Oh, come on. It isn't THAT bad.

Not at all, really. No, it's not as good as it used to be, but it was already sliding a bit even when the Big Head was still in charge and it's generally still been of high quality this year.

I am, of course, talking about The West Wing.

I was noodling about Bartlet4America, when I discovered Don'tSaveOurShow.org, a site devoted to promoting the cancellation of The West Wing. Lord, people, get a grip -- Aaron Sorkin isn't God. The more of his stuff you watch, the more his bag-of-tics becomes obvious; and he was frankly lousy at crafting a serial drama. Plotlines would come and go; characters would disappear for no reason whatsoever (Mandy?); favorite snippets of dialogue would turn up again and again ("I got screwed with my pants on", "I'm a whole new woman", "We don't have time to do one thing at a time", et cetera).

Not to beat up on Aaron Sorkin, because I love the guy's writing. I own both of the West Wing script books currently in print; The American President is one of my favorite movies; and so on. But there's no way that The West Wing has completely fallen apart. So come on, people, let's rein in the histrionics. We still got a thing to do. Yeah.

(And I realize it's cool to see your site mentioned in Big Media, but really -- there's not as much cachet in getting mentioned by one of Entertainment Weekly's corral of crappy critics as you might think.)

(UPDATE: I wasn't really clear in that last paragraph. It was DontSaveOurShow.org that got mentioned in EW, not me. They have a scan of the article over there, if you really want to read Ken Tucker being boring and snippy.)