aaron Sorkin, joining the cast of "The West Wing" as a series regular.

Malina has had a recurring role on the NBC drama this year, appearing in a handful of episodes. He plays Will Bailey, a campaign manager who ends up taking a job as a speechwriter in the White House.

"Josh won the part fair and square in a Texas Hold 'Em tournament," Sorkin said.

Other "West Wing" cast members have been supportive of Malina's addition to the ensemble, he added.

"John Spencer just walked over to me on a break from shooting a scene with him and said, 'We're firing on all cylinders,"' the scribe said. "And during rehearsal, the light may have been funny, but we thought we saw Richard Schiff smile."

For his part, Malina said working with Sorkin once more "couldn't be better."

"This is essentially my dream job," he told Daily Variety. "If I had to pick a role on TV to play, having Aaron create one for me is the ultimate. I'm reveling in the fact that something that looked great (as an idea) actually came to pass."

In addition to playing Jeremy Goodwin on Sorkin's critically hailed but short-lived "Sports Night," Malina appeared in both the stage production and feature adaptation of Sorkin's "A Few Good Men" as well as the scribe's feature "The American President." Other small-screen credits include "From the Earth to the Moon," "The Larry Sanders Show" and "Tracey Takes On."

On the feature side, Malina will next be seen in helmer Bruno Barreto's "A View From the Top," which stars Gwyneth Paltrow.

One Nation Under Fox

Earnest politics makes for bad TV—which is why the scrappy, outsider, underdog approach championed by Fox News has made it the new psychic heart of the Republican Party.

By Michael Wolff
New York Magazine

If modern politics is about message, about media opportunities, about controlling the news cycle, then what’s the effect of having the fastest-growing news organization in the nation on your side?
But before exploring the reaches of Fox’s power and influence, let’s analyze, at the other end of the sensibility spectrum, The West Wing, which, like the Democrats, fell apart this autumn.

Here’s the question: Did The West Wing fall apart because the liberals were falling apart, or vice versa?

The show’s premise has been that restless, passionate single people in the White House—more or less reflecting a version of the Clinton White House, or, really, a George Stephanopoulos White House—were something that a good part of the country (demonstrably single, and arguably restless and passionate) could identify with.

So have we stopped identifying—as ratings suggest we have—because of a change in national circumstances? Has being single, for instance, gone from being a semi-heroic condition to being just a depressing one? Is it that one person’s problems don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world?

Or are the Republicans in power and The West Wing sinking because of bad writing on the part of liberals?

Surely it has occurred to many people that The West Wing may have lost a certain jazz because creator Aaron Sorkin went into rehab and now, on the straight and narrow, is grasping at a sober and virtuous literalness (which might support the Fox view that liberalism works only for the morally lax).

Early this season, there was an incident in the show—habit keeps me watching—in which the single young people in the Bartlet White House got all restless and passionate about going to a Rock the Vote party. C.J., the press secretary, normally intense and ironic, was suddenly in would-be youth garb, on a stage exhorting the young and faithful to make their vote count. Oy.

Many people in rehab, and in defeat, get religion—great earnestness meets saccharine beliefs. (I’m on seemingly hundreds of liberal mailing lists—it’s a tsunami of tedious virtue.) And many people think the Democrats need even more religion. “We need to be partisans!” President Bartlet exhorted the West Wing faithful on a recent episode.

This is neither good politics nor good writing. Actually, let me formulate here a new principle of politics: Good politics is about good writing.

Of course, the Republicans used to have their own problems with religion and with literalness (and, not least of all, dedicated humorlessness). But they were saved from themselves, I believe, by Fox News, which has become the new psychic heart of the Republican Party—taking over from the Christian Right.
Here’s the biggest problem politics has today: All but an exceptional few politicians suck at making, or understanding, media. This is a surprise, because the only thing politicians want to do is get on TV. That’s their basic job. But they’re talentless. They’re zeros. The media consultants they hire to help them are mostly hacks and rejects, too. Political ads? Sheesh. It’s a form that has not advanced in twenty years. Of course, professional Republicans and right-wing people are usually no more capable than the Democrats and sappy liberals of creating a compelling and credible story line.

