Perspectives (the The West Wing double-bill post)
The West Wing - 2.5 And It’s Surely To Their Credit
What I felt was going on was Sorkin using Ainsley’s first day at work to raise the sexism of his characters. I’d say, though, that some of that sexism was AFAIK accurately representing the gender and racial breakdown of the world the show portrays, where the decision makers are mainly white men. But at the same time, this was reinforced by the sexism of the TV world that created it And with episodes like this, The West Wing had an impact on the political culture and TV dramas, so I try to bear that in mind when watching it two decdes later, especially after MeToo and OscarsSoWhite lead to discussions about representation, and the cultural landscape has moved on.
Anyway, I appreciated the celebration of women in Ainsley’s competence and disillusion; CJ going toe to toe with that general (did he call her KITTEN at some point in their encounter or did I mishear? I couldn’t be bothered to rewind); and Abbey’s spirited points about the commemoration of women (although the fact she had to use sex blackmail says a lot abot the power structures at play.) I also enjoyed watching Donna have to handle/suffer the president’s failure to record a speech for radio. But there were wrinkles with what I thought was a good-faith attempt to approach sexism on the show. And then the take of the podcast, where the presenters found it a less important element, of the ep, and they teased out some of the problematic issues and raised some that hadn’t registered with me was really interesting.
But if I’m honest, my main takeout from this ep was ‘What is this Gilbert and Sullivan obsession with the American elite as written by Aaron Sorkin?’ I mean, their influence on British life as experienced by me is minimal. Is it because they’re the precursors of musical theatre (but aren’t they purveyors of operettas? Is it a weird Ivy League thing? Molina’s knowledge thereof suggested so, so I was glad of the commentary on the podcast about the characters being really into G&S.)
We were also introduced to Lionel Tribby, who was such a force of nature that I thought they should have gone back and put in echoes of his roaring down the corridors of the White House in previous episodes. And apparently this is his only appearance? That feels like a waste.
But yeah, Ainsley’s first day. Leo was nice and yet there was a little guilt there over not having told Tribby about her and knowing the staff weren’t enthused about the new hire, as epitomised - we thought - by her getting that office, and there was a barb there about the criticism he’d received about being an alcoholic in his position. Actually, that made me think back to Liza Weil’s character and how there’d been a hint of making her a recurring character. She now looks like a first draft for Ainsley, who is introduced as a daughter-like figure for Leo and a foil for Sam (the actress playing Mallory must have been delighted) and making the conflict more political than personal.
So, those two guys were introduced as having caused trouble before. As per the podcast flagging that what they were in trouble for this time wasn’t important, I’d assumed it was something to do with the letter about who was in charge when Bartlet was under. Anyway, I too found them caricatures like the previous ep’s crab radio host, except their behaviour wasn’t that far away from examples that we’ve seen from Sam and Josh. Sam had an attitude about Ainsley (the girl who beat him!) encroaching on his job/territory (his line about their all being lawyers who’d turned political operatives/politicans in the room just made me think ‘just from the one pool, then.’) The way these two guys behaved when they were advised to behave in another way, all because, as CJ had observed, it was a good-looking Republican woman advising them was pointed enough.
But I did have some complicated feelings about the part of the exchange between Toby and CJ where he brought in her looks to his compliment to her and her saying it only tok two years. (They did some ‘what he really meant’ gymnastics on the podcast, but it comes down to (for once) bad writing. Why did that need to be part of the compliment? Will anyone ever compliment Toby on his looks? No And that undermined the whole scene.
I didn’t have the same issues as they did on the podcast about the convenience of CJ being the one person to know about the dodgy medal in the moment, although I can rationally accept the point. I just saw it as part of CJ being a good press secretary. When she appeared in the final scene welcoming Ainsley, I was struck that she’d had no interaction with Ainsley on the day before, although obviously she was aware that she owed her for the reassuring legal advice from before and she’d said she’d come around to being okay with Ainsley’s hire. Of course, if they’d interacted, it would have spoiled the build up of how sucky the day was for Ainsley
Sam had time to talk to Josh about setting up a gesture to welcome Ainsley properly, but not to hear his response to the suing the Klan proposal until Saturday? Okay, dramatic convenience. Josh was testy in his shouting at Donna - good response to such behaviour, Ms Moss - although it soon became apparent that he was stressed by the bill he was expected to pay for having his life saved!? And, one felt, the ramifications of having been shot at, which Sam, all caught up in his righteous indignation and new wheeze, was relatively insensitive to. I think I yelled ‘READ YOUR FRIEND BETTER, SAM.’ Although I’m now wondering if I was projecting.
