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October 27, 2005
Support for presidential dramas just doesn't add up
By Matthew Gilbert
Boston Globe
Look now, or you'll miss the fact that ''The West Wing" may be tumbling into the electronic dumpster.
Since NBC moved TV's most politically complex drama to Sunday nights at 8, its ratings have plummeted -- this despite a juicy White House leak plot with strong parallels to the Valerie Plame case. Now competing with ''Cold Case" and ''Extreme Makeover: Home Edition," the series has suffered a 30 percent decline in viewers from last season. Meanwhile, Geena Davis's ''Commander in Chief," ABC's simplistic ''West Wing" knockoff, has become an instant Nielsen Top 10 hit.
Go figure.
Not long ago, the crash of ''The West Wing" might have merited an indifferent shrug. So brilliantly charged in its early days, the drama underwent serious creative lows, both from creator Aaron Sorkin's excessive idealism and braininess and then from replacement producer John Wells's ill-advised character futzing. All the smarty-pants talk could be mind-numbing, despite the steadicam struts; and all the character nobility could be cringingly all-for-one-and-one-for-all. How about a few scoops of deep-seated cynicism on that pie in the sky?
But recently ''The West Wing" has reemerged creatively as a sharp epic about campaign chess gaming, with a fierce presidential contest between Alan Alda's liberal Republican and Jimmy Smits's unpolished Democrat. Now in its seventh season, the show is also profiling a two-term presidency as it awkwardly disbands. And it has cleverly enacted a timely plot about a White House leak to a now-jailed New York Times reporter.
Some longtime ''West Wing" watchers were disappointed that Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff) was responsible for the leak, and not someone more flagrantly villainous. But it was more interesting to see the grim but loyal face of ''The West Wing" exposed for all his arrogance. With an almost violent suddenness, Allison Janney's C.J. Cregg stops talking to him, he is sequestered by lawyers, and Martin Sheen's Jed Bartlet refuses to offer even a morsel of support. In a scene on Sunday that played like a funeral for the show's residual giddy idealism, Bartlet coldly refuses to acknowledge any of Toby's moral reasoning for leaking information. He also refuses to accept Toby's resignation, preferring to terminate him.
So far in its run, ''Commander in Chief" is showing us it will not pursue this kind of moral layering and character depth. This approach may change once the show's new producer, Steven Bochco (''NYPD Blue," ''Hill Street Blues"), gets to put his fingerprints on the series, but its first episodes have been painfully naive. It plays out with all the intricacy and depth of an unrevisionist Western shootout between the good guys (Davis's President Mackenzie Allen and her team) and the bad guys (Donald Sutherland's Speaker of the House Nathan Templeton and his old-boy network). Surely the battles in the presidential office aren't quite so black and white, and surely they don't always end with a heroic flourish.
Regardless of whether you feel Davis brings enough gravitas to her role, or whether you feel her straining to bring gravitas to her role, her President Allen is written as a one-dimensional character. She's all triumph and virtue, ultimately overcoming all the obstacles -- including the sort of sexism that last Tuesday found Sutherland saying, ''It's so easy to deal with women if you just remember they're not men." If she is a positive fantasy about what might or might not happen with a female president in office, she is almost too positive to seem human and possible. Dramatically, she's predictable.
In each episode of ''Commander in Chief," President Allen seems to solve some major global issue with a political savvy for which her limited experience in government probably wouldn't have prepared her. One week she manipulates a Latin American country into overthrowing an evil dictator and puts its president back into office; the next, she gets a Russian premier to agree to help jailed journalists before she dances with him at a state dinner. There's no extended anatomy of political problems, like the leak story on ''The West Wing," just crises of the week.
President Allen's almost preternatural ability to resolve world events and know rare information recalls the least appealing images of President Bartlet through the years. And giving Allen stale family problems doesn't counterbalance those superhuman qualities. In the most obvious domestic issue the ''Commander in Chief" writers could tackle, the first female president is finding it hard to juggle career and family. Recently, in an embarrassingly obvious scene, her preteen daughter wanders into the Oval Office, where the secretary turns her away because she doesn't have an appointment. And husband Rod (Kyle Secor) gets tripped up once too often in male ego twists as the first First Gentleman.
''Commander in Chief" may rise to the occasion of its largeviewership. Let's hope it finds the grit to be less blandly heroic before, as with this season's ''West Wing," it's too late.
Posted by Jo at October 27, 2005 04:59 PM