Winged Words in "The West Wing"

In America, fans of The West Wing are called Wingnuts. There are about twenty million of them. British Wingnuts are fewer but even more dedicated, because in order to view the programme when it goes to air, they first have to find it. Channel 4, perhaps to ward off accusations of abject subservience to American cultural imperialism, moves the programme unpredictably around the schedules in order to keep the viewing figures as low as possible. The irony here is that the White House of The West Wing's fictional President, Jed Bartlet, and the White House of the actual president, George W. Bush, have little in common beyond their colour-scheme and architecture. A different language is spoken in each. In The West Wing version of The West Wing the frantically energetic inhabitants speak modern American English in its highest state of colloquial eloquence. Crafted in the Bush administration's West Wing, a holding area for somnambulists, any speech by the President sets a standard so low that Donald Rumsfield is elevated to the oratorical status of Edmund Burke. When the Founding Fathers were addressing the question of a national language, German and Hebrew were both considered. After they finally realised that the language in which they were discussing the matter was probably the best candidate, English won by default. Bush and the rest of the boys make you wonder how it happened. How long does it take them to wish each other good morning? Condoleezza Rice, whose gift for languages includes her own, must feel like an epidemiologist dealing with a mass outbreak of lock-jaw.

From that angle, the actual West Wing is a wildly improbable fiction. The fictional West Wing is realistic, but only in the sense of reminding you that realism is the most refined form of manufactured drama. Just how refined, in this case, is best studied by viewing the episodes one after the other. To ease the frustration of waiting for Channel 4 to peel back the camouflage on the latest instalment, the trainee Wingnut can purchase the whole of the first season on video, or, even better, on DVD: 22 chapters of the story in a single glorious wodge. The second season will shortly be forthcoming: I haven't seen the DVDs yet, but I have been granted access to a set of time-coded tapes. So even as the third season intermittently unfolds on broadcast television, I have been able to wallow in the 44 chapters of the first two seasons with full benefit of replay. Sometimes I watch half a dozen episodes in an evening that stretches on into the night, like Bayreuth with better music. Things that struck me as merely wonderful a couple of years ago are now revealed as miraculous. On a one-time basis, a typical episode is so absorbing, and flies by at such a speed, that the viewer has no time to ask how it was put together. You don't wonder how they did it. When you start seeing how they did it, you really wonder how they did it.

To start with there is the dialogue. Aaron Sorkin conceived the series and supervises every line of every episode, even when he does not compose its basic story. He has absorbed the whole tradition of high-speed, counterpointed dialogue since it first emerged in 1930s screwball comedy and later on spread into drama in both the cinema and television. Before The West Wing, it was not unknown for straight drama to be accelerated by comic timing: Sipowicz in NYPD Blue would never have talked that way if his writers had not grown up watching Sgt Bilko. But Sorkin has pushed the heritage to such a culmination that there is no possible further development except decadence. Even as it stands, the complexity of the exposition verges on the incomprehensible, especially if you don't know much about the American political system. (Since there aren't all that many Americans who know about it either, in its homeland the show is widely recommended by schoolteachers as a painless civics lesson.) Sometimes you have to wait for half an episode to find out that the two different sets of initials bandied about in the first scene stand for a bill and a committee that will meet each other in the last. But usually a quick reference to the Second Amendment will be expanded later on by an argument about the desirability of banning private guns, and the argument will be illustrated by somebody getting shot.

(The rest of this article is in The Meaning of Recognition, published by Picador in 2005.)