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Two Cathedrals is the best hour of television ever. And there's a handful of other episodes - Bartlet For America, Celestial Navigation, 17 People, In The Shadow Of Two Gunmen - that are in the discussion. When The West Wing was on, there was never a better show, not The Wire or The Sopranos or AD or anything else. It wasn't on all the time, of course. Not nearly enough love for Annabeth in the "seasons six and seven were actually pretty good" line of discussion. The Leo/Annabeth stuff on the campaign trail was freaking awesome and then welp. This thread is probably going to prompt me into a rewatch. It's been awhile.
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Jul 10, 2011 04:19
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FISHMANPET posted:Next up in the rewatch is '2162 votes.' I know what happens, and I'm getting chills from the cold open alone. That episode has my single favorite shot of the entire show, when President Bartlet is getting ready to get onto the stage and the shot focuses from Bartlet to Leo standing right across from him as a slower version main theme kicks in. The three episode season 6 finale run of In God We Trust, Things Fall Apart, and 2162 Votes is up there with any arc Sorkin did except for the MS reveal.
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Jul 14, 2011 01:56
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FISHMANPET posted:On the other hand, this shuttle plot is a loving non starter, since I know the secret already. I thought that they didn't play up the ambiguity of whether Toby actually leaked it or whether he jumped on the grenade for CJ and Leo enough. There's hints here and there but it's never really explored, probably because of Richard Schiff's unavailability in the last season.
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Jul 14, 2011 02:11
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mdemone posted:poo poo, you must be right. According to my hazy memory of the plotline, the leak was conclusively Toby. If that was actually technically ambiguous, then they did a crap job of emphasizing that, or I just missed some key dialogue. It was definitely a plot point in Welcome to Wherever You Are with the US Attorney for the District floating (with a story that sure seemed like it was intended to be plausible) that it wasn't really Toby on his own, and it was hinted at a bit in other spots. Andi in WtWYA and Institutional Memory pretty strongly suggests that Toby's brother leaked the information to Toby, but they never really explored any of it past "Toby's gone, Toby's pardoned" and even that had little tension because we'd already seen Toby in the flash-forward.
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Jul 14, 2011 02:27
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MikeJF posted:It's been a while, but doesn't CJ's reaction when Toby confesses to her pretty much rule out that she had any part in it? To us, probably. I was more talking about the implications on the election and the other characters - the plot basically completely disappears for ten episodes with Toby showing up to occasionally be Josh's sounding board, then out of nowhere you've got the federal prosecutor trying to bring in Leo and CJ as part of a cobspiracy.
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Jul 14, 2011 15:00
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Mu Zeta posted:And that Toby scene on the plane, I don't recall ever seeing that and I swear I've seen all the West Wing multiple times. It's from The Stormy Present in season 5, which was one of the more interesting episodes of that season.
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Jul 26, 2011 02:53
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Chamberk posted:Watching the "Shutdown" plotline in season 5 seems a bit too timely these days. Kinda wish things in Washington could get resolved nice and quickly like in a West Wing episode. In God We Trust's plotline was basically "Congress is playing games with the debt ceiling, Bartlet and Vinick have to be the adults in the room."
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Jul 26, 2011 05:51
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Josh's replacement was Cliff Calley, the Republican Donna dated in season 3. He showed up for a couple episodes and then was an offscreen character in season 7.
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Jul 28, 2011 23:52
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The official explanation which was never really mentioned in the show but popped up in stories in weird places like alternate history mags and in depth profiles was that the show timeline split from our reality in 1974. IIRC it was something along the lines of that Nixon resigned in The West Wing universe before Ford was confirmed as VP, and that Congress ordered a presidential election in 1974 for a new full four year term at the wishes of Acting President Carl Albert, which then knocked off the succeeding cycles by two years. This would probably be constitutional in real life, but since we've never had a full Acting President succeed there's no real precedent. Don't ask me how to explain the full year gap including a midterm election that happens in season five, though.
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Aug 2, 2011 04:53
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Most of season five has the characters acting like pod people. It gets better as season six progresses, especially for Leo post-heart attack and Josh post-Santos.
