Aaron
Sorkin's The West Wing, a
Washington fantasy set in reaches of the White House you only read
about in depositions, is a show about people who love their work -- an
ode to long hours, interrupted sleep and professional
single-mindedness. "I have nothing to do!" wails one senior staffer,
suddenly taskless and filled with existential dread. (More often the
characters are "too busy to talk to you now.") This is precisely the
geist of Sorkin's other series, Sports
Night, to which The West Wing
-- though it comes dressed as an (amusing) "ensemble drama" while the
former show suits up in the gear of a (serious) sitcom -- is something
of a twin. In each there is a lot of coursing down corridors and
rattling away in the stagy hot-potato-speak that creator-scripter
Sorkin, who also writes for the theatah, channels from The Front Page, and that bears the
same relation to actual human speech as a Globetrotters routine does to
professional basketball.
"What's that?" "It's coffee." "I thought so." "I brought you some coffee." "What's going on, Donna?" "Nothing's going on." "Donna." "I brought you some coffee." The narrative import of this
exchange (speaker one is in trouble and speaker two knows it -- you
didn't think it was about coffee, did you?) is no more significant than
its rhythm, its speed and its stresses, the close-to-the-net volleying,
the repeated words and sounds (the short o of coffee, thought, brought, Donna and on), all meant to embody the
speedy, stressful life of national governance. Just so is the political
matter of the show -- what to do about the Cubans rafting to Miami, the
fundamentalist Christians waiting in the Oval Office, the Syrians who
brought down an American plane -- less significant than the vibrant air
of backstage crisis it generates, the opportunity it creates for
characters to blow their cool ("Paranoid Berkeley shiksa feminista!"
"Elitist Harvard fascist missed-the-dean's-list-two-semesters-in-a-row
Yankee jackass!") and then apologize. Which feels somehow right in the
midst of a real-life administration as well known for palace intrigue
and, lord knows, for apologies as for its social vision, the
particulars of which I cannot for the life of me recall.
Given
the potential for wonkiness in a show that, for all the rushing
around, nevertheless consists mostly of meetings, its pleasures are
oddly sensual: the way the camera reels through the many-chambered,
mazelike set, flying backward in the players' path; the musical
dialogue; the look (burnished is the imprecise adjective that comes to
mind) of a cast made up largely of character actors, whose faces are
familiar if not always their names, and who are, on balance,
refreshingly not young -- not even Rob Lowe, in major career recovery
as the deputy director of communications (with attitude), though he is
aging handsomely and looking less like a mote of trivia and more like a
real actor. John Spencer (L.A. Law)
is the wise-owl chief of staff; Richard Schiff (Relativity) the moody-prickly
director of communications. Allison Janney, who barely got to bat an
eyelid as the mother-next-door in American
Beauty, is all muscle and bustle as the president's press
secretary -- 6 feet tall in her stocking feet, and always wearing
heels, with nice pictorial use made of her long, long legs -- while
Moira Kelly, by contrast small and kewpie-doll cute (you will remember
her if you remember anything at all from last year's To Have and To Hold), plays a media
consultant formerly involved with deputy chief of staff Bradley
Whitford. As on Sports Night,
all of them are superbly good at, not to say fanatical about, what they
do, but this being a Hollywood Washington, they are also, by necessity,
not a little unconventional. And not a little sexy. Then there's
Dulé Hill (Bring in 'da Noise,
Bring in 'da Funk), who is young (and gifted and black), and who
in episode three, having applied for a messenger job, becomes instead
the president's personal assistant -- his belated casting a direct
result, and a good one, of what Sorkin has described as a "tap on the
shoulder" from the NAACP in this famously, overwhelmingly Caucasian new
season. Said tap might also have had something to do with hiring Good Times dad John Amos as
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not that he isn't every inch an
admiral.
