Funny, Didn't Feel Like A Marathon

While debating with ourself as we did in this decade-late encomium for the TV series The West Wing as to whether to buy the boxed DVD set of the entire seven seasons or to instead buy as separate items only the four boxed DVD sets of Seasons 1-4 as after Season 4 the show's creator and almost sole writer, Aaron Sorkin, left the show, the following seasons written and produced by others, our mind was made up in favor of the latter choice after we viewed on Bravo a rerun of a certain episode from Season 1.

To the casual eye and ear, nothing about the episode was amiss. We, however, paying attention with something more than a casual eye and ear, knew within less than sixty seconds that something was very much amiss. The dialogue, although it sounded all right was in fact all wrong. Its tempo, its rhythm, its counterpoint, its melody were all just a bit "off". Something was missing. In short, all the notes were sounded and in place but the music was absent. And when the credits flashed by, we saw that Sorkin had had no hand in its writing; one of the three episodes of the eighty-eight that constitute Seasons 1-4 where Sorkin was not at least one of the co-writers.

Accordingly, we purchased the four boxed DVD sets of Seasons 1-4 (Season 1, Season 2, Season 3, Season 4), our plan being to view two episodes a day until we'd viewed all 88 episodes.

Yeah. That worked out real well. Like resolving to eat only two pistachio nuts at a sitting. We began viewing Season 1 early Saturday morning, and ended 20-some hours later after viewing all 22 Season 1 episodes without interruption except for brief breaks between episodes for food and other calls of nature.

What an extraordinary achievement for broadcast network television was (is) The West Wing. Everything about the series is peerless — from Sorkin's writing (never in the history of TV drama series dialogue has the many-times-uttered, single-word line "OK" or "Yeah" been so eloquently expressive), to the work of the creator of the series's visual style, Thomas Schlamme, to the principal-cast actors (Stockard Channing, Dulé Hill, Allison Janney, Moira Kelly, Rob Lowe, Janel Moloney, Richard Schiff, Martin Sheen, John Spencer, and Bradley Whitford) all of whom inhabit their roles in a manner that's utterly convincing — and we're not likely to see its equal on television anytime in the foreseeable future except it be, perhaps, a series produced for a pay-to-view premium cable channel.

As a series, The West Wing fulfills the dramatic (as in drama) promise of fee-free, popular commercial television as envisaged by its earliest champions, and is vindication of their passionate devotion to the medium and its dramatic possibilities.

On to Season 2!