(OK, a word to the wise here: Get to your local DVD-selling emporia and look for a display of TV show DVD season sets for $19.99. They're all Warners shows, and among the sets featured at this jaw-dropping price are the first two seasons of The West Wing. It's a deal you'd have to be a goof to pass up.)
Anyway, as much as I love Aaron Sorkin's writing when he's on, there's something that he does that's always bugged me: he tends to use jokes that are not situationally appropriate. In other words, he tends to put jokes into his work that shouldn't be possible if his characters really know the things they should know in that position.
Case in point: In the opening sequence, Sam Seaborn sleeps with a woman he meets in a bar, who later turns out to be a Washington call-girl. (This is how she's putting herself through law school.) Early in the morning, his beeper goes off, and he begins to quickly get dressed in what appears to be the time-honored manner of men who are bolting on their one-night stands. Laurie reads the message on the beeper: "POTUS in bicycle accident", and then this exchange takes place:
SAM: I really gotta go.
LAURIE: Cause POTUS was in a bicycle accident?
SAM: Yup.
LAURIE: Tell your friend, POTUS, he's got a funny name. And he should learn how to ride a bicycle.
SAM: I would, but he's not my friend, he's my boss; and it's not his name, it's his title.
LAURIE: POTUS?
SAM: President of the United States. I’ll call you.
Now, we don't learn until later on that Laurie's a Washington call girl, and we don't learn until several episodes later that she's a good-enough call-girl to provide escort service for Congressmen, but the fact remains that a high-priced Washington call-girl would know what "POTUS" means.
Later on the same episode, Sam runs into some trouble when he has to give a White House tour to "Leo's daughter's fourth-grade class". He assumes that Leo's daughter is in the fourth grade, when it turns out that Leo's daughter is the teacher of the fourth-grade class in question (meaning he's completely misinterpreted the phrase, "Leo's daughter's fourth grade class). Problem is, this isn't too believable either: it just doesn't seem plausible that Sam could work with Leo for as long as he has and not know that the man doesn't have a ten-year old daughter.
This kind of thing also cropped up in the Aaron Sorkin-scripted film The American President, which is one of my favorite films. Early on, the President (Michael Douglas) tells his Chief of Staff (Martin Sheen) that he doesn't have to keep calling him "Mr. President". ("When we're alone, you can call me Andy. You were the first man in my wedding.") Of course, the CoS has none of this, and it becomes a small running gag. But the film also establishes that its events take place in Year Three of the President's first term, culminating in his election-year State of the Union address. Is it really plausible that over two years into his term, the President will finally try to get his CoS to stop calling him "Mr. President" even when they're alone? I don't think so. (It also always struck me as odd that the Vice President is never so much as mentioned in The American President, but that's something else.)
Don't get me wrong: I still love The West Wing and The American President. But I've long been of the opinion that Aaron Sorkin excels at crafting smart dialogue, but his love of dialogue sometimes crowds out things like plot and plausibility.
UPDATE: OK, I was just looking at the Buffalo News website (looking for an article I was going to quote in an entirely unrelated post) and I found this, about the new TV series centered on the Presidency, Commander in Chief:
ABC's "Commander in Chief" would seem to be a pretty straightforward drama.
The president dies. The vice president, played by Geena Davis, succeeds him in the Oval Office. And, omigosh, she's a woman!
But there's more going on here, suspicious minds are thinking: Commander in Chief isn't just this fall's most-watched new series - it's a sinister scheme by Hollywood lefties to hype Hillary Clinton for the White House.
[snip]
"Keeping with the modern liberal tradition of subliminal socialist indoctrination (through U.S. television), Commander in Chief seeks to accomplish more than prime-time entertainment," warned a writer named J.B. Williams on the National Ledger Web site, while the blogger Colossus pronounced the show "a nefarious plot to advance the notion of a Hillary Clinton presidency."
The chain of logic seems to be that, taking as given that any piece of entertainment at all probably has hidden "Leftist" agendae, any TV show, movie, novel, opera, song cycle, stage musical or puppet show depicting a woman ascending the office of President of the United States must be a stealth campaign for Hillary Clinton.
To the people out there who are so convinced that the Left's hatred of George W. Bush knows no bounds and is the only factor in the current poisoning of American political discourse, I point to the people theorizing thusly about Commander in Chief and say, "Suck it."
(BTW, Associated Press, if you're going to quote a blogger in your stories, it's not enough to give the name of the blogger -- especially if it's a pseudonym. You've got to provide a URL. Here's the quoted post, which provides more evidence that the ABC show is a Hillary stealth campaign: the guy playing the White House CoS looks like Barack Obama! Well, shit. That seals the deal. I mean, it's not like The West Wing ever had a black woman as National Security Adviser...oh, wait, it did. Well anyway, it's not like The West Wing has a guy with a history of heart troubles running for Vice President...oh, it does. As I said, well, shit.
Here's another money quote:
The thought is that if we, the submoronic television viewers, get used to seeing a woman president on TV, we'll be more inclined to vote for one in 2008. This is what the TV industry thinks. They don't view us as being rational actors, able to vote for a President based on our own reasoning, but instead as sheep to be herded and trained.
Yeah, that's it -- and it goes back farther than that! Remember in Air Force One, when the Vice President was played by Glenn Close, and all manner of 25th-Amendment stuff came up? Hollywood's been pimping Hillary-for-Prez for years! And Deep Impact was a plot to get Americans to vote for a black man for President, in the guise of a SF disaster movie. (Of course, when that movie came out, the likeliest name here was Colin Powell, which doesn't seem to stack up well on the "Hollywood Leftist" side of the ledger, but we all know that the Right has never been terribly comfortable with Colin Powell.) And The Lord of the Rings was probably a massive plot to get men all over the world to melt down their wedding rings. Because, you know, in a country that's never come close to having a woman as President, the question of "Hey, what if we had a woman President?" just can't be interesting on dramatic grounds alone.)
UPDATE: "The Colossus" responds in comments, claiming to be more reasonable than he was really trying to appear in the linked post. I'm prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt on that one, because he actually expresses, you know, thoughts in his comments (as opposed to the "You're wrong, neener neener!" stuff that you see all over comments threads throughout Blogistan). And he claims to have received little traffic from being quoted in an Associated Press story, which I find disappointing. One should expect some bump in readership after appearing in papers nationwide, right?
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