The great thing about inventing
your own White House, of course, is that you can elect and appoint
whomever you like, and like Sorkin's screenplay for The American President, The West Wing is an exercise in
wish fulfillment. This is nowhere more evident than in the person of
the chief executive, played by Martin Sheen (possibly the shortest man
ever to occupy the office), who was JFK in a 1983 miniseries and here
plays essentially the same stern but caring boss as does Robert
Guillaume on Sports Night; he
is, if anything, a little too high-minded for the job (his grasp on realpolitik is sometimes tenuous).
Nevertheless, despite a somewhat quick temper and a tendency to carry
on as if there's a speechwriter on call inside his head ("Let the word
ring forth from this time and this place, gentlemen," that sort of
improbable stuff), he's a pre-neocon Democrat's dream: a liberal
hard-ass. (Conservatives may be less pleased.) And it is, to be sure, a
dream, a fiction, a beguiling construct -- not as strange as the truth,
perhaps, but not as disgusting either. While the proceedings are
tricked out in the inside-the-Beltway jargon of The New Republic, The American Standard and The McLaughlin Group, the show
works because it's also fun in a common way. Not unlike Upstairs Downstairs, the mother of
all multiple-storyline series (i.e., soap operas) that aspire to
quality and might incidentally have "something to say" -- not unlike
Dickens, for that matter -- it delivers cheap thrills well dressed.
Something for everyone would be the tag line.
Third Watch, another interweaving multithread
soap from NBC -- and co-created by ER
producer John Wells, who co-produces The
West Wing as well -- is also about people who love their (in
this case dark-blue-collar) jobs. "Hot damn," exults lean, keen NYFD
paramedic Kim Raver as she and a truckload of hunky firemen head off to
another big-city disaster, "I love this job." Could that be any
plainer? Elsewhere on the not yet completely safe streets of Manhattan,
hothead cop Jason Wiles puts pedal to the metal and lifts his voice in
praise of his gun, his siren and his tank full of city-bought gas. As
in The West Wing, everyone
rubs someone the wrong way; there are staglike rivalries, disagreements
about choices in love and approaches to work, arguments over parking
spaces and who gets the free meat from a grateful butcher, and some
extremely immature pranks, some of which I plan to try or I would
repeat them here. Unlike The West Wing,
its dramatis personae -- comprising four (4) police officers, one (1)
of them a woman, four (4) paramedics, one (1) of them a woman, and one
(1) fireman -- was conceived as a rainbow coalition from the start. And
with a lot of good-looking bodies onscreen and techno music pulsing
beneath the action, it seems to want to say: Young people, come on! This show is hot!
The title refers to the shift
that lasts from 3 to 11 p.m., a chronometric detail that, while
possibly exotic to viewers who have only ever worked from 9 to 5, has
no dramatic import whatsoever on this program. The salient high concept
is the competitive intertwining of municipal services -- the police
station and firehouse are across the street from each other --
necessary to keep Gothamites safe from themselves and each other. In a
honey-roasted nutshell, it applies the gloss of ER and the grit of New York
locations -- most of the show takes place outdoors -- to a melding of
Jack Webb's Adam 12 and Emergency!, whose Randolph Mantooth
has been paid homage in the naming of the firehouse Dalmatian. There is
some disagreeable low comedy involving vomit, and "stepping in dead
guy," and a dismaying "oops" when a ledge jumper slips out of a
policeman's grasp -- an incident put out of mind in the space of a
commercial; I'm not sure even New York cops are that hard. And you will
have seen much, oh very much, of this before, since there are only so
many ways to chase down a suspect, deliver a premature baby or put out
a fire, and the shot-partner-in-the-hospital and
eager-rookie/irregular-vet routines reprised here have long since been
worn down to nothing. But an attractive, believable cast, and good use
of the less manicured reaches of the city that never sleeps -- and how
can it with those damn sirens blowing? -- make it convincing enough.
Imperfect, like a president, but better than passable.
© Robert Lloyd 1999
and 2011
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