But then there’s Roger Ailes.

There’s something incredibly creepy about Ailes. He looks the way you imagine the man behind the curtain looking: That is, he doesn’t care about how he looks (which is, as it happens, gray and corpulent). He understands it’s all manipulation.

When he got found out giving the president ex parte advice on handling the war, he didn’t for a second whinge or show remorse. Let others pretend—he’s too old and too good at his job to start making believe the world works any other way than the way it works. The rap on Ailes is, of course, that he’s a hopeless partisan, a true believer, a Republican agent. But that deeply misses the point. Ailes is a television guy. He’s been doing television practically as long as anyone. His digressions into politics (for Nixon and for Reagan) have always been more about television craft than about Republican craft. His is the singular obsession of any television guy: to stay on the air.

Fox really isn’t in the service of the Republicans. Ailes can say this baldly and confidently. (The Republicans, more and more, follow the Fox line.) Fox isn’t in any conventional sense ideological media. It’s just that being anti-Democrat, anti-Clinton, anti-yuppie, anti-wonk turns out to be great television. Great ratings make for convenient ideology.

Now, professional political people, while surely corrupt and cynical, are also sentimentalists: They believe everybody else is as interested in politics as they are. A good television guy, who has to command the attention of the public, would never make that mistake.
The West Wing, in its original, surprising incarnation, was not at all about politics. It was a show about an office that happened to be the White House. It was the basic joke, even—working in the White House was not really different from working any other place. Then, in an unconscious shift, it became not only about the White House but about some schmaltzy, patently phony version of the White House.

Similarly, Fox is not really about politics (CNN, with its antiseptic beltway p.o.v., is arguably more about politics than Fox). It certainly isn’t arguing a consistent right-wing case. Rather, it’s about having a chip on your shoulder; it’s about us versus them, insiders versus outsiders, phonies versus non-phonies, and, in a clever piece of postmodernism, established media against insurgent media.

Perhaps most interesting, it’s about language, or expressiveness—which politics has not been about in a long time (modern politics is the opposite of expressiveness). Fox has cultivated a fast-talking garrulousness. Traditional news is rendered slowly, at a deadly, fatherly pace. Fox gunned the engine. This was a West Wing signature, too, before it got gummy—automatic-fire patois. Cable talk.

Fox, too, is about arguing—rather than the argument. It’s a Jesuit thing. Thesis. Antithesis.

In the conventional-wisdom swamp of television, this passes for serious counter-programming.

It’s the tweak.

This is really the Fox narrative device.

The entire presentation is about tweaking Democrats and boomer culture.

The Fox message is not about proving its own virtue, or the virtue of aging Republicans (except, of course, for Ronald Reagan), or even of the Bushes, but about ridiculing the virtues of Democrats and their yuppie partisans.

Pull their strings.

Push their buttons.

Build the straw man, knock it down. Night after night.

Here’s the way not to get labeled a phony: Accuse the other guy of being one.

Always attack, never defend.

And have fun doing it.

A media nation demands great media showmanship. What’s more, in a media nation, it’s logical to make the media the main issue. The most audacious part of the Fox story line—the point that drives liberals the craziest—is that Fox is the antidote to massive media bias. And that the Fox people resolutely stick to this story. The wink is very important in television (we weren’t really taking The Bachelor seriously).

Which brings us to what may be the central political conundrum of the era: Why do conservatives make better media than liberals? Fox is, after all, just the further incarnation of a successful generation of conservative radio provocateurs.

There aren’t really even any liberal contenders except for Paul Krugman and Michael Moore. And Krugman’s is a victim’s voice. It assumes a kind of emasculation—conservatives are doing things to him and he’s helpless. As for Moore, it’s comedy and pretty scary narcissism—he’s satisfied being just an entertainer. And never mind Phil Donahue, MSNBC’s disastrous liberal counter-programming gambit.

No, nobody who’s seriously interested in ratings and buzz wants liberals on television or even near an op-ed page. Indeed, CNBC has gone to an almost fully conservative prime-time schedule.