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Aug 10, 2011 19:36
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It's really only the first three episodes that are problematic. Liftoff is great and after that the campaign stories and new characters start kicking in. I didn't functionally mind CJ as CoS as much as most. Chiefs of staff sometimes get picked from odd places, and she's probably pretty qualified all things considered. oldfan fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Aug 10, 2011 |
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Aug 10, 2011 19:52
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Leo and Annabeth doing screwball comedy was one of the highlights of season seven until, well, you know. So Annabeth leaving the White House was not a bad thing at all!
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Aug 10, 2011 22:40
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Popo posted:@t3ch3; I guess what I meant was "How did Toby get to be on Leo's radar?" He'd won no races at that point and had caused one of his candidates to faint. It doesn't matter and is likely "They just met and some point and Toby impressed Leo" but it's just one of those things I like to wonder about from time to time. Bartlet was running a no hope favorite son campaign in New Hampshire just to make some policy speeches; the only person who thought he could win was Leo. All of the top tier Democratic talent was either with Hoynes or sitting it out. The people that would be staffing a campaign like that would be friends of the candidate or ideological true believers, Toby being the latter.
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Aug 11, 2011 04:23
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I really like the arc from A Change Is Gonna Come to Faith Based Initiative as the campaign takes shape. Those episodes also have a lot of good Bartlet MS stuff.
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Aug 19, 2011 23:04
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myron_cope posted:Are any of those the China trip one? (or is it two?) Yep. I kinda liked that arc. I really hated Kate in the Middle East episodes when she got shoehorned as some sort of godlike figure, but once she went to being a background character she was cool. Mary McCormack is also excellent so that helps.
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Aug 20, 2011 03:02
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myron_cope posted:(picking him for VP never made sense to me) Leo was always portrayed as a big-time national political figure, so I bought it. Even back to the Sorkin years, Josh floated Leo for a Hoynes replacement as VP in both Stirred and Commencement, and Jed originally thought Leo was coming to New Hampshire in Bartlet For America to get support for a presidential run. I think it was a perfectly reasonable twist for the writers.
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Aug 22, 2011 23:25
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t3ch3 posted:It also makes sense as a last minute pick since all of Leo's negatives are already known. Right, and for various reasons, Santos would have had to pick a steady hand who was close to the unions, especially teachers' unions, allied with the Bartlet wing of the party, and had good foreign policy experience. It's possible someone other than Leo would have fit - probably even Governor Baker - but I don't think we know of that person for sure, and there wouldn't have been a lot of other options.
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Aug 22, 2011 23:55
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Sam got mentioned a few times in between his loss in the Congressional campaign and his return as Josh's deputy. Filling in the blank that after he lost he stayed in California to go back into private practice for a ton of money isn't exactly difficult there. It was a nice cameo to bring things full circle.
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Aug 29, 2011 03:08
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Buane posted:Sam was mentioned exactly once in between appearances, and that one mention was a reference to the past. His whereabouts go completely ignored for four years. Not to mention everybody - Sam included - talk several times about how he'll come back after he loses the special election. I can think of twice off the top of my head (called Josh after the senator flip in season 5 and mentioned in the Josh vs. Toby episode in season 6). scarymonkey posted:I think the conservative judge might have been a slight nod to Earl Warren, a Republican appointee that surprised many conservatives by handing down very social liberal decisions. I didn't get that at all. What I did get from the discussion with Chief Justice Baker Lang was that they were highlighting that Justice Mulready was different than the Republican justices who get appointed in our world, in that he would often come to the liberal result from an originalist viewpoint. If anything, that would make him pretty close to Hugo Black.
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Aug 29, 2011 03:29
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bobkatt013 posted:Ah yes the one who was a member of the KKK and helped to pass the civil rights amendment. (To be far he had to be a member in order to get elected) There's no such thing as the Civil Rights Amendment and Black was out of the Senate decades before any of the major civil rights laws passed Congress. However, your point is still valid; Black did vote in the majority in most of the Warren Court discrimination cases, and papers later revealed that he was one of the justices for pushing for even more in that regard. It's regrettable that Black is only remembered for the KKK stuff, because few white southerners did more to end the Jim Crow era than Hugo Black. Anyways, Justice Black is one of the great American jurists and represents a constitutional philosophy that basically doesn't exist anymore. That sort of constitutional textualism was what I got from Mulready in the exchange over DOMA. There are very few modern conservatives that would actually strike DOMA down on Tenth Amendment grounds as Justice Mulready posited, and perhaps none that would have called it an easy case. In that sense, his votes would not be predictable in the typical liberal or conservative sense. The real problem is that the Republican counsel for Senate Judiciary never would have suggested someone like that, she'd have suggested a typical Republican establishment lawyer.
