(If you came here for my notes on the Hillary Clinton Masterclass episodes, I’ve moved them to their own page. This makes them easier for Google to find. )
For the past two years or so, mostly during the COVID quarantine, I’ve been doing some research for the podcast The West Wing Thing.
Roughly three years ago, podcaster and comedian Dave Anthony (The Dollop, with Gareth Reynolds) and screenwriter Josh Olson (A History of Violence, The Movies that Made Me with Joe Dante) embraced a radically conservative, neo-medieval Catholic faith that required years of self-abnegation and physical penance for sins real and imagined, and decided that watching every episode of The West Wing would be appropriately painful and scourging. At least, that’s the explanation that makes the most sense to me. They might disagree. But, they decided to do a podcast where they’d go over each episode and examine the show’s political assumptions, overt and unspoken. That’s 7 seasons of 22 episodes each, totalling 154 episodes, and you’re probably realizing how persuasive that crazy-Catholic theory really is.
I assure you, it has nothing to do with those crypto-billions funneled through clandestine bitmining servers in the Nordenskjold Archipelago.
Josh roped me into doing short notes on the upcoming episodes, because he liked some stuff I’d posted and thought I might catch things he and Dave had missed. God help me, I’m a sucker for flattery.
But why do this to a TV show that went off the air in 2008? Well, unlike most shows, The West Wing enjoys an ongoing impact on our politics and culture.
The project began, more or less, with a 2017 article by Canadian writer Luke Savage for Current Affairs that discussed the importance this show had for American liberals. At the time, in the aftermath of the 2016 election and Donald Trump’s Presidency, Democrats were rewatching the series as a balm for severe political trauma. But even before them, the show had inspired people to seek employment in the political sector as policy wonks; both Corey Robin (“The Obamanauts,” Dissent) and Nathan J. Robinson (“The Obama Boys,” Current Affairs) wrote reviews of books by Obama Administration staffers, many of who cited the show as more than an inspiration: some even claimed that they tried to find a working life that matched the show’s fantasies. The trend continues under Biden, when Press Secretary Jen Psaki claimed that a 2011 bingewatch of the show spurred her to leave a career in the public relations industry to go do public relations for the public sector.
The consensus of the above writers is that The West Wing‘s influence has been extremely bad— that it contributed to a complacency and smugness that protects an aggressive centrism, flatters the Right and maligns the Left, and which prevented these people from making any great accomplishments when in power. Robinson did another article, “What Happens in the West Wing,” which sums up this argument, and one of the podcast’s listeners– I wish I had his name to cite– commented that The West Wing may be “the most measurably consequential work of American political art since The Birth of a Nation.” Its impact may be almost as malign. One of the regular features on the podcast is a segment called “West Wing Brain,” where real-world examples of this complacent liberalism are brought to light.
So the podcast has racked up 150 episodes, and as I write this (March 7, 2022), we’re heading into the final seventh season. My writeups have grown a little. The first season or so would be maybe a page or two of short comments. But then I’d listen to the podcast, and Josh, or Dave, or one of their guests, would make some wonderfully perfect comment, or notice something I hadn’t. And thanks to COVID, I had all this free time and all this psychological isolation. So the writeups got longer, more structured, more detailed, so now they usually run close to fifteen pages on average. I’m thinking of putting them on a website, for research and posterity and my own egomaniacal lust for Internet glory. But that’d mean going over them and rechecking and maybe even rewatching and…. yeah, not rushing on that project. At least, not unless we get a book deal. Or another pandemic.