I used to love shows and movies set in the White House. WEST WING was my favorite show. Movies like THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT, DAVE, FROST/NIXON, 7 DAYS IN MAY, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, etc. were always high up on my list.
But then when Trump got into office I couldn't watch anything that featured an Oval Office. Even though VEEP consistently made me laugh, I could no longer watch it. HOUSE OF CARDS had been a binge fave. I bailed even before Kevin Spacey was dumped. I was never a huge fan of SCANDAL but caught it occasionally. Same with DESIGNATED SURVIVOR and MADAME SECRETARY. And forget about revisiting 24.
WEST WING in particular was hard to watch again. The stark contrast of how smart, caring, noble, and earnest everyone in that fictional White House was compared to the evil moronic lying shitheads who occupy it now just made viewing impossible.
But HBO has gotten the cast and Aaron Sorkin back together for a special reunion to Benefit When We All Vote. It premiers tomorrow on HBO Max and I imagine other places as well. There will be special appearances by Michelle Obama and others. This I will watch. Partly for nostalgia and partly for hope -- that we might go back to that again. That we might try to uphold the Constitution, Democracy, caring for the American people, justice, security, sanity, healing, equality, kindness, and calm. At one time WEST WING was a model; now it's a fairy tale. Let's make the fairy tale come true. VOTE.
24 comments :
You're far more optimistic than me, Ken. Trump supporters are already openly talking about taking to the streets with their guns if Trump loses. The end of the United States as a democracy is in sight. Time to start preparing emigration plans.
And yesterday we saw Amy Coney Barrett refuse to directly answer if she opposes separate but equal. A Supreme Court nominee who has no problem with segregation. That's where we are in 2020 thanks to the Republicans. Once a political party, now a criminal organization for neo-Nazis.
Just the opposite here for me. I showed DAVE and THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT to my teenage son to demonstrate, while fictional in many ways, this is more how an American president should behave. The wife and I are watching "The West Wing" on Netflix for the first time for the exact same reason. It's hard to believe how much has changed in just 20 years...
I remember a MOM episode where they did a brief parody of this show featuring Janney walking briskly though a corridor in conversation. Christie: "Your smile scares me" Bonnie: "It should."
Thank goodness we have HBO, lol. My favorite show of all time. I re-watch it a lot because it makes me calmer, reminds me that this time is an aberration and we will get back to normal. Can't wait for tomorrow night.
Pam, St. Louis.
Any show with Otter as VPOTUS works for me.
Believe me, it was all I could do when I filled out my ballot not to write in "Josiah Bartlett".
I had literally never seen the "The West Wing" before a few weeks ago (!), when I started bingeing it. I never wanted to, because the hype on it was unbearable, and nothing on network TV could ever live up to such expectations. Or so I thought (disclaimer: you can literally feel it in the season when Aaron Sorkin leaves the writers' room. Love him or not, he's a force of nature whose aura emanates from any episode he writes).
And even though I considered myself an outlier for discovering the show 20 years too late, it's struck me that in the past few weeks, even as I was experiencing it for the very first time, the whole nation suddenly became super "West Wing"-conscious right along with me. Seems this was all America could do to remind itself that there once was a thing called "normal", and "West Wing" became the comfort food of choice.
The greatest self-goof on the West Wing "walk and talk" was the Richard Schiff-directed episode when Josh and Donna angrily declared they weren't speaking to each other, and start stomping through the corridors together, silent for an uncomfortable amount of screen time. Suddenly, there's this look of realization on both of their faces; they stop and stare at each other in mock horror for a second, then quickly peel off in separate directions (... and SCENE! :-)
I never got into West Wing. I did love Veep, and a show on Prime Video called Alpha House. My point being, I like comedies when it comes to fictional politics.
I do remember in my childhood, I did like a serious show called The Senator, starring Hal Holbrook.
This post made me cry. I am so sick of the shithead in the White House and the terrorists who support him. And I can't even emigrate because no other country is stupid enough to accept Americans in the Age of Covid.
Friday baseball question: How is it that Clayton Kershaw's nickname isn't Opie? He is a Ron Howard look alike. You can still see it now but a few yeas ago he was a dead ringer. Also since you probably wont answer a baseball question: How can you defend umpire called pitches where the obvious balls are called strikes and strikes are called balls. The 3D technology makes a mockery of the human judgment in this case. I assume if a game seven is decided by a bad call there will be change.
I too love political fiction involving the WH (SEVEN DAYS IN MAY is one of my all-time favorite movies. Want to see great acting? Watch the confrontation scene in the Oval Office with Fredric March and Burt Lancaster masterfully reciting Rod Serling's crisp dialogue) and have avoided them for the duration of the Trump Era, but you miss a crucial point about how we ended up where we are. The "best and the brightest" (a term derogatorily coined by Seymore Hersh describing the hawks in the Johnson Administration who escalated our involvement in Vietnam) PAVED THE WAY FOR TRUMP. These mostly Ivy-League educated elites were bought and paid for by corporate special interests leading to policies that created massive income inequality (take a drive around LA sometime and look at the shanty towns lived in by people with college degrees). Occupy Wall Street occurred under Obama who refused to prosecute a single bankster, abolish ICE, support a livable minimum wage or put Merit Garland on the Court as a recess appointment. Hillary Clinton then proceeded to ignore these vital issues when running for president while she was measuring the drapes (she admitted in her own memoir that during the campaign she bought a house near hers in Chappaqua to house her WH staff and was considering people to put her administration when she should have been concentrating on her campaign) the result: 63% of registered voters refused to vote for her knowing full well who Trump was and as for patriarchy, Trump got 45% of the woman's vote. Meanwhile, Rahm Immanuel (the basis for Josh Lyman) ran a scandal-ridden mayoralty in Chicago after destroying Howard Dean's 50-state strategy (the Dems REALLY have it in for politicians from Vermont, don't they?). Trump's rampant idiocy obscures the fact that there is no direct correlation between intellect and competence or integrity, especially when one is paid handsomely to look the other way. Let us hope that a) Trump gets ousted before he does any more damage and b) the Biden administration does not make the same mistakes. I really want to sit back and enjoy SEVEN DAYS IN MAY again.
