of the West Wing the frantically energetic inhabitants speak modern American English in its highest state of colloquial eloquence. Crafted in the Bush administration’s West
Wing, a holding area for somnambulists, any speech by the President sets a standard so low that Donald Rumsfeld is elevated to the oratorical status of Edmund Burke. When the Founding Fathers were
addressing the question of a national language, German and Hebrew were both considered. After they finally realized that the language in which they were discussing the matter was probably the best
candidate, English won by default. Bush and the rest of the boys make you wonder how it happened. How long does it take them to wish each other good morning? Condoleezza Rice, whose gift for
languages includes her own, must feel like an epidemiologist dealing with a mass outbreak of lock-jaw.
From that angle, the actual West Wing is a wildly improbable fiction. The fictional West Wing is realistic, but only in the sense of reminding you that realism is the most refined form of
manufactured drama. Just how refined, in this case, is best studied by viewing the episodes one after the other. To ease the frustration of waiting for Channel 4 to peel back the camouflage on the
latest instalment, the trainee Wingnut can purchase the whole of the first season on video or, even better, on DVD: twenty-two chapters of the story in a single glorious wodge. The second season
will shortly be forthcoming: I haven’t seen the DVDs yet, but I have been granted access to a set of time-coded tapes. So even as the third season intermittently unfolds on broadcast
television, I have been able to wallow in the forty-four chapters of the first two seasons with full benefit of replay. Sometimes I watch half a dozen episodes in an evening that stretches on into
the night, like Bayreuth with snappier music. Things that struck me as merely wonderful a couple of years ago are now revealed as miraculous. On a one-time basis, a typical episode is so absorbing,
and flies by at such a speed, that the viewer has no time to ask how it was put together. You don’t wonder how they did it. When you start seeing how they did it, you
really
wonder
how they did it.
To start with, there is the dialogue. Aaron Sorkin conceived the series and supervises every line of every episode, even when he does not compose its basic story. He has absorbed the whole
tradition of high-speed, counterpointed dialogue since it first emerged in 1930s screwball comedy and later on spread into drama in both the cinema and television. Before
The West Wing
, it
was not unknown for straight drama to be accelerated by comic timing: Sipowicz in
NYPD Blue
would never have talked that way if his writers had not grown up watching
Sergeant
Bilko
. But Sorkin has pushed the heritage to such a culmination that there is no possible further development except decadence. Even as it stands, the complexity of the exposition verges on
the incomprehensible, especially if you don’t know much about the American political system. (Since there aren’t all that many Americans who know about it either, in its homeland the
show is widely recommended by schoolteachers as a painless civics lesson.) Sometimes you have to wait for half an episode to find out that the two different sets of initials bandied about in the
first scene stand for a bill and a committee that will meet each other in the last. But usually a quick reference to the Second Amendment will be expanded later on by an argument about the
desirability of banning private guns, and the argument will be illustrated by somebody getting shot.
The otherwise all-inclusive talk has only one conspicuous absence: obscenity. In the film
Wag the Dog
, David Mamet’s enjoyable dialogue had the advantage that the characters were
allowed to swear.
The West Wing
makes you wonder whether that is much of an advantage at all. Unlike
The Sopranos
, which as an HBO cable product enables
Wing, a holding area for somnambulists, any speech by the President sets a standard so low that Donald Rumsfeld is elevated to the oratorical status of Edmund Burke. When the Founding Fathers were
addressing the question of a national language, German and Hebrew were both considered. After they finally realized that the language in which they were discussing the matter was probably the best
candidate, English won by default. Bush and the rest of the boys make you wonder how it happened. How long does it take them to wish each other good morning? Condoleezza Rice, whose gift for
languages includes her own, must feel like an epidemiologist dealing with a mass outbreak of lock-jaw.
From that angle, the actual West Wing is a wildly improbable fiction. The fictional West Wing is realistic, but only in the sense of reminding you that realism is the most refined form of
manufactured drama. Just how refined, in this case, is best studied by viewing the episodes one after the other. To ease the frustration of waiting for Channel 4 to peel back the camouflage on the
latest instalment, the trainee Wingnut can purchase the whole of the first season on video or, even better, on DVD: twenty-two chapters of the story in a single glorious wodge. The second season
will shortly be forthcoming: I haven’t seen the DVDs yet, but I have been granted access to a set of time-coded tapes. So even as the third season intermittently unfolds on broadcast
television, I have been able to wallow in the forty-four chapters of the first two seasons with full benefit of replay. Sometimes I watch half a dozen episodes in an evening that stretches on into
the night, like Bayreuth with snappier music. Things that struck me as merely wonderful a couple of years ago are now revealed as miraculous. On a one-time basis, a typical episode is so absorbing,
and flies by at such a speed, that the viewer has no time to ask how it was put together. You don’t wonder how they did it. When you start seeing how they did it, you
really
wonder
how they did it.
To start with, there is the dialogue. Aaron Sorkin conceived the series and supervises every line of every episode, even when he does not compose its basic story. He has absorbed the whole
tradition of high-speed, counterpointed dialogue since it first emerged in 1930s screwball comedy and later on spread into drama in both the cinema and television. Before
The West Wing
, it
was not unknown for straight drama to be accelerated by comic timing: Sipowicz in
NYPD Blue
would never have talked that way if his writers had not grown up watching
Sergeant
Bilko
. But Sorkin has pushed the heritage to such a culmination that there is no possible further development except decadence. Even as it stands, the complexity of the exposition verges on
the incomprehensible, especially if you don’t know much about the American political system. (Since there aren’t all that many Americans who know about it either, in its homeland the
show is widely recommended by schoolteachers as a painless civics lesson.) Sometimes you have to wait for half an episode to find out that the two different sets of initials bandied about in the
first scene stand for a bill and a committee that will meet each other in the last. But usually a quick reference to the Second Amendment will be expanded later on by an argument about the
desirability of banning private guns, and the argument will be illustrated by somebody getting shot.
The otherwise all-inclusive talk has only one conspicuous absence: obscenity. In the film
Wag the Dog
, David Mamet’s enjoyable dialogue had the advantage that the characters were
allowed to swear.
The West Wing
makes you wonder whether that is much of an advantage at all. Unlike
The Sopranos
, which as an HBO cable product enables
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