The West Wing Is The Dumbest Show In The Entire World. Here Are 5,000 Words About One Classic Episode.

Read to the bottom for a fun chance to win $100.

It’s not its own genre, really, but there is a certain type of film and TV show where the appeal is entirely wrapped up in the fact that it teaches you something. I don’t mean in a documentary sense where that is explicitly the appeal, I don’t mean in a didactic John Oliver sense, where a person just tells you what to believe. I also don’t mean in a direct “this is a well-researched movie about firefighters, and by watching it, I am learning what it is like to fight fires” way. I mean things like the show Billions.

Billions is about people who work in finance, and it’s probably totally wrong about what working in finance is really like, but the characters talk in references such that their conversations resemble hitting the random page button on wikipedia and after watching an episode, you can feel like, “wow, I hate these characters, and I wish they were all killed in a mass shooting but in watching them buzz around each other like autistic Hofstra undergrads I have probably picked up some random Snapple facts about Bruce Springsteen’s favorite strip club” or whatever.

The King of this type of writing is Aaron Sorkin.

Let me start by saying I am not an Aaron Sorkin hater. The next 5,000 words are going to make you think I hate Aaron Sorkin, so I want to be clear upfront that that isn’t the case. In fact, for many years, I would have described myself as a pure, uncut Aaron Sorkin fan. That is no longer true. Now I think he’s a bit hit & miss. And in retrospect, a lot of things I once loved, I think, are pretty flawed. But he is a straight-out wonderful playwright. I don’t mean you need to have read his plays to appreciate it. I mean, he’s a playwright in the sense that even his movies and TV shows are plays. He’s great at writing scenes of dialogue. He sets them up and knocks them down. And his dialogue schtick, while a schtick, is good schtick. It’s fun to watch his insufferable, self-righteous characters blather back and forth in repetitive ways as though Google’s woke AI was told to stylize David Mamet.

Sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes the actors don’t know how to perform it. Sometimes the directors don’t know how to direct it. Sometimes Sorkin himself goes too far into his own ass and is just too preachy and annoying. But a lot of times it works.

Aaron Sorkin loves to do little info dumps by characters randomly and unnecessarily one-upping each other with fun facts they learned from a novelty calendar.

Fact-a-day calendars are fun and neat!

Unfortunately, this calendar is not a serious calendar. This is a novelty hoax calendar. This is a calendar that needs a Community Note.

I hate the West Wing now because I just know too much about politics, so whenever I watch it, I become the guy in the audience watching the movie The Whole Nine Yards who won’t stop muttering about how, in real life, “dentistry isn’t really this exciting.” But I loved the West Wing when I was young. Loved it. I’ve seen every episode dozens of times. To this day, I can slip into the voice in my sleep. And though the West Wing did not create my interest in politics, it did nourish it.

I never thought the West Wing was an accurate portrayal of working in the White House. I am not someone who was under the impression that I was watching a documentary. But I did think that when it came to the issues they were having little policy debates about every week, there was some level of truth going on. I’m not saying I would have cited Jed Bartlet in a term paper, but it’s reasonable to assume that when the smarty pants characters on this incredibly expensive show staffed by former Clinton aides confront situations inspired by Clinton White House anecdotes, someone probably tried to make sure that what they were saying had some relationship to the truth.

That might be a reasonable thing to assume, but it’s wrong.

There is literally nothing on the West Wing that you can trust. The fact that there is actually a part of the White House called the West Wing is probably just luck.

Consider the episode Mr Willis of Ohio.