« Footballs won't fly on 'West Wing' | Main | Disloyalty oaths »
October 30, 2002
Executive Decision
By Paul Droesch
TVGuide.com
Aaron Sorkin hasn't had a good fall. Okay, he won another Best Drama Series Emmy in September (and, okay, it was for the third year in a row). But that was before the season started. Lately, it seems, it has been nothing but falling ratings and sniping critics. Last week, The New York Times's Caryn James even used TV's dreaded "s"-word — "shark" (as in jumping one) — in her sorrowful assessment of The West Wing's season thus far.
The opener certainly was silly (picaresque, but silly): It's hard to imagine top White House aides stranded by the side of a cornfield or going the wrong way on a train. And change the background music (and maybe the lighting) and the quirky heartland characters Toby, Josh and Donna kept encountering could have been on Twin Peaks.
On the plus side, Bartlet (Martin Sheen) has held it together, and the Qumari-assassination storyline is a more plausible test of presidential character than last season's overheated MS crisis. But oddball new secretary Debbie Fiderer is just too much of an oddball (though Lily Tomlin comes close at times to pulling it off). And Toby (Richard Schiff) has been such a downer it's no wonder that he's not allowed in the president's sight on days when Bartlet's blood pressure's up.
Sorkin's giving Toby a love life — his ex-wife, a liberal Democratic congresswoman played by Kathleen York, is back in the picture, if not completely back in his life — and that might prove to lighten him up a bit. But it's hard to imagine a sexy Toby (sexy Toby?) as a response to the surprisingly stiff competition that The West Wing has faced from ABC's The Bachelor this fall. (It's harder to imagine disgruntled West Wing fans switching to The Bachelor, but stranger things have happened.) Besides, it's not as though the West Wingers have taken chastity vows. Next week, for instance, Christian Slater signs on for a guest stint as a love interest for Donna (Janel Moloney).
But if Sorkin wanted to seriously sex things up, he would have written a romantic storyline for Rob Lowe, the show's resident hunk. After the first season, though, Lowe's Sam Seaborn has been noticeably celibate (although his former fiancée has turned up from time to time), and now the raise-deprived Lowe is on the way out, so Sorkin must write Sam out. That process could begin to unfold tonight.
Sam's heading out to Orange County, Calif., where he happens to be from, to persuade the campaign manager of a recently deceased Democratic congressional candidate to stop campaigning because it's an embarrassment to the national party. But the campaign manager (played by Joshua Malina, the nerdy Jeremy on Sorkin's Sports Night) is no dummy, and the physically dead candidate might not be so dead politically. Could there be a campaign in Sam's future?
There is a campaign in The West Wing's present, although not so you'd notice that much. True, a Bartlet loss would end the series. That won't happen, and Sorkin has wisely realized that there's no point in dramatizing something that's not dramatic. So he has taken sidelong glances at the race, using it mostly as a soapbox for political issues, and using Bartlet's opponent, the gravitas-challenged "Bobby" Ritchie (James Brolin), as a Republican punching bag.
Bartlet (Martin Sheen) gets the chance to take plenty of shots at him tonight, when the two square off in their only campaign debate. It's the episode's centerpiece, but it, too, is treated in a sidelong manner (though Sorkin definitely imparts its flavor). More directly treated is the way debates are "spinned" by the two sides, and this gives Sorkin not only another opportunity to be a policy wonk (the subject: trade with China), it opens up another guest spot for Hal Holbrook as the enjoyably cantankerous State Department veteran Albie Duncan, who's a wary Bartlet advocate.
Next week: the election. Bartlet's up in the polls but down in the ratings. It's far too early to call him a lame duck, but the presidency is an office that has term limits.
Posted by MorganG at October 30, 2002 05:45 PM