NY TIMES CRITIC MISSES THE POINT
There's a lot of that going on at the Times these days
The NY Times chief TV critic James Poniewozik wrote an opinion piece What Did ‘The West Wing’ Do to Us? As Aaron Sorkin’s political fantasy turns 25, its romance has aged better than its politics.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/23/arts/television/the-west-wing-25th-anniversary.html
Here is my comment posted on the Times website:
Mr. Poniewozik misses the point of The West Wing by setting congruence with reality as a standard by which to measure the worth of a show. (Hence, he prefers The Sopranos to The West Wing.)
Remember, Sorkin wrote the show just as Bush II was assuming his disastrous presidency (abdicated in all important matters to Cheney). We were on the cusp of 9/11; two costly and pointless wars in the Middle East; Reaganomics Redux spurring even greater upward redistribution of wealth, greater inequality and skyrocketing fiscal deficits, punctuated by the Panic of 2008 and the Great Recession.
Sorkin's The West Wing was the antidote to the Bush administration. TWW is aspirational, never intended to reflect reality, but rather inspire Americans to do better. The fact that its "politics has not aged well" is not a reflection of TWW's shortcomings but rather of ours.
EPILOG (October 6, 2024): Confirmation of the aspirational character of The West Wing comes from unexpected sources: Argentina’s libertarian, leftist-hating president, Javier Milei, speaking before the United Nations on September 24, was accused by Argentina’s La Nación of plagiarizing The West Wing’s President Jed Bartlet’s speech from Season 4, 2003. In addition, former British Prime Minister Theresa May was accused of lifting part of another Season 4 speech when addressing the Conservative Party Conference in 2017.
Maybe there’s hope.
David: thank you for putting WEST WING into context. The NYTimes review is symptomatic of a culture that finds the study and teaching of history time-wasting and abusive. I'm not surprised by the opinion passing as fact, which characterizes our times.
(Each year, as a professor at Savannah College of Art and Design, I would ask at faculty meetings for the college to install at least ONE CLASS in American and World History...Each year, I was told that SCAD had history classes in film, design, architecture---I replied that such classes meant nothing, that the events described were never put in social context, but were simply names and dates and an aesthetic delineated without the meanings for its existence). The American and World History classes were never added to the curriculum.
Moreover, the use of reason for writing an essay was not as important as the essay's grammatical or syntactical merits! In other words, "What's the point?" had disappeared, or never was seen as a reason for the very existence of the essay
And you wonder, how did we get this way?
History may be a nightmare from which Joyce didn't awaken ---Nice line, but the lack of its study probably produced the nightmare in the first place.