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Aug 29, 2011 03:41
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Diabolik900 posted:What was Will's rationale for Russel being the best candidate? Was it just that he was VP? That's all I remember, but really very few Vice Presidents actually go on to be elected President after. Will thought he could mold Russell into being whatever he wanted since Russell was such a blank slate, and Will also assumed there was something great about Russell because Bartlet and Leo picked him. Russell was the clear frontrunner for most of the cycle, as most untarnished VPs of popular presidents would be. I'm sure that helped.
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Aug 31, 2011 04:11
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Most of the best episodes of the last three seasons, were completely or mostly written by an up-and-coming writer named Debora Cahn, who was Sorkin's protege during season four and wrote the characters in his tone. Here's her list of TWW writing credits: Jefferson Lives Abu el Banat The Supremes No Exit Liftoff Impact Winter Drought Conditions The Ticket Undecideds The Cold Requiem Institutional Memory She ended up on Grey's Anatomy, where she's written most of that show's best episodes of the last few years too. Brad Whitford wrote Faith Based Initiative and Internal Displacement and he pretty much had the right character beats down too. The rest of the seasons five through seven writing teams was very hit and miss.
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Sep 6, 2011 04:35
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If that makes your head spin, try figuring out the late season 5 and early season 6 timeline in a fashion that makes sense.
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Nov 8, 2011 03:07
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Mu Zeta posted:Which season was it where Josh and Toby get into a fist fight in an office? Man that was retarded. Season 6 episode Drought Conditions, which other than the 30 second fight scene is a great episode.
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Nov 13, 2011 01:17
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The most annoying part of Isaac and Ishmael for me was that they delayed the resolution to one of the greatest serial plotlines ever for an extra week to do a play about religious tolerance.
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Apr 19, 2012 21:57
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TheBigBad posted:Yeah tolerance isnt a virtue we should be promoting on television. Tolerance is great. The West Wing did a lot of storylines that portrayed that well. An out of order rushjob episode hamfistedly making that point a couple weeks after 9/11 was not one of them; all everyone wanted to see was the aftermath of the MS storyline. I understand why they did it, but the last thing I wanted at that point of time was to have Josh Lyman vaguely talking about 9/11 and why they hate us.
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Apr 19, 2012 23:19
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TheBigBad posted:No one gives a poo poo how you felt after 9/11 anymore. I'm not "holding a grudge." It's a terrible, terrible episode of television, no plot and afterschool special levels of education on complicated issues. I wouldn't expect anything else for something developed, written, and shot in a little over a week. It was Sorkin and NBC deciding that they just had to be the first people to get a RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES 9/11 episode on television, and to do so they had to do a bad out of continuity episode pushing themes that were insultingly preachy then and sound ridiculous now. It also wasn't the resolution of the cliffhanger. There was no cliffhanger.
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Apr 20, 2012 00:10
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After Leo came back in mid-season 6 they stopped writing him like a pod person, and the Leo as VP candidate stuff was one of my favorite arcs of the series.
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Apr 21, 2012 19:33
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myron cope posted:I think I ask this every time I watch Season 4 (and if not, I definitely think about it every time) but did they already know Sam was leaving at the beginning of it? They set up the Horton Wilder thing in episode 4--was the plan just to have him go out, sacrifice himself, and come back and then it just worked out that he didn't come back? Or did he want to leave after Season 3 and they convinced him to stick around for part of S4 to wrap things up? Yeah, they knew Rob Lowe was leaving at the beginning of the fourth season. I've always assumed he was supposed to win until they went "poo poo, if Sam wins he's still supposed to be around Washington all the time, wouldn't we see him a lot?" Sorkin was pretty much losing his mind at that point; they should have just had him run for California lieutenant governor or something where he could have won and still been an offscreen character.
