The CT Review: The Children of Light
Good writing and acting cover a multitude of biases on The West Wing.
Eric Miller | posted 10/01/2001 12:00AM
"Have I displeased you, you feckless thug?" Al Pacino in a Godfather film? Try Josiah Bartlet in The West Wing. President Josiah Bartlet, that is—the most powerful man in America, here taking a swipe at the Almighty himself.If Bartlet isn't in fact the most powerful man in America, for one hour a week we enjoy pretending he is. As ER fades into an (ironically) slow and drawn-out death, The West Wing has emerged to take its place as NBC's latest champion. It has become, in just two years, a consistent top-ten performer—bona fide Must See TV.
The secret of its success? Aaron Sorkin, also the creator of ER, has his golden fingerprints all over The West Wing: witty (if cute) repartee, beautiful actors with just enough flaws and facial creases to keep us watching, close and relatively neurosis-free relationships between characters, a riveting dramatic backdrop (the White House! America!), all melded into story lines that thoughtfully interpret the country's moral condition without meddling too much with the sunny, progressive pole of our national disposition. Not as painful to watch as, say, the late great Homicide: Life on the Street, but not as sugary as the Providence variety of (what passes for) TV drama: Sorkin is clearly at the top of his game. It is fun to watch his work.
The show bears all of the marks of its birth at the end of the Clinton years. Not only does it play to our progressive instincts, as Clinton did so well, but it also amplifies and extends the better side of the Clinton persona itself, the generous, noble, warm, and fun Bill, the guy we, sometimes against our better judgment, liked having around.
While Martin Sheen's Bartlet harks back to an older Democratic type, the manly Cold War liberal, the more cavalier yuppie staffers swagger with Ivy League intelligence and 1960s idealism. Sorkin, one suspects, is trying hard to make sure we understand that liberal idealism, centered on the ongoing fight for liberty, equality, and justice, is what makes America great—even when the live versions of that idealism disappoint.
This underlying liberal didacticism helps to account for the folklorish, mythical quality of The West Wing, its Camelot-the-TV-Show feel.
As the Waltons-esque theme music cuts in, we see flags waving alongside black-and-white photos of the show's cast. These are not celebrities—these are heroes.
Unless we're jaded cynics or self-absorbed fools, we all long to pay homage to rulers who wed virtue to power, and Sorkin taps into our longing with impressive skill.
White-Hat LiberalsBut of course in Sorkin's world it's not the Right that deserves our honor and allegiance: it's the Left, the liberals. Conservatives, in his Washington, tend to be the ones who need monitoring; they are the ones who, when left to their own devices, threaten the very idea of America. "You're the good guys—you should act like it," we hear one character (a prostitute, ironically) tell two of the President's deputies as they, against their better judgment, seek blackmail information on a few particularly malign Republican congressmen. Later, chief of staff Leo McGary (played superbly by John Spencer), reinforces the liberal self-image in a stern but fatherly rebuke to the wayward duo: "It's not what we do!"To be sure, the show is not simply a campaign ad paid for by the Democratic Party. In its quest for audience share, The West Wing plays to the middle as well as any politician. Bartlet's policy positions are, accordingly, not always predictably Democratic. True to their political generation, both he and his chief of staff McGary seem more hawkish than the younger post-McGovern liberals around them, who tend toward more peaceably pious and unctuous postures.
October 1 2001, Vol. 45, No. 12
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