They Call Her the Jackal: Top 10 Reasons why CJ Cregg is Best TV Character Ever (Part II)
6. She plays to win and that’s fine by everyone. This is an idealized administration and CJ’s instinctive niceness does get her far. However, there are still times that politics requires a certain amount of bitchiness. CJ threatens to shove a motherboard up Josh’s ass, puts the fear of the almighty in Sherri and Chris Whitaker, bars Corey Sykes from entertaining at a dinner, plays the hardnosed pragmatist to those protesting Darfur and lies to the press or obfuscates the truth on a number of occasions. The show honestly displays these less than attractive moments of hers but we’re never supposed to diminish her as a bitch by playing by the same rules as male politicians.
7. CJ cares about people on every level. She has incredibly rich and fascinating relationships with her friends and family. She broadly cares about people that she’s never met from the women of Qumar to the murdered kids of Kundu to students who are shy about raising their hands and participating in class to tornado victims. Then in between, she becomes involved in the well-being of acquaintances. She cares about whether at-risk Anthony has a Big Brother and she goes beyond “crazy lady on a White House tour” to becoming involved in returning stolen artwork from the Holocaust. Reporter Bill Price may have made her life difficult but she becomes personally invested in finding out what happened to him and making his wife as comfortable as possible.
8. She’s independent minded. She has enough education and experience to form her basic opinions and she stays true to them. However when she learns new information, she has both the intelligence and humility to change her mind. She reacts to new information whether it’s big and angsty like Mr. Lydell’s correctness in calling out the administration for a weak gay rights position, procedural and important like taking Cliff’s suggestions on lobbying for desalination or small and quirky like the need for a Wolves Only Highway and Maps for Social Equality.
9. She's brilliant and the ironic thing is that we're really not often *told* about how brilliant CJ is. The show just on the sheer surface text will poke fun at CJ much more often than it will rhapsodize poetic about her intelligence. Instead of being told how smart CJ is, we just see it all the damn time which is even better. We see it in how she anticipates the other sides moves. How she learns and masters information in a blink of an eye. Her astounding emotional intelligence. Heck, even the delightful trivia that makes up "Claudia's Useless House of Knowledge".
10. Allison Janney is a six-foot tall, forty-something character actress who was presented as the desirable, beautiful heroine on a network TV show. That’s what I call progress.