anybody in the cast to say
anything at all – try to imagine a sentence from Tony that doesn’t include a four-letter word –
The West Wing
is financed and first broadcast by the NBC network and
therefore rules out any swear word you can think of except ‘arse’, which scarcely sounds like a swear word at all when spelled and pronounced in the American way, as a perissodactyl
mammal of the horse family. (Here I attempt to echo the relentless pedantry of President Bartlet, an affliction from which President Bush is notably free.) When characters refer to each other or
themselves as being pissed, it doesn’t even mean they are drunk. It is merely the American way of saying they are pissed off with each other, which they frequently are, even if they are
pursuing the same objective. Usefully deprived of profanity as an easy shock effect, the vigour of the dialogue still depends on conflict, and thus further depends on an American cultural feature
strange to us.
*
In the British version of the English language, we will go out of our way to avoid verbal confrontation even with enemies. The American version thrives on verbal confrontation
even between friends. The people of
The West Wing
all adore each other, and you can tell by the way they find quarrel in a straw. The quarrel, however, is rarely a screaming match. When
fighting for advantage, they up the speed, not the volume. Toby Ziegler, the Chief of Communications who is most often caught between administration policies and his personal beliefs – this
is a Democrat administration, but one of the show’s binding themes concerns the distorting pressure of political realities on liberal principles – is allowed only the occasional
pop-eyed crescendo. When Josh Lyman, his deputy, raised his voice in the President’s private office, it was because of post-traumatic stress disorder. Somebody had shot him during what looked
like an armed attack on the President at the end of the first season. It also looked like the potential mass write-out that once climaxed a season of
Dynasty
so that the actors would
moderate their demands in the next salary round. (Joan Collins was placed at the bottom of the pile of bodies, for purposes of encouragement to her agent.) In fact, however,
The West Wing
near-massacre was an attempt by white supremacists to nail the President’s black personal assistant Charlie, who had enraged them by forming a miscegenetic alliance with the President’s
daughter. Enraged in his turn, Toby spent a whole episode looking for a gimmick to offset the drawbacks of the Second Amendment by finding a way around the First. He was on a personal quest to
subvert the Constitution, and had to be reminded that the document had been framed against exactly that impulse. Toby did quite a lot of yelling before his colleagues calmed him down to his usual
brooding mutter, but he never ceased to be articulate either way. Nobody ever does. Even the token Republicans can pack a page into a paragraph. There has never been dialogue like it, but little of
it can be quoted in the form of one-liners, because there are very few of them. The wit in
The West Wing
is a lot funnier than anything in
Cheers
,
Friends
,
Frasier
or for that matter
The Importance of Being Earnest
, but most of it comes up in the interchange between serious characters. Which brings us to another trump in the
show’s unbeatable hand: the acting.
With a few exceptions, the standard of acting is uniformly stratospheric, but even her colleagues agree on ranking Allison Janney as beyond praise. In the role of C. J. Cregg, the White House
press secretary, she is currently the most admired thespian in America. Before she was handed the script of
The West Wing
pilot, fans of Janney had to search her out in some pretty
off-trail movies, and when the movies were mainstream she was rarely in them for more than a few minutes. In
American Beauty
you could see her, briefly, being downtrodden. In
Drop
anything at all – try to imagine a sentence from Tony that doesn’t include a four-letter word –
The West Wing
is financed and first broadcast by the NBC network and
therefore rules out any swear word you can think of except ‘arse’, which scarcely sounds like a swear word at all when spelled and pronounced in the American way, as a perissodactyl
mammal of the horse family. (Here I attempt to echo the relentless pedantry of President Bartlet, an affliction from which President Bush is notably free.) When characters refer to each other or
themselves as being pissed, it doesn’t even mean they are drunk. It is merely the American way of saying they are pissed off with each other, which they frequently are, even if they are
pursuing the same objective. Usefully deprived of profanity as an easy shock effect, the vigour of the dialogue still depends on conflict, and thus further depends on an American cultural feature
strange to us.
*
In the British version of the English language, we will go out of our way to avoid verbal confrontation even with enemies. The American version thrives on verbal confrontation
even between friends. The people of
The West Wing
all adore each other, and you can tell by the way they find quarrel in a straw. The quarrel, however, is rarely a screaming match. When
fighting for advantage, they up the speed, not the volume. Toby Ziegler, the Chief of Communications who is most often caught between administration policies and his personal beliefs – this
is a Democrat administration, but one of the show’s binding themes concerns the distorting pressure of political realities on liberal principles – is allowed only the occasional
pop-eyed crescendo. When Josh Lyman, his deputy, raised his voice in the President’s private office, it was because of post-traumatic stress disorder. Somebody had shot him during what looked
like an armed attack on the President at the end of the first season. It also looked like the potential mass write-out that once climaxed a season of
Dynasty
so that the actors would
moderate their demands in the next salary round. (Joan Collins was placed at the bottom of the pile of bodies, for purposes of encouragement to her agent.) In fact, however,
The West Wing
near-massacre was an attempt by white supremacists to nail the President’s black personal assistant Charlie, who had enraged them by forming a miscegenetic alliance with the President’s
daughter. Enraged in his turn, Toby spent a whole episode looking for a gimmick to offset the drawbacks of the Second Amendment by finding a way around the First. He was on a personal quest to
subvert the Constitution, and had to be reminded that the document had been framed against exactly that impulse. Toby did quite a lot of yelling before his colleagues calmed him down to his usual
brooding mutter, but he never ceased to be articulate either way. Nobody ever does. Even the token Republicans can pack a page into a paragraph. There has never been dialogue like it, but little of
it can be quoted in the form of one-liners, because there are very few of them. The wit in
The West Wing
is a lot funnier than anything in
Cheers
,
Friends
,
Frasier
or for that matter
The Importance of Being Earnest
, but most of it comes up in the interchange between serious characters. Which brings us to another trump in the
show’s unbeatable hand: the acting.
With a few exceptions, the standard of acting is uniformly stratospheric, but even her colleagues agree on ranking Allison Janney as beyond praise. In the role of C. J. Cregg, the White House
press secretary, she is currently the most admired thespian in America. Before she was handed the script of
The West Wing
pilot, fans of Janney had to search her out in some pretty
off-trail movies, and when the movies were mainstream she was rarely in them for more than a few minutes. In
American Beauty
you could see her, briefly, being downtrodden. In
Drop
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