The West Wing Revisited: More like what kind of year has it been, amirite?
Welcome back to Kheiro Magazine’s West Wing recaps, where things get dicey
It’s the end of the season, my babies! So much has happened. Toby arranged for a veterans funeral on Christmas, Sam talked down to lots of women, CJ got a goldfish. So many memories.
First of all, it bears mentioning that A-Sorks ends the first season of all his shows with the same episode title: What Kind of Day Has It Been. Why? Like, every episode of television answers that question. Except the ones that take place over more than one day. I usually find creator catchphrases to be cute. Like how many works from former The State performers have this exchange:
Person One: What are we doing?
Person Two: I don’t know.
[makeout ensues]
Or those cigarettes from The X Files that pop up on other shows. That’s cute. What Kind of Day Has It Been is a very generic question from a very generic man. Moving on.
Season finales are important episodes. They put a lil bow on what we’ve accomplished, and how we’ve grown over 22 episodes. They also have to give a little reason to come back and watch next year. Ending with all our friends under siege by white supremacist teens is quite the hook. An audacious move, like trying to kill someone with a handgun in a building several blocks away and two stories up.
Starting an episode in media res is also a ballsy move, though not quite on the level of killing the president. (Or did we? Tune in next season to find out!) The cold open sets up lots of little oblique clues to build hella suspense. Toby gets a phone call, which Sam answers. Sam signals Toby, who signals Josh, who tries to signal Leo. It’s a great bit.
Leo: What’s that?
Josh: It’s the signal.
Leo: I thought that was the signal for the other thing?
Josh: It’s the signal for this thing, now.
Leo: When did that happen?
Josh: It happened just… who cares, Leo? It’s the signal for this thing, now.
Leo: So, we’re totally out of the woods?
Josh: Go tell the President.
What does any of it mean? We’re totally out of the woods? Leo asks Josh. What woods? Who’s we? What was the other thing? What’s this thing?
I’m going to briefly summarize the events of this episode, so we have time and energy to assess the first season of The West Wing under Trump holistically.
Toby has a brother?! And he’s in space?! And the shuttle malfunctions?! And that shuttle is the very real Columbia, which did explode on reentry but not yet because this is the year 2000?! Fucking wild. Columbia successfully landing is what the signal was for.
The “other thing” was an American pilot who was shot down in the no-fly zone over Iraq. They did a covert rescue mission, and CJ had to lie to the press about it. Danny got mad that CJ lied to him, personally. Because Danny just sucks at his job, which is to be an impartial observer of the White House. They got the pilot and that’s nice.
Josh had to jog.
Charlie was feeling like his ideas weren’t valuable because he’s the least educated and experienced person at his job, and honestly, same. Related: I watched an episode of Psych since we last spoke. It was a mystery set in a fake version of The Bachelor and guest starred Valerie from Sabrina the Teenage Witch, the pilot of the plane on Lost, Betty’s dad on Riverdale, Wayne Brady, and The Miz from wrestling/The Real World. It was a lot.
The president has a town hall with youths, where he yells at millennials for caring more about their avocado toast than voting. Cool. We’re “convinced that the generation before them has ransomed their generation’s future.” We’re convinced of that because it happened, my dude. America is a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream that boomers gave to the Koch brothers, who ate all of the Wavy Gravy and put the empty carton back in the freezer. Also the freezer is projectile vomiting CFC’s.
This is where the assassination attempt takes place, at the end of the ep. Officer CSI sees a proud boy and starts looking around wildly for something. Meanwhile everybody else is acting like it’s all chill. No disrespect to Jorja Fox, but if you’re spidey sense is tingling, get your protectee in the car before you do a lookyloo. Then there’s so much gunfire, and even though I know everyone turns out OK in season 2, I started weeping uncontrollably because of the NEWS and all the BAD STUFF ALL THE TIME. Then the happy credits music started playing.
Thus ends season 1 of The West Wing. My husband pointed out that this episode had a lot of stuff that has carried on in the public consciousness for the almost 20 years since it aired.
- Iraq
- White supremacist teens
- Women in power used as tools of the imperial state
- Mass shootings
- Mocking of women’s sports (everybody thinks it’s weird that the President wants to watch a women’s softball game after the town hall)
- Lazy millennials
- Elizabeth Moss in peril
Doing this rewatch, there have been lots of weird moments of synchronicity. I watched the episode about gun control the same week as Las Vegas. I watched this episode the same day as the March for Our Lives. The pilot has a prominent subplot about Cuban refugees, which I saw during the height of furor over Syria and DACA. But the syncs go deeper than particular episodes. The West Wing is a show about a president who came into the presidency without the popular vote, who is misleading the public about his health, who is never in the same town as his wife, who has multiple daughters but only seems to care about one, and who only acts on things that are personal to him. Sound familiar?
One big difference between Bartlet and Trump is that Bartlet spent his first year trying to be conciliatory. He wanted to appeal to the half of the country that didn’t vote for him. The arc of this season is Bartlet deciding to abandon that frankly sisyphean task and just fuck shit up. As we’ve seen in real life, it’s definitely effective in the short-term.
This rewatch has really brought to the forefront the underlying structural problems in this country: sexism, racism, homophobia, soft money and a borderline useless mainstream press. When the show aired, these problems seemed, if not solved, than at least on the cusp of solving. Like syphilis …which incidentally is making a comeback in the US. These problems were ignored and left to fester, and became gaping lesions. A gross metaphor for a sad reality. Let’s all work to make next season better.
For more of Kheiro’s West Wing recaps, visit: kheiromag.com/westwing. And be sure to sign up to receive Kheiro straight to your inbox.
