|
bobkatt013 posted:Ya I know that is one of the things that pissed off Rob Lowe. That it was suppose to be his show instead it became Martin Sheens. Also Mandy sucked so so much. What, really? Because I always thought Josh Lyman was the undeniable star of the show, even if Seaborn is better looking than him. Although there was that one line about how he was gonna run for president in the episode about chess. Old James posted:Ok, I lump 18th & Potomac in with Two Cathedrals (wiki'd the names) since I saw them in one sitting. But keep in mind the the term jump the shark doesn't mark the low point of a show, just when it is starting its decline. Wait so when an episode is so loving good that even if every other episode is better than whatever other television available, it is, strictly speaking, not the apex, you've jumped the shark? Jumping the shark is where you witness such a nadir in production that you realize what you're watching isn't worth it anymore, if it ever was, and you stop spending time on it; I never did that with the West Wing.
|
#
¿
Jul 7, 2011 13:20
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2024 13:00 |
|
|
t3ch3 posted:During my rewatch I've become a huge Margaret fan. Just a couple of episodes into season two and she's already crashed the White House email system by forwarding an email about muffins and told Leo that she's willing to forge the President's signature on a document handing power over to the Vice President. I appreciated the episode where CJ asks her to remain on-board as lead admin; it was only being called a "strange woman who I've never really understood" that she kind of became a "real" character for me, and not an object that they added to the show for coy levity.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 23, 2011 08:18
|
|
|
That episode is the best because it indicates the creators of the show and I have a rapport on the Carol of Bells, the hauntingest Christmas tune on earth.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2011 08:39
|
|
|
Do we think he could have braced the president while the man stood to pee?
|
|
#
¿
Oct 17, 2011 21:17
|
|
|
Of course it also underlines how catastrophically they handled Will's progression as a character in the talent vacuum of season 6. "no really guys the vice president guys no really guys come on he's the vice president guys come on"
|
|
#
¿
May 22, 2012 01:04
|
|
|
Hobo Erotica posted:Then in the next episode Toby orders the kids pizza - "They deliver don't they?" A Good Day is such a great episode. I went a while without watching any West Wing and then was explaining to someone why it was so great, and came up with the three greatest off-the-wall serial plots to explain how great the situational narratives were. When I went back to rewatch, my mind was loving blown to discover all three were the same episode and not pieces of three individual ones.
|
|
#
¿
May 27, 2012 05:51
|
|
|
ABIGAIL your BREASTS are MAGNIFICENT.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 11, 2012 15:21
|
|
|
Joementum posted:The show was also getting terrible ratings and was really only kept alive because it was an Emmy factory and had the wealthiest viewer demographics of any show on TV. In the last season it was getting beat badly by Commander in Chief, the ABC show where Geena Davis was President. What, seriously? I went and watched a bunch of "best of" clips of that, once, and it seemed so throughly mediocre. Wasn't the principal crisis of one season just a rip of the West Wing submarine episode? FISHMANPET posted:About the most criticism you could levy is that we never heard of Haffley before Season 5, but we never heard about anybody before or after they played their part in that week's storyline. They had a little pool of miscellaneous policy-makers who were sometimes heard of but almost never seen. I think Stackhouse comes up as an arbitrary name in the very first episode, and then it's like three seasons until he does a filibuster.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 11, 2012 00:29
|
|
|
gently caress, yeah. Favorite part is when the landlord comes to check on josh and raps on his door. It's abrupt and overbearing and incredibly loving obnoxious. It's a small thing in a long episode of small things that put me closer to the character's state of mind than any other presentation I've ever experienced. I really appreciate the decision to close the episode with the Carol of the Bells, too. Long before the West Wing I thought it was the perfect gloomy christmas song. The words tell you to be happy but the melody is so melancholy and haunting. Noel owns.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 14, 2012 04:54
