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November 02, 2004
Rethinking 'West Wing'
by Ellen Gray
Philadelphia Daily News
I WOKE UP yesterday to find someone had removed the Bush-Cheney signs from my street.
Can't say I missed them, but I wouldn't have minded seeing the Kerry-Edwards signs go, too.
Whether or not you believe "good fences make good neighbors," it's unlikely dueling lawn signs have the same effect.
And as I've been reminding myself for weeks now, signs or no, I already have good neighbors.
I think that's called perspective.
Whatever happens today, by tomorrow many of us will need a little perspective.
If our candidate loses, we'll need to remind ourselves of all the mediocre-to-bad presidents this country has already survived.
If he wins, we'll need to remember that even the best-qualified candidates have been known to fall short, that the federal government is a complicated machine and the presidency only one branch of it.
I've been finding some perspective lately in, of all places, the third-season DVD of "The West Wing," which goes on sale today.
I say "of all places" because for me, the 2001-02 season was the one where the wheels started to come off the wagon.
Beginning with the preachy, ill-considered "Isaac and Ishmael" - in which creator Aaron Sorkin attempted to address the events of Sept. 11 without mentioning them directly or linking that episode to the rest of the series - and ending with the shooting death of C.J.'s Secret Service agent/love interest, it felt at the time like one long train wreck.
Which, oddly enough, is not how it plays on DVD.
Oh, "Isaac and Ishmael" is still a mistake. Didn't like it then, don't like it now.
And I continue to find the too-convenient convenience-store demise of Mark Harmon's character as believable, as, say, the idea that the president's chief of staff could fall in the forest of Camp David and no one in the Secret Service hear it.
But the rest of the season, viewed without commercial breaks or, more importantly, the long stretches created by reruns and NBC pre-emptions, is full of good stuff. There are discussions of wonky issues you probably haven't heard mentioned much, if at all, in this year's election campaigns - war crimes, Indian reparations, the obsolescence of the Lincoln penny - as well as some, like our dependence on foreign oil and the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia, that feel all too current.
It's better than I remember it being at the time.
And whatever happens today, I hope that a few years from now, I'll see all this, too, more clearly than I do now.
Posted by Jo at November 2, 2004 06:39 AM