Inaugurating a real hero, does the term end for a fake one?: we may never see Jed Bartlet the same way again

I wonder if it wasn’t with a bit of serendipity that The West Wing lived out most of its years in an era where many of us more-than-secretly wished for a different President. The West Wing (though it technically began during the Clinton administration) served as the reasonable person’s replacement for what was actually happening in Washington during the years of the worst President ever. Jed Bartlet was our hero. Had Al Gore won (the lawsuit), the West Wing would still have been one of the best shows ever; you can’t have Aaron Sorkin and a bad show—it just doesn’t happen.

I will not post tomorrow. I do not write to report on, or even react to the major news of the day. After a miraculous plane landing and rescue in the Hudson river, this New York Philosopher has nothing to add; not yet anyway. Nothing I write is news.

With that out of the way, my speculation turns to the role of this television hero Josiah Bartlet—the President on the West Wing, played by Martin Sheen. The comparisons between the characters from this show and real life DC people were already set in stone before I ever even saw episode one (I netflixed the first few seasons and bought the rest).

In a day and age where viewers watch shows on hulu, some other internet source, or obtain the DVD, I wonder if the new viewers of The West Wing will watch the show with the same admiration as us pre-Obama viewers did.

Networks are learning (NBC is the teacher’s pet in this category) that we don’t want to be scheduled anymore. We want to watch shows when we feel like it. If you’re like me, you wait till a season is basically done, and then you watch it. This phenomena produces an ironic result in the day and age where we assume that this is a fast-paced world. The fact that we don’t have to watch according to network schedule, means that we can actually slow down, and watch a show years after its final season. This changes the role that shows have as cultural indicators. (see notes 1, 2, and 3 at the end of this post for what other bloggers have said about this and other similar phenomena).

In my essay on All in The Family, I consider how that show was strangely on point in an era when television was at best 5-10 years behind the social relevance meter. From an era before even the VCR (nay, before Beta!), the show truly is the perfect example of a cultural indicator: that viewers had to watch together means that we know the show was an indicator of social consciousness. But now, when there are so many channels, so many great shows made that are out on DVD that we have yet to watch, so many of our current shows available online, where is our collective consciousness?

It bothers me that many people don’t get the Santos-Obama allusion, the Lyman-Emanuel allusion, or the Vinick-McCain allusion. It bothers me even more that new viewers to the show will miss out on the surrogate effect of pretending for an hour that what your watching is real, or at least imagining that it's possible.

This bother, of course, is the tales side of a coin that heads an overwhelming joy. I am happy that I need not turn to Bartlet any longer as my hero-President.

Notes:

1. Michael Z. Newman (Notes on Cult Films and New Media Technology). See this post for the distinction between "Ephemeral" and "Collectible" media.

2. Jason Mittell (Storytelling technologies) discusses how DVD's change the nature of the viewer's experience with the narrative structure.

3. David Bordwell (Observations on film art and Film art) considers how DVD's allow the viewer a book-reading kind of experience.

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