|
|
|
My favorite lovely pat argument is the one where Donna is talking to Jack Reese to about wasteful military spending and 300$ ashtrays, and he justifies them by procuring one he apparently stole and smashing with a wrench. Then he reminds her, sardonically, that sometimes submarines get hit by torpedoes or something. And, it's like, why do you need glass ashtrays at all? Go hit a piece of sheet metal with a hammer a couple times and make your own, you jackass.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2012 08:33
|
|
|
Plucky Brit posted:During the space race the US spent millions producing a pen that would work in zero-gravity, the Russians used a pencil. They both used pencils, and then an independent inventor came up with a pen on his own initiative and NASA bought some from him so they wouldn't have to worry about floating graphite shorting out their electronics. king of no pants posted:Schiff is really an amazing actor and it's a goddamned crime that he doesn't get more work than he does. He was also in Burn Notice! But he has one talking scene and then they murder him~
|
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2012 10:48
|
|
|
I am stunned at how well Allison Janney has held up and how well Bradley Whitford has not. Josh 
|
|
#
¿
Sep 20, 2012 16:20
|
|
|
Hell, in the very episode that Bartlet falls over he has a conversation with Leo and it's clear that's the first time they've ever discussed it.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 7, 2012 17:07
|
|
|
MC Fruit Stripe posted:A bit more obscure (ie, fewer people knew what the reveal would be), he has like 9 different characters say that the Rwandans are trading houses for the night just so he can do the dramatic "they're raping each other" reveal. I liked that part. Captures pretty well the sense of being in a room with a bunch of people who know how much more the world blows than you do.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 20, 2013 21:42
|
|
|
I was let down a lot by the fact that we never actually get to see anything pertaining to the space shuttle. I think that's an enormous oversight for a visual medium. We got to see it when they assassinated the foreign dignitary by getting him off his plane in the middle of the night, we got to see an agent with a hole in her head when Zoey got kidnapped, and when the hurricane knocks over the tender boat, Bartlet huddles next to a radio in his office counseling its signal officer. So I'll concede that it might have been ridiculous to conjure the special effects for wind and rain, and maybe an action sequence for the SWAT team that murked Zoey's kidnappers would have been outside of the show's scope, but at the best of times, they always found a way to get us in physical contact with the current events happening outside of the West Wing itself. With the space shuttle thing they could have done anything from a begrudging blast-off sequence at a military installation, to a shot of a couple guys in space suits waving at television cameras on a tarmac, to just having some the astronauts show up at the White House to be received as guests. The showrunners never really made the effort to obscure the fact that the whole ordeal was a cheap plot point to gently caress around with Toby for a while, and that's kind of unfortunate.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 10, 2013 12:15
|
|
|
I came to that same conclusion myself. So did the writers, honestly. I think Rob Lowe got fit to a character that Rob Lowe could play masterfully: Sam is youthful, charismatic, and sort of silly. But those traits don't peg him as a kingmaker. Rob Lowe makes an excellent assistant to the Whitehouse director of communications, but ultimately, the assistant the Whitehouse director of communications does not move plots.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 27, 2013 03:53
|
|
|
I would be super proud to have that site in my portfolio and ur dumb if you think the significant drive for its creation wasn't the desire to demonstrate skill without just using lorum ipsum filler text, instead of a self-sufficient maniacal love for an hour of television.
