Gone With the 'Wing'
So I’m surfing through TVtattle and reading up on the assorted West Wing links, in part because I’m wondering if anyone’s thought to offer a rebuttal to Ken Tucker’s latest brooding on the show (I never thought I’d miss the days when he was mooning over Felicity, yet here I am …) and in part because I am actually enjoying this season in a giddy sort of way, and I am amassing my background material for the likely-to-be-never-written magnum opus, “The West Wing: More fun now that it’s gotten over itself.”
The previous raving exposition sets up how I stumbled across the Texas City Sun’s “Confessions of a West Wing Lover,” which is either an absurdist parody on the order of “Waiting for Guffman” or a truly baffling collection of words arranged in an order that appears to make sense only until you actually read them. The part that got my attention is below:
To me, The West Wing is in a class with “Gone With The Wind”. That class is made up of movies and television shows that are well written. These days, many of the viewers of both movies and television would not recognize a well written script if it fell on them.
Putting aside the nearly irresistible temptation to comment on whether or not newspaper readers would be able to recognize a well-written column if it fell into their laps, I’ve got to take issue with the passage above for several reasons.
1. It promulgates the myth that The West Wing was a consistently well-written show. We’ve commented on why it’s not on at least two separate occasions, so there’s no need to rehash every point.
2. It perpetuates the idea that liking a specific television show is the remote-control version of a Mensa certification. While it may be true that some shows attract people of a more cerebral bent, the converse is not true: liking a show does not make you smarter, and someone else disliking that show does not make them dumber.
3. It returns to the tired trope that the same people who watch hours of television weekly — and probably have for years — are somehow incapable of discerning the crap from the watchable stuff. Yet you, special viewer, with your mutant TV-watching powers, have gained the ability to recognize genuine quality amid the dross. It must be magic!
4. It proposes that “Gone With the Wind” was well-written.
Don’t get me wrong: I love that movie. I own that movie. I will watch it every time it’s on television. However, the genius of that movie is the way it took a spready potboiler of a novel (which I’ve also read multiple times) and hammered into a nearly-coherent narrative that’s told through uninhibited spectacle. The genius of “Gone With the Wind” lays not in the story it tells, but in the presentation of the story. There’s a difference between writing and directing. “Gone With the Wind’s” script works, but it’s nowhere near the apex of the craft.
But you’re not reading MooVee, are you? So I’ll curb that argument and return to the other ones. Watching smart TV doesn’t mean you’re smart. Insisting that your TV choices are smart doesn’t make you smart. And frankly, if you’re in the position where you’re insisting that you are what you watch, maybe a little intellectual self-examination is in order.
In the meantime, I’ll be kicking back and waiting for the Jason Isaacs appearance on The West Wing. Writing, schmiting. I can recognize evil hotties when they fall on me, and for that, I’ll forgive a lot.