DVD : The West Wing - The Complete First Season

Rating: - Great writing!
The show is done very professionally in all respects, but I think I most enjoy the writing.

Watching the shows straight through on DVD really lets you appreciate the writing, the timing and the ability of the actors to carry off the scenes.

The writing is much more like what you would find in a play than the normal television schlock.

I'm also a fan of Sportsnight.

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Rating: - Why did I wait so long to watch the West Wing?
I picked up Season 1 of the West Wing last week and was hooked from the first scene. The writing is superb and the characters just get better with every episode. I had convinced myself that I wouldn't like it, but I can't wait to find an extra 45 minutes to watch another episode. Season 2 coming up!

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Rating: - The West Wing: Season One
I have always been interested to political dramas. And "The West Wing", episode by episode, gives the audience those kinds of stories and more. From the witty and sarcastic one-liners to the character driven stories, the show always delivers. It created a tapestry of characters that are individually and collectively engaging.

Here are my personal top 5 favorite episodes of the season:

1. In Excelsis Deo - A great episode that has a very positively Christmas feel. The White House staff had to deal with different things, CJ with her position on hate crimes, Sam and Josh protecting Leo from the drug scandal, Toby inexplicably affected by the death of a homeless man. Ironically only the president seems to be in the Christmas mood with his holiday shopping. The episode ended with a great montage with the white house staff all lined up while listening to the Christmas carol and then the funeral of the dead homeless man.

2. Let Bartlet Be Bartlet - A great ensemble episode that showcased the unity and loyalty of the staff to the administration of Bartlett. It's a poignant episode that strengthens the viewers attachment and involvement to the characters. You root for them and you want them to succeed.

3. Celestial Navigation - I love this episode. Probably the funniest episode of the season. There's so many great scenes like Josh being hounded in the press room, Sam and Toby in the prison, and CJ with the root canal. Nice use of flashbacks.

4. What Kind of Day Has it Been? - I love this kind of style of storytelling. The episode opened with the last 5 minutes of the episode where nothing makes sense because we have no idea what happened prior to the scene. The opening scene ended with a cliffhanger. Then we get to see things that happened before the opening scene. I often see that kind of storytelling style in Alias, and I really like it. The last few minutes of the episode were suspenseful. A great season ender.

5. Pilot - A solid series premiere that established the mood of the show as well as introducing the White House staff.

Grade: A-

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Rating: - How we'd like it to be...
It has now become television legend that when the creator of The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin, pitched his idea about a show concerning American politics to the executives, he was almost laughed out of their offices. Absolutely no average American TV viewer would have an interest or the intellectual capacity to appreciate a series that expounds on political policy and the political machinations behind the scenes in the nation's capitol. A show about the president? Please, the American people have had enough "real life" drama during the impeachment of president Clinton concerning his deceptions about his sexual exploits in the oval office. Well, these savvy television executives were dead wrong. At the end of its first season, The West Wing won more awards and was the most watched debut television series in memorable history, continuing to produce many more seasons.

This series set a new benchmark for television drama. All said and done, however, this wonderful series is not about "real" American politics and their politicians; The West Wing is about how we would want our politicians to be - smart, ethical and human. This show is about wish fulfilment. President Bartlet may not be everyone's idea of a perfect president, but he certainly comes close. He is a Noble Prize winning economist and a politician with a family tradition that extends back the signing of the Declaration of Independence. He is "presidential", commanding respect, and is much too honest for his own good. Bartlet has surrounded himself with an exceedingly intelligent and loyal staff. These people bleed for him every day and would certainly die for the man. But the entire cast is strong, each character unique, contributing to the magical mix that makes this show so dynamic and personal to the audience.

The first season hits the ground running building momentum until its final episode, leaving the audience hanging and chomping at the bit for more.

Aaron Sorkin is an exceptionally talented writer and informed about world affairs, issues and American politics in general. I was astounded at one episode where two characters are discussing civil rights and possible monetary reparations for the great grandchildren of African American slaves. The amount worked out to be in the trillions of dollars. This discussion was simply an education and opened my eyes to this issue. Sorkin is a first class writer with a scary talent.

The West Wing Season 1 includes 22 episodes with extras of interviews with the crew and cast. If you are a fan of this show, having these DVD's at your disposal is a treat and well worth the investment.