Instead of electing a president from now on, can't we just get Aaron Sorkin to write the lines and an actor to deliver them?
I'll second Russ. The first four seasons and the final three seasons are distinctly different. And I recalled something that Sorkin said that really resonated. He was asked if it was difficult to write a show without a love story. He said there was one. Who? He replied, "Jed and Leo."
Have you ever seen GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE HOUSE (1933)? Walter Huston plays a machine politician who is elected president. After a near-death experience he awakens determined to save the country from the Great Depression by becoming a dictator. He adjourns Congress, starts executing gangsters and creating jobs, collects all the money we loaned the Allies in World War I and makes every nation sign a disarmament treaty. The people love him! I understand William Randolph Hearst promoted this movie even while his newspapers attacked FDR for far milder (and more Constitutional) actions. A lot of people thought we needed a strong leader like Germany and Italy in 1933.
Just a little Hollywood perspective. Later presidents (Fredric March, Franchot Tone, Michael Douglas) were a lot less scary.
You failed to include the movie "DICK" staring that girl with the crooked teeth, the other girl from "Dawson's Creek" and the guy that was on "CHEERS" for a while.
M.B.
Now that I got that baseball question out of my mind I can post a relevant west wing link. https://www.3aw.com.au/victorian-mp-caught-lifting-speech-from-fictional-tv-show-the-west-wing/
I have never seen West Wing. I am sure it is good. And all things considered that was probably a fairy tale as well.
“The American President,” which Sorkin wrote and Rob Reiner directed, was almost a template for The West Wing. Great picture. Sheen’s even in it, though not as President. So is Joshua Malia.
@Mike Barer The Senator was one of my favorites as a teenager, too. On that show was the first time I heard the "First they came for..." poem...
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2020-10-14/hillbilly-elegy-trailer-amy-adams-glenn-close
Hillbillies are also back!!
Opie just done directed “Hillbilly Elegy”
aka Mayberry RIP aka Reverie Hillbillies
Love all those films too set at the White House. I used to say Sorkin created West Wing so that that he could use all the research he did for American President. By coincidence, I decided to watch an early episode and now have ended up bingeing it.
I also want to second the shout out to the film Gabriel Over the White House. I caught it on TCM by chance and found it to be one of the most batsh*t craziest films I'd ever seen (and I mean that in a good way). I ended up writing about it on my blog several years back. Yes, it actually makes a case for an authoritarian president -- I think Hearst wrote it with FDR in mind, believing that's what the U.S. needed to get things back in shape, then of course had a total falling out with FDR because of the New Deal. Really shows you where Hearst was coming from.
Ugh - I feel exactly the same way. The American President is one of my favorite movies, and I haven't been able to stomach watching it for the last four years. I long for a president who would give a speech like Andrew Shepard did in the movie. "We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you, [Donald Trump] is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things and two things only: making you afraid of it and telling you who's to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections. You gather a group of middle-aged, middle-class, middle-income voters who remember with longing an easier time, and you talk to them about family and American values and character... This is a time for serious people, Don, and your fifteen minutes are up."
GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE HOUSE is my favorite, as Randy @ WCG Comics put it, batsh*t crazy film that came out of the old studio system. Directed by Gregory La Cava (who also directed STAGE DOOR). I watch it every time TCM airs it and own the DVD (from Warner Archive). The President (an absolute doofus at the beginning of the film) is an authoritarian but he also stands up to the industrialists and insists that workers have a living wage and decent working conditions. Some people have seen it as right-wing reactionary; others have seen it as a "Red" commie film. Which is why Hearst pushed to have it withdrawn.
As for Hal Halbrook and THE SENATOR - it was part of the original "Bold Ones" trilogy and the only segment to be canceled after the first season. I loved it and still haven't forgiven NBC for dropping it. ;-) There was a TV movie that was the genesis for the series, "A Clear and Present Danger" (not that one) with Melvyn Douglas as the older senator who was retiring and Holbrook as his son who wanted to succeed him.
Completely disagree with Ken - re-watching THE WEST WING makes me feel so much better that it almost needs to be a daily ritual. I'm even a Conservative (albeit, a Conservative that feels abandoned), and miss THE WEST WING greatly about 100 different ways - it's easily my favorite show of all-time (not counting all the ones Mr. Levine has written...sorry, I forgot where I was for a second). I don't have HBO or its streaming service, so it will hurt to miss this thing.
hey Ken,
thought you'd enjoy this short video of a flaming zamboni.
https://youtu.be/OWaNswjZILU
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