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May 24, 2012 00:01
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Commander in Chief had an interesting premise and a strong cast but the writing was a mess because they had repeated staff turnover. I think it's still on Netflix and it's worth a watch if you want something quick to breeze through.
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Jul 11, 2012 00:51
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One of the subplots in one of the White House episodes in the sixth season is Will trying to get at everyone who was in the room for the Russell decision to figure out why they picked him, actually.
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Aug 5, 2012 18:31
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The House Republicans foisted a list of unelectable vice presidential options on the White House, not a list of people that would be horrible in the job or couldn't handle presidential duties. Russell was one of the ones that Bartlet and Leo assessed wouldn't be in the overlap group.
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Aug 5, 2012 20:29
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gohuskies posted:And yet the only argument Will makes in favor of Russell being the nominee is "he's the most electable", so Will is either lying or wrong. The other main candidates in the race were a former VP that resigned in disgrace, a three term House backbencher, and a far left Senator running as a one issue candidate on UHC. The runaway frontrunner declined to run right at the New Hampshire filing deadline, remember.
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Aug 5, 2012 23:04
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tomapot posted:My wife and I just started watching the DVDs. I forgot how much we start the show mid-stride in the administration and backfill along the way. And, of course, the major flashback info dump episodes (In the Shadow of Two Gunmen and Bartlet For America) are among the very best couple of the series.
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Sep 14, 2012 23:29
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drawkcab si eman ym posted:Working my way through season 3. Can I watch 4 and then skip to 7? I'm a big Sorkin fan and I don't have the most time in the world right now. Id rather read the Wiki summary of season 5 and 6 than slog through watching it. I'd just watch everything, but you absolutely cannot skip after about the fourth episode of season 6 and know what's going on in season 7; the huge election arc that starts in early-mid season 6 carries the rest of the series.
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Sep 20, 2012 00:25
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If you absolutely must skip around 5 and 6, here's the episodes I would describe as must-watch due to either being very good or containing important plot developments: Season Five 5-1: 7A WF 83429 5-2: The Dogs of War 5-3: Jefferson Lives 5-7: Separation of Powers 5-8: Shutdown 5-9: Abu el Banat 5-10: The Stormy Present (marginal import but I like the episode) 5-15: Full Disclosure (could be skipped) 5-17: The Supremes (this is one of the best episodes of the whole series) Season Six 6-4: Liftoff (I think everything in the season five cliffhanger into season six arc of import gets rolled into the previously ons here) 6-6: The Dover Test 6-7: A Change Is Gonna Come 6-8: In The Room 6-9: Impact Winter 6-10: Faith Based Initiative (this is where the show kinda splits in two for awhile with alternating campaign/governing episodes, the governing-only eps with no campaign interludes are skippable) 6-11: Opposition Research 6-13: King Corn 6-15: Freedonia 6-16: Drought Conditions 6-17: A Good Day 6-18: La Palabra 6-20: In God We Trust 6-21: Things Fall Apart 6-22: 2162 Votes
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Sep 20, 2012 00:49
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Diabolik900 posted:I've been doing my first rewatch of the series lately. Is it wrong for me to assume that Mandy died in the shooting and nobody cared? My assumption has been that she departed the administration in the five to six month time jump between In the shooting and the end of The Midterms.
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Oct 28, 2012 22:31
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Ainsley quitting off-screen sets up the Joe Quincy storyline which ends up turning into the Hoynes storyline.
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Dec 27, 2012 07:20
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TinTower posted:Vinick in his entirety is the West Wing's dream Republican. An atheist, pro-choice, pro-entitlements, realist California farmer/lawyer? He's pretty close to the dream Democrat, too.
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Jan 2, 2013 00:06
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The Warszawa posted:Whatever you might think of the development, how it was handled, and the resolution foisted upon the show, That Scene in 2162 Votes never fails to get right at me. My single favorite shot in the entire series is right after that when Bartlet and Leo pass wordlessly off the stage while the DNC chair runs off the Bartlet administration's accomplishments and the title theme swells. That's the one that gets me.
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Feb 13, 2013 06:58
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