Anyway, I loved the lunch scene between Josh and Donna for its quiet ease, and chortled at its ending, where she just pinches his salad and dives in because he’s clearly left it.
But Sam was a much better human being over Ainsley eventually. I was glad that Ainsley, lost in her own despondency, didn’t respond to the ‘HEY’s. Why should she know you were shouting at her, Sam? At least seeing she was on the verge of tears brought him up short, and troubled him enough that he went after her. I thought what happened next played out beautifully. (I was too busy getting up to peer if the writing was what I thought it was to register that the flowers were dead, so I didn’t share Hirway’s reaction of ‘who puts so much energy into being so jerky?’ And man defends woman’s honour didn’t register with me either.) Sam went after the anonymity, but I was too busy finding the sexist slur in a professional environment shocking. And Ainsley’s size and still body language was played beautifully.
So, off Sam goes in righteous anger (some of which had to be sef-directed or certainly it ought to be) to ream out those two jerks. And we’d been told that he was their boss, so we knew he could fire them (as he should) for such harassment. I’ll repeat I found my differing reaction to the episode to the podcasters’ really intriguing for this.
Moving on to 2.6 ‘The Lame Duck Congress’,I‘m fairly sure Josh slapped Donna on the behind in this episode (this, I paused and rewatched, and you can’t entirely tell, but I think he did) and given that I believe she had a perfectly valid grievance over RSI (I’ve suffered from it in the past; I’ve been clucking over friends who suddenly had to work on laptops at deeply unsuitable home settings over the past 12 months) and she’d just been told to suck it up because her (mainly male) employers who don’t do that much typing don’t care about her welfare (emphasised again by Leo and Margaret, which was played for laughs as was Donna going on and on about work-related injury to the Ukrainian politican)… Okay, Josh and Donna have a consensually not that professional relationship, but it left a sense of ‘what was the point of that Very Special Episode about Everyday Sexism. Then?’ For that matter, there was Sam’s worry that Laurie had returned to accompany the politician . The podcast picked p on Charlie commenting on that woman’s looks and going ‘eww’, but that was lower down the list than the other two incidents for me.
Still.
I then remembered Donna had pinched Josh’s ear, which is also inappropriate (but was funny because it was in the context of her talking about losing the inability to use or misuse her fingers) but doesn’t have the same sexual connotations.
Every time they mentioned Pakistan (quite a lot given they wanted to pass legislation having something to do with nukes), I snarked about their inability to appoint an ambassador last year. On a point of lexicon, ‘rogue nations’ is still in use, but we have ‘variants of concern’.
Storywise, it was predictable that the Democrat who’d changed his vote was always going to be the one Toby would meet (Toby was right, that was some weird ordering of food at the restaurant. Ah, ordering food at the restaurant.) But the denouement (is it?) of CJ/Danny was unexpected, and illuminating. Someone referenced them acting oddly over the past few weeks (actually that could have been in relation to the editorials, but CJ and Danny have been doing this dance for ages, but now it looks as if they’re facing the fact that neither of them is going to give up their jobs for each other, because they’re great at it, and those jobs are incompatible with their having a relationship. Or CJ sees that.
The whole idea of whether they were like a high school yearbook staff overshadowed everything - although why Leo couldn’t have come up with setting up an ‘accidental’ meeting earlier, I don’t know. We learned that Ainsley is a hungry one, as she outmanoeuvred Sam at the meeting (although it was ultimately fruitless) but then she was wrongfooted by the speed of their position paper being accepted by Leo. For a bit, it seemed like she was going to get hung up on Sam not giving her credit for changing his mind, which he didn’t in the room, but we knew he’d been gabbing a lot about asking her to summarise his position all day, which is still not giving her credit for changing his mind, but actually that was a side point.
As in the previous episode, perhaps because of Procter’s comments on the podcast, I was keeping an eye on Ainsley’s body language and the use of space, not that I could have missed the bravura 360 shot of the office that she was now a part of. They’ve made the best use of her role as a newcomer with a very different perspective. I also really liked the final scene being of someone dimming the lights in the Oval Office.
