On a sitcom president
Mills, Nicolaus
THE DOCTORS of E.R., the lawyers of Ally McBeal, the teenagers of Dawson's Creek. This year, as last, ensemble casts dominate television's leading programs. The newest ensemble cast is,...
...Much harder to know is what to make of The West Wing, which in its Wednesday night premiere on NBC drew a whopping 16.9 million viewers...
...Strangelove...
...John Frankenheimer's Seven Days in May and Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe, which in combination offered audiences a new film genre—the nuclear thriller...
...But in the case of The West Wing, it is a painful endorsement as well...
...During the Great Depression Frank Capra in Mr...
...By the sixties Hollywood was focused on the bomb, and in 1963-1964 it took center stage in Stanley Kubrick's Dr...
...Smith Goes to Washington and Preston Sturges in The Great McGinty made corruption their big issue rather than take on the New Deal question of how to get the country back to work...
...The show has enough intelligence to tease us into expecting more...
...To its credit, The West Wing is far more complex than any of these Hollywood movies...
...Today, thanks to the Clinton scandals, sex has become the dominant political issue for Hollywood, and in Mike Nichols's Primary Colors, Ivan Reitman's Dave, and Barry Levinson's Wag the Dog, the fate of the nation is inseparable from the president's infidelity...
...Themes and moralizing have traditionally appeared in place of analysis...
...It is in film that politics have gotten their fullest attention in American pop culture...
...The newest ensemble cast is, however, different from the others...
...90 n DISSENT / Winter 2000...
...The other side of The West Wing is, however, its implicit conviction that today the art of politics consists of making rapid decisions on the basis of a gut decency that substitutes for hard-won political values or serious thought...
...To date, President Bartlet has shown himself capable of dealing with the religious right, anti-immigrant politicians, Middle Eastern terrorists, a Ryder Cup golf team he offended, and a gaffe by one of his own aides without ever worrying if he is being inconsistent or taking the country in the wrong direction...
...Political shows are scarce on prime time television...
...The president and his staff thrive on franticness, and the message The West Wing consistently delivers is that it would be unsophisticated to believe that anything more deliberate is possible...
...For television that's an unsurprising endorsement...
...In an America in which the Clinton administration has remained in power by virtue of its ability to zigzag, this centerless view of the White House is grounded in reality...
...Yet here, too, the attention has usually lacked depth...
...This year, as last, ensemble casts dominate television's leading programs...
...What is frightening about The West Wing is its notion DISSENT / Winter 2000 n 89 NOTEBOOK that such centerlessness is the best that we can do...
...With its numerous plots, its fast pace, and cast of a half-dozen characters, The West Wing presents a White House that is centerless...
...It consists of a fictional president and his White House staff, and it sets the tone for the most talked-about show of the fall season, The West Wing, the creation of Aaron Sorkin, whose past work includes the sitcom Sports Night as well as the screenplay for Rob Reiner's The American President...
...If there is any film it resembles, it is Michael Ritchie's 1972 The Candidate, in which Robert Redford, in an exceptional picture brilliantly scripted by Jeremy Lamer, played an idealistic California lawyer who wins a Senate seat only to find himself trapped by electoral politics...
...THE DOCTORS of E.R., the lawyers of Ally McBeal, the teenagers of Dawson's Creek...
...The president, Josiah Bartlet, an independentminded former New Hampshire governor played by Martin Sheen, is consistently seen reacting to events rather than being guided by an agenda or having a political philosophy...
...NICOLAUS MILLS'S most recent book is The Triumph of Meanness: America's War Against Its Better Self...
...The result is an endorsement not simply of the end of ideology but the end of ideas...
...Benson, which ran on ABC from 1979 to 1986 and featured Robert Guillaume as the assistant to a state governor and finally as a lieutenant governor, defied the political odds during the Reagan years, but Benson rarely ventured beyond sitcom to take a serious position on any issue...
Vol. 47 • January 2000 • No. 1