Part of the explanation of the conservative-media success is that in a liberal nation, they have had to develop a more compelling and subversive story line. They’ve fully capitalized on the outsider, tough-talking, Cassandra thing. Accordingly, while the country remains unenthusiastic about Republican policies, as the Times reported last week, Republicans get positive ratings (go figure).

And a part of this is the dancing-dog advantage. Conservatives have been hired by the heretofore liberal media to be, precisely, conservatives—hyperconservatives, even; eager exaggerations (wink). Whereas, when liberalish people are hired by liberalish media organizations, the issue is to be neutral, unliberal. The main challenge for George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week is never to let on that he once worked for the Democrats.

But most of all, it’s an understanding-the-media point, which if you’re building a media career—exactly what all the conservatives tend to be doing—you get. But which if, like many liberals, you see yourself as having a higher calling than just a media career, you may not get.

We can talk about politics as a metaphor for something else, as Fox does, and as The West Wing was doing—politics as a metaphor for working too hard, living in your office, being too involved with your co-workers. (Likewise, there’s Ann Coulter, who really uses politics to talk about some S&M thing.)

But what we can’t do is talk about politics for its own sake. It’s way too boring. It’s too disconnected—it’s too Al Gore. And you can’t say, as almost all liberals do, “It’s boring, but it’s important.” That would be bad writing. (It’s why George Bush’s patent deficiency in talking about policy has not been so great a liability.) As opposed to the Fox writing style, which is to thrust and parry and dump on Clinton and thump a liberal snob or egghead when things get dull.

So the Republicans have not only a war that walks the walk but a network that talks the talk. What the WB or MTV does for a certain demographic, that’s what Fox does. This is big.

Celebrities Endorse Letter Asking Bush To Avoid War

More Than 100 Entertainers Sign Document
Associated Press

LOS ANGELES -- Part of Hollywood has told Washington to tone down its hostility toward Iraq.

Celebrity activists Martin Sheen, Mike Farrell and Tony Shalhoub were among nearly a dozen performers gathered Tuesday to publicize a letter urging President Bush to avoid a pre-emptive invasion of the Middle Eastern nation.
More than 100 entertainers signed the document, which stated that a war with Iraq will "increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks, damage the economy and undermine our moral standing in the world."

"This notion of pre-emptive war is setting a precedent ... and we must ask ourselves, where does this end?" said Shalhoub, star of the ABC detective show "Monk." "Where is the next pre-emptive strike?"

"Steal This Movie" director Robert Greenwald and Farrell assembled the signatories mainly by e-mail over the course of several weeks.

Farrell said the Hollywood community was speaking out to show average citizens that it is OK to voice dissent. He also said he did not believe that Bush has proven Iraq is a danger to America.

"It is inappropriate for the administration to trump up a case in which we are ballyhooed into war," Farrell said.

Among those signing the letter were Academy Award winners Kim Basinger, Helen Hunt, Olympia Dukakis, Susan Sarandon and director Jonathan Demme.

Other names included former "X-Files" stars Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny; "The West Wing" stars Martin Sheen, Janel Moloney, Bradley Whitford and Lily Tomlin; "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" actors Marg Helgenberger and Robert David Hall; and "Ocean's 11" co-stars Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Elliott Gould and Carl Reiner.

R.E.M. performers Michael Stipe, Peter Buck and Mike Mills joined fellow musicians Peter Yarrow and Bonnie Raitt.

Sheen, who plays a United States president on "The West Wing," said he believed Bush was eager to go to war with Iraq because he wanted to settle a personal score with Saddam Hussein.

Bush's father, President George H.W. Bush, ended Saddam's invasion of Kuwait but did not eliminate the dictator in the 1990s Gulf War.

"I think he'd like to hand his father Saddam Hussein's head and win his approval for what happened after the Gulf War. That's my own personal opinion -- I don't know if that's true. I hope it's not, but I suspect it is," Sheen said.

Asked why the government should care about the feelings of Hollywood actors, Sheen said: "I think the president should care about all citizens."

Bush has threatened military force against Saddam, saying the dictator has amassed weapons of mass destruction that pose a danger to the United States.
United Nations weapons inspectors are searching the Middle Eastern country for such devices but have turned up little so far.