A nice chap wrote in the other day about my blog and mentioned The West Wing, the American television series about the White House senior staff. Now, I feel fairly confident talking about The West Wing, even if it sounds pretentious for someone who also likes Buffy the Vampire Slayer; I hesitated and finally didn't put The Economist among my favorite reading material, because to be completely honest there's an element of trying to overreach a bit intellectually in subscribing to that magaazine (sorry, newspaper). Indeed, most weeks I rarely get past the obituary (I'm a back-flipper); so my week begins by finding out who died. If I'm really industrious by Wednesday or Thursday I can get past Books and Arts; on blue moon Sundays I actually get to News and find out what happened in the world two weeks ago.
But The West Wing I do love; and I'll say this just once, I love it the way I love Buffy. The thing is, I'm not really into vampires and goth, and rarely even watch horror movies; in the same way, I'm only marginally interested in American executive politics. But Buffy the Vampire Slayer was simply great television, hitting its high notes in Seasons Four and Five. The problem of initiating someone who wouldn't normally watch this sort of thing is that you have to fill in the cumulative mythology from Seasons One to Three, which are good television but not outstanding. What you get in Season Four is the sense of a creator who suddenly realized the possibilities of television. Continuing storylines aren't a new thing; the 80s had Dynasty and Falcon Crest. What suddenly seemed to happen with late Buffy, and eventually with The West Wing and especially with Alias, is that a new form of tightly-written, well-directed, visionary storytelling was attempted.
No single element taken alone is actually new, of course. Well-written doesn't get better than Joss Whedon's "Hush" (Buffy 4); for well-directed just about any of Thomas Schlamme's ten-scenes-in-one-take (including impossibly difficult steadicam shots and lots of backlighting) stuff; for demanding a lot of the audience, Alias 3 is mind-boggling if you didn't see the first two seasons. But the strange thing about anything written for television is that it is not end-oriented: in other words; the basic rule of writing a story, which is to have a beginning and work towards and end, doesn't apply here. The point of television is to have as many seasons as the networks will give you. At the same time, how do you get an audience involved in the story if there isn't a story? This sounds like making too much of a couple of good TV series. Appreciate, yes; but claim that there's something new going on there? Yes, I do.
If you really want to appreciate it, invest in the DVDs. Not for the commentary, but so that you can watch it sequentially rather than as a weekly snippet. I watched The West Wing's first four seasons in one week. Aside from the fact that you can see the sets evolve so that they're not obviously walking through a door into a different time of day, you get a sense of the broad canvas, the larger story. I suddenly remembered the last time I burned night into day by being so engrossed; it was JRR Tolkien (and, to a lesser extent, the Harry Potter novels).
I wrote about small being the new big and big the new small? Forget the size or shape of the screen. The new format is video come of age. Imagine that for years everyone had written novels and short stories; some novelists ran long: Dickens, Dostoyevsky (which Alias has been compared to, by the way); but Proust is long not just quantitatively. It's a long novel in a different way; and there's something "unending" about it as well; and I'm not talking about the experience of reading it. Okay, it's a stretch; but there's something new happening in the format of motion pictures, and it's not happening on the big screen; it's already taking shape in 4:3; in your living room.
And now back to intellectual pretense
1 comment:
I'm sort of a devotee of The West Wing, at least so far as Aaron Sorkin's writing lasted. I tend to come to things late and I remember the pleasure of discovering it, watching episode after episode in order, whenever I was sharing a house with my older brother three years ago and whose addiction I was forced to partake in, quickly to enjoy.
Quirkily, he was also a big Buffy fan - well, even more so - which I didn't quite get into, putting it down as I did then to his penchant for the petite and flimsy in the fairer sex. But, I didn't persevere, and I must have a look at the later series. My brother has everyone of them. Well, he manages a DVD internet postal retailer, so there are some advantages.
What you say about the ever-developing plotline, or the 'Previously, on ...' innovation, I think really began properly with NYPD Blue, which I also came late to. But retrospectively, I think it's first series was curiously the best one and my younger brother and I would revel at finding the subtlest reference on a second watching that would have seemed impossible on a single view.
What The West Wing does best for me, which is something which Scrubs seems to imitate, is use dialogue in a quick-fire twinkling way, but then arrive at some sort of a worthy conclusion which fires the civil (or social) idealism once more.
About the idea of a story that is someway unending, those are the ones which seem the more real. Chekhov just has charcters walking around in different stages of malaise on their own individual uncertain pilgrimages, but the untidiness feels real; and if we ever get to the end of a story and do not care what happens to the characters after its resolution, then to an extent the story has failed. What dominates for me in The West Wing (and NYPD Blue) is the drama of character par excellence, pitted against the roles they are struggling to fulfill.
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