|
|
#
¿
May 22, 2014 00:50
|
|
|
Victor Vermis posted:I don't get it. The post you're referring to is, itself, referring to this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQoGfOBTx6E It's the line of succession he's talking about, and the problem Joementum is talking about is that that it poises a significant problem, in terms of aggravating destabilization, if it's not secured zealously. The West Wing displays two crises of leadership. The first is the one that Leo's talking about; Although recently they've been very high-profile (Dick Cheney was arguably the actual man of substance in the GWB administration), the Vice President is historically a very weak figure who the president ropes into his campaign to diversify his ticket, not assure a strong successor. LBJ, for example, was dogshit and had to make appointments if he wanted to have a word with JFK, who preferred the council of his brother bobby. So let's say JFK didn't get killed in the attack on his motorcade; let's say he was put into a coma, instead. LBJ is his successor by statute, but that's not the power structure of the administration; everyone who works in the whitehouse looks to anybody but LBJ for their marching orders. So whose side are you on? Whose side is the cabinet on? Whose side the millitary on? The other big deal goes down when Bartlet recuses himself of executive power after Zoe gets kidnapped and the Speaker of the House takes the post. If some tea party fucks show up at the Shake Shack while Biden and Obama are making an appearance and detonate a bomb that manages to kill both of them, then John Boner (R) is King America and there's gently caress all you get to do about it. Which is probably exactly what a non-trivial number of people who talk about killing the president would actually prefer. Is a line of succession that sanctions the turnover of government to the opposition party in the wake of an assassination that may or may not have been engineered by members of the opposition party one that you want to stand behind? The line of succession, if you care to look at it, is a band of total unworthies, split between officials with no connection to the mandate that elected the president (Such as the Speaker of the House) and holders of appointed posts for which there was never any election at all (like the loving Secretary of Agriculture). Those are two different, and in fact, mutually exclusive types of heir. But the problems poised by succession, to me, are not very difficult to answer. For all of Toby's outrage that Leo, an unelected official, was nonetheless permitted to exert de facto sovereign power during the 100-minute crisis after the shooting, the truth of the matter is that the President has always been capable and allowed to turn over the decision-making responsibility to whichever advisers (or even just adviser) he wants. There is nothing that textually prevents him from assuming the role of a figurehead and do whatever his Chief of Staff (or whoever) tells him to do. And this state of affairs has arguably been the actual case on many decisions of monumental importance and even entire administrations! So it's perfectly reasonable that everybody in the line of succession be persons that the President is allowed to appoint or fire, because those people (in the event of succession) will ultimately derive their legitimacy from the electoral mandate that selected the person who chose them. The rules of succession are muddled by federalist difficulties that have been largely put to bed at this point. The office of Vice President, for example is, an office invented as a way to get electors to keep from all voting for the guy from their own state. That's arguably stupid as gently caress, even in the context of the 18th century, but I guess it's a testament to the kind of anxieties some of those assholes were wringing their hands about two and a half centuries ago.
|
|
#
¿
May 22, 2014 07:38
|
|
|
I don't really accept that a meritorious leader should be "hawkish" or not without a distinction in purpose. To that end, I think the characters acquit themselves reasonably, when it's said and done. Bartlett is, by the third season, again portrayed as being nervous and compulsive about a military affair where he wants to go get his guys, and Leo again preaches restraint. CJ is eager, on several occasions, to agitate, when it comes to alliances of convenience with desert theocracies where they beat women. And there's Toby with the ever-coherent standpoint of "they'll like us when we win!" policy of maximal foreign aid as the primary means of getting his way in the long run, which is consistent with his zealous defense of cultural spending in general.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 11, 2015 14:42
|
|
|
Ellie wouldn't have matched him in his service to the President and his love of the White House. Charlie was a charismatic and driven dude and he hooked up with the available Bartlett daughter who was down for that. Ellie had daddy issues and got what she went looking for: an empty suit with zero convictions or capacity to hold the limelight.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 11, 2015 14:51
|
|
|
A Good Day also features the invasion of Canada, right? Basically it's an episode with three B-plots (and a C-plot), but those three happen to be some of my favorite three B-plots in the whole series. I was telling someone, once, about why they should watch The West Wing once and drew reference to each of them in turn, thinking, at the time, that they were from seperate episodes. It blew my mind when I circled back around on a rewatch and found them consolidated.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 3, 2016 17:01
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2024 13:00 |
|
|
Mooseontheloose posted:Noel continues to be one of the best written pieces of television ever. The thing that really gets me about Noel is the sound direction. My first time watching it, I was wearing headphones, and the booming imposition of the knock at Josh's door is... It's abrupt, it's grating, it made me want to smash a glass in outrage. And then they close on the Carol of the Bells, which is the best Christmas song, and a perfect expression of the episode's mood: the lyrics assure you that you should be happy, but the melody is hostile and somber.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 11, 2016 07:13
|
|