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October 30, 2003
The West Wing goes south
by Bert Archer
Eye Weekly
The call's already been made. The West Wing has jumped the shark. Scott Feschuk spotted the fin in the Post on Oct. 27, about two weeks after the rest of us had noticed it, but a little more than a week, judging by the date at the top of this page, before any of us had come fully enough to terms with it to say it in print.
The West Wing belonged to a sub-subgenre of the subgenre of shows like Six Feet Under and The Sopranos that might be called Exceptionals, to the same sub-subgenre that shows like Boston Public do and Hill Street Blues and Buffy did. They're auteur shows, shows that rely on the personality and quality control of a single person to reach their respective heights.
So we were all expecting something to happen when we heard Aaron Sorkin was leaving the show at the end of last season. We all knew it had been good, and that it would probably suffer, but the beginning of the current season's shown that we didn't quite know how maverick its style was, and how easily and precipitously it could slide off, even in the hands of one of the creators of one of the Exceptionals' direct antecedents, ER.
Onto the specifics: the kidnapped Zoey Bartlet was found way too quickly, her rescue providing neither denouement, action, pathos or even catharsis. (In fact, she really ought to have been killed, and it's my little theory that Sorkin wanted to kill her off, and management's disagreement with this child-unfriendly move is what precipitated Sorkin's relatively abrupt departure.)
But worse, far worse: the dialogue got loose, lines began to whizz past each other without ever engaging, leaving ugly, sagging spaces between word, meaning and feeling that would not only have been anathema a season earlier, but possibly even itself the subject of some sharp verbal shootout. In fact, the very essence of West Wing dialogue has been compromised to such an extent that it might now be confused with, let's say, ER dialogue.
The most noticeable aspect of the dialogue degradation has been the disappearance of what people who did English degrees call in medias res and what everyone else call starting in the middle of things. Listen to this:
BARTLET: Nancy's in her office. There are some calls I asked her to make.
LEO: I've told the President about the parachute.
FITZWALLACE: Tommy, do they even make parachutes in Israel? They're saying it's an Israeli-made parachute.
TOMMY: They make 'em. They're good ones.
BARTLET: Listen, I know we're here for a serious purpose, for a sober purpose, but I wanted to say I've never been a part of a street gang before, and that's basically what we are -- a pretty well-financed one -- but anyway, I wanted to say it feels good, and I think when we're done with this meeting, I think we should go out and get girls, and I don't know, maybe knock over a fruit stand or something.
That's the opening scene for an episode last season called "College Kids." The first line seems to be the end of some other conversation we're not privy to. The second is a reference to some other off-stage business (which, in this case, is not elucidated by anything else in this scene). President Bartlet's last speech here is not only effectively funny, but reproduces, in a stylized sort of way, a realistic bathos that enters into even the highest-stakes situations. The effect is what McLuhan might have called an extremely cool audience engagement in a beautifully realized sense of important office work at the centre of the universe.
When The West Wing was first cast, the president was meant to be mostly off-camera, his importance and power heightened by his absence, in the same way as Stephen King insists the monster in the closet is always scarier than the one standing in front of you. Martin Sheen was really good, though, and so the plan shifted, but Sorkin never forgot that this was an office drama, and that its attraction was the importance of the business at hand, and the enormous intelligence, knowledgeability, quick wit and articulacy of the office staff. Personal lives, therefore, meant little, and forays into them, like CJ's visit with her father or Toby's ex-wife-and-twins subplot, were the exceptions rather than the rule, serving mostly to heighten the sense of the characters' performance of their jobs.
But now, Toby's twins are front-and-centre, as is the Bartlets' marital difficulties stemming from the kidnapping, and CJ's increasing -- and increasingly incredible -- disillusionment with politics at their highest level.
The West Wing under new management is trying to transform a workplace drama into a slightly soap-operatic emotional one. Both these forms can work well, but it's idiotic to try to change one into another (the only time this sort of thing has ever worked, as far as I can tell, is the mid-run shift of M*A*S*H from slapstick to emotionally resonant and issue-based sitcom). And to do it as ham-handedly as The West Wing folks are can only mean it's a premeditated attempt to turn critical plaudits into Nielsen numbers by toning down the vocab and turning the heart-lights to high-beam. Is that a goose I smell roasting? BERT ARCHER
Posted by Jo at October 30, 2003 04:56 PM