This entry was originally posted at https://shallowness.dreamwidth.org/460043.html.
What I felt was going on was Sorkin using Ainsley’s first day at work to raise the sexism of his characters. I’d say, though, that some of that sexism was AFAIK accurately representing the gender and racial breakdown of the world the show portrays, where the decision makers are mainly white men. But at the same time, this was reinforced by the sexism of the TV world that created it And with episodes like this, The West Wing had an impact on the political culture and TV dramas, so I try to bear that in mind when watching it two decdes later, especially after MeToo and OscarsSoWhite lead to discussions about representation, and the cultural landscape has moved on.
Anyway, I appreciated the celebration of women in Ainsley’s competence and disillusion; CJ going toe to toe with that general (did he call her KITTEN at some point in their encounter or did I mishear? I couldn’t be bothered to rewind); and Abbey’s spirited points about the commemoration of women (although the fact she had to use sex blackmail says a lot abot the power structures at play.) I also enjoyed watching Donna have to handle/suffer the president’s failure to record a speech for radio. But there were wrinkles with what I thought was a good-faith attempt to approach sexism on the show. And then the take of the podcast, where the presenters found it a less important element, of the ep, and they teased out some of the problematic issues and raised some that hadn’t registered with me was really interesting.
But if I’m honest, my main takeout from this ep was ‘What is this Gilbert and Sullivan obsession with the American elite as written by Aaron Sorkin?’ I mean, their influence on British life as experienced by me is minimal. Is it because they’re the precursors of musical theatre (but aren’t they purveyors of operettas? Is it a weird Ivy League thing? Molina’s knowledge thereof suggested so, so I was glad of the commentary on the podcast about the characters being really into G&S.)
We were also introduced to Lionel Tribby, who was such a force of nature that I thought they should have gone back and put in echoes of his roaring down the corridors of the White House in previous episodes. And apparently this is his only appearance? That feels like a waste.
But yeah, Ainsley’s first day. Leo was nice and yet there was a little guilt there over not having told Tribby about her and knowing the staff weren’t enthused about the new hire, as epitomised - we thought - by her getting that office, and there was a barb there about the criticism he’d received about being an alcoholic in his position. Actually, that made me think back to Liza Weil’s character and how there’d been a hint of making her a recurring character. She now looks like a first draft for Ainsley, who is introduced as a daughter-like figure for Leo and a foil for Sam (the actress playing Mallory must have been delighted) and making the conflict more political than personal.
So, those two guys were introduced as having caused trouble before. As per the podcast flagging that what they were in trouble for this time wasn’t important, I’d assumed it was something to do with the letter about who was in charge when Bartlet was under. Anyway, I too found them caricatures like the previous ep’s crab radio host, except their behaviour wasn’t that far away from examples that we’ve seen from Sam and Josh. Sam had an attitude about Ainsley (the girl who beat him!) encroaching on his job/territory (his line about their all being lawyers who’d turned political operatives/politicans in the room just made me think ‘just from the one pool, then.’) The way these two guys behaved when they were advised to behave in another way, all because, as CJ had observed, it was a good-looking Republican woman advising them was pointed enough.
But I did have some complicated feelings about the part of the exchange between Toby and CJ where he brought in her looks to his compliment to her and her saying it only tok two years. (They did some ‘what he really meant’ gymnastics on the podcast, but it comes down to (for once) bad writing. Why did that need to be part of the compliment? Will anyone ever compliment Toby on his looks? No And that undermined the whole scene.
I didn’t have the same issues as they did on the podcast about the convenience of CJ being the one person to know about the dodgy medal in the moment, although I can rationally accept the point. I just saw it as part of CJ being a good press secretary. When she appeared in the final scene welcoming Ainsley, I was struck that she’d had no interaction with Ainsley on the day before, although obviously she was aware that she owed her for the reassuring legal advice from before and she’d said she’d come around to being okay with Ainsley’s hire. Of course, if they’d interacted, it would have spoiled the build up of how sucky the day was for Ainsley
Sam had time to talk to Josh about setting up a gesture to welcome Ainsley properly, but not to hear his response to the suing the Klan proposal until Saturday? Okay, dramatic convenience. Josh was testy in his shouting at Donna - good response to such behaviour, Ms Moss - although it soon became apparent that he was stressed by the bill he was expected to pay for having his life saved!? And, one felt, the ramifications of having been shot at, which Sam, all caught up in his righteous indignation and new wheeze, was relatively insensitive to. I think I yelled ‘READ YOUR FRIEND BETTER, SAM.’ Although I’m now wondering if I was projecting.