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Rating: - put on your sunday duds
Early in the first season, CJ Cregg, President Barton's press secretary, blurts out something about America having a "pathology". A pathology is a deviation from the normal functioning of an organism. In this context, CJ believes that the physician capable of curing the disease is the state. She moralizes aloud that our nation is in dire need of "hate crimes" legislation following the well-publicized murder of a gay teen at the hands of Hail Mary chanting rural thugs in Wisconsin (in Hollywood, people who live in the country are all murderous thugs; see my remarks for 24 - Season Two). Some how or other, it'll prevent more deaths of gay teenagers at the hands of angry Catholic mobs. This vignette captures the whole essence of the West Wing. Sorkin's show is THE original old time state religion gospel hour for millions of sheeple. A strong cast of talented actors and good script writing blend to create one of the most tiresome shows ever made for teevee. No Tammy Faye Baker make jobs, no Jan Crouch scalp-to-sky hair-dos, no Benny Hinn slap fests, just straight moralistic preaching from agents of the state. Sure gubbamint screws up sez Toby Ziegler (Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, Iraq, the Native Americans, etc.), but by golly, big gubbamint still has a place in our lives (except for the womb: it's still okay to kill the laffing fetus. Barton and his crew respect human life so long as it can't vote.). You don't neeeed God folks, you just need mo' bigga betta gubbamint -- this is the message for our age! The righteousness of the left finds clear expression in the many speeches of Barton and his crusaders. Just like in real life, the holiness of the leftist is divorced from reason or any notion of fair play. Barton rejects a SC nominee because of a previous position he took on privacy laws, but it's clear that he's no problem hiring people who want to regulate and punish certain thought crimes. Inconsistent? Sure. Integrity and a rigorous moral aesthetic are not possible in leftism though. As Jacques Barzoun notes in his seminal work From Dawn to Decadence, leftists have generally favored sexual libertinism while simultaneously promoting the most rigorous forms of thought control. The left favors hedonism up until the point it has secured its goals and eliminated all vestiges of the old order; after that, the steel chastity belts come out. On the show, sexual morals and professional ethics are loose, everyone solemnly intones the mantras of abortion; graphic sex education teaching materials of the pornographic kind are taken seriously, etc. That aside, the show's preachiness reminds me of just how boorish secular moralizers can really be. I'm not exactly endeared to anyone on the show. Sorkin is clearly a liberal who doesn't mind dishing on the Christians, playing up to every stereotype of them in his desire to make the GOP the source of the social "pathology" destroying the nation. Barton's Catholicism is charming, Irish, folksy and "safe". The Hail Mary chanting during the killing of the gay teen indicates that less quainter forms of Christianity pose a big problem to the peace of the state. Was this little add-on necessary to the story? Elsewhere, Ziegler lies to the president, telling Barton that the Talmud is opposed to capital punishment. Maimonides sez "even the best of the gentiles deserve death." Not exactly Talmudic, but it captures the flavor of rabbinical sentiment more faithfully than Sorkin's revisionism. The state is a jealous god and will tolerate no competition from the followers of a moribund religion like Christianity. In the opening episode, Ziegler and Lyman meet with members of the Christian right. The Christians are all fat, ugly and stupid. The liberals are clever and witty (and super compassionate). Within moments, Ziegler has denounced one of the Christians as an anti-Semite after the old sod makes a stupid remark. This sets the tone for the whole season; the Christians are portrayed as dumb, gossipy and anti-intellectual puritans (Ziegler: "I'd start by telling them that Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote Oklahoma, and Arthur Murray taught ballroom dance," etc.) with a taste for the prurient. I'm curious to see how far the show can go in laying out its prejudices. One of the differences in modern bigotry is that it's slick -- far, far slicker than anything in the past because it belittles and tears down the dominant intellectual and cultural traditions through refined slur and innuendo. Jews were called vermin and other nasty things by Hitler; today, the shoe is on the other foot and the "cretins" (a derogatory, bastardized word for Christians from long ago) are made out as the defenders of backward ignorance. Crackers in the South take the usual drubbing on the show as well. Teevee is hypnotic even for intelligent people and it's easy to ignore the underlying assumptions of the writers, focusing instead on the talents of the actors and set designers, all of which WW has in spades. The show is a polished piece of high pitched nasal whining posing as a moral voice. The battle between Democrat/Republican, good/evil in the show is all just a dramatized form of the Coke-Pepsi dialectic that is American politics. We're supposed to think that Republicans are out to starve children and kill old people, but during 1999, the Republican-controlled Congress increased gov't. spending for the fourth or fifth consecutive year. Fast-forward to today, the Republicans control all branches of gov't. and are accelerating the growth of domestic spending to ridiculous levels, funding exciting new wars and providing prescription drugs for granny all within the same omnibus. They make LBJ look like a tight-wad in comparison. If you get your political views from the West Wing, you never see this. The liberals are always more compassionate because they want to spend more than the Republicans.