Bartlet For America!

Season Five of The West Wing kicks off this evening, and it begins the post-Aaron Sorkin era. The majority of the reviews I've seen of tonight's episode online are positive, although the ones that are negative are really negative. As shocked as I was at Sorkin's abrupt departure last year, I'm holding out hope that it will be fine. The show has four years behind it, and I did get the feeling that while Sorkin's storytelling abilities were still as strong as ever, his dialogue for TWW was taking on a "sameness". I'll be glad, really, to see some other directions taken, and I'll certainly be glad to see conversations where the most common words are not "the thing" and "yeah". (Ever notice how TWW characters always respond affirmatively with "Yeah"?)

One scene that I'd like to see is Josh and Donna walk together from the White House front door all the way through the building to their offices, in one of those long tracking shots the show always does, and yet not say a word as they do so. I think that would be pretty funny.

And I am looking forward to a return to more "nuts and bolts of politics" type stuff going on. I just hope they don't turn to Law and Order-style, "Ripped from the headlines!" stories. And I'd sort of like it if they'd back off the foreign policy stuff, not because I disagree with anything they've done or anything like that, but because it always throws me out of a story when they refer to countries that don't really exist.

(Of course, it's possible to go too far the other way. I caught the first couple of minutes of that NCIS show the other night, and it actually had a guy playing President Bush. And not just "Back of the head" or "Going around the corner" shots, mind you; this guy actually interacted with the show's characters. The guy they cast did a pretty good Bush, but I just couldn't take anything seriously after that. And now that I think of it, it seems that Presidents pose problems to filmmakers in general. I remember the horrible digital cut-outs of President Clinton that were injected into Contact, an otherwise terrific movie. It's possible to go too far in the search for realism, because there is a certain amount of illusion that can never be totally disspelled.)