Anyway, I loved the lunch scene between Josh and Donna for its quiet ease, and chortled at its ending, where she just pinches his salad and dives in because he’s clearly left it.
But Sam was a much better human being over Ainsley eventually. I was glad that Ainsley, lost in her own despondency, didn’t respond to the ‘HEY’s. Why should she know you were shouting at her, Sam? At least seeing she was on the verge of tears brought him up short, and troubled him enough that he went after her. I thought what happened next played out beautifully. (I was too busy getting up to peer if the writing was what I thought it was to register that the flowers were dead, so I didn’t share Hirway’s reaction of ‘who puts so much energy into being so jerky?’ And man defends woman’s honour didn’t register with me either.) Sam went after the anonymity, but I was too busy finding the sexist slur in a professional environment shocking. And Ainsley’s size and still body language was played beautifully.
So, off Sam goes in righteous anger (some of which had to be sef-directed or certainly it ought to be) to ream out those two jerks. And we’d been told that he was their boss, so we knew he could fire them (as he should) for such harassment. I’ll repeat I found my differing reaction to the episode to the podcasters’ really intriguing for this.
Moving on to 2.6 ‘The Lame Duck Congress’,I‘m fairly sure Josh slapped Donna on the behind in this episode (this, I paused and rewatched, and you can’t entirely tell, but I think he did) and given that I believe she had a perfectly valid grievance over RSI (I’ve suffered from it in the past; I’ve been clucking over friends who suddenly had to work on laptops at deeply unsuitable home settings over the past 12 months) and she’d just been told to suck it up because her (mainly male) employers who don’t do that much typing don’t care about her welfare (emphasised again by Leo and Margaret, which was played for laughs as was Donna going on and on about work-related injury to the Ukrainian politican)… Okay, Josh and Donna have a consensually not that professional relationship, but it left a sense of ‘what was the point of that Very Special Episode about Everyday Sexism. Then?’ For that matter, there was Sam’s worry that Laurie had returned to accompany the politician . The podcast picked p on Charlie commenting on that woman’s looks and going ‘eww’, but that was lower down the list than the other two incidents for me.
Still.
I then remembered Donna had pinched Josh’s ear, which is also inappropriate (but was funny because it was in the context of her talking about losing the inability to use or misuse her fingers) but doesn’t have the same sexual connotations.
Every time they mentioned Pakistan (quite a lot given they wanted to pass legislation having something to do with nukes), I snarked about their inability to appoint an ambassador last year. On a point of lexicon, ‘rogue nations’ is still in use, but we have ‘variants of concern’.
Storywise, it was predictable that the Democrat who’d changed his vote was always going to be the one Toby would meet (Toby was right, that was some weird ordering of food at the restaurant. Ah, ordering food at the restaurant.) But the denouement (is it?) of CJ/Danny was unexpected, and illuminating. Someone referenced them acting oddly over the past few weeks (actually that could have been in relation to the editorials, but CJ and Danny have been doing this dance for ages, but now it looks as if they’re facing the fact that neither of them is going to give up their jobs for each other, because they’re great at it, and those jobs are incompatible with their having a relationship. Or CJ sees that.
The whole idea of whether they were like a high school yearbook staff overshadowed everything - although why Leo couldn’t have come up with setting up an ‘accidental’ meeting earlier, I don’t know. We learned that Ainsley is a hungry one, as she outmanoeuvred Sam at the meeting (although it was ultimately fruitless) but then she was wrongfooted by the speed of their position paper being accepted by Leo. For a bit, it seemed like she was going to get hung up on Sam not giving her credit for changing his mind, which he didn’t in the room, but we knew he’d been gabbing a lot about asking her to summarise his position all day, which is still not giving her credit for changing his mind, but actually that was a side point.
As in the previous episode, perhaps because of Procter’s comments on the podcast, I was keeping an eye on Ainsley’s body language and the use of space, not that I could have missed the bravura 360 shot of the office that she was now a part of. They’ve made the best use of her role as a newcomer with a very different perspective. I also really liked the final scene being of someone dimming the lights in the Oval Office.
This entry was originally posted at https://shallowness.dreamwidth.org/460043.html.