The Worst Wing

It's been a long, slogging trail through this show and so we have The Last Episode for you here (spoiler it's bad). We also spend another 20 minutes or so musing poorly and waxing misunderstood philosophically about the impact of the show on the culture at large, on Aaron Sorkin himself, and on future projects. We will probably get back together to do an auxiliary ep on Studio 60, and then we migh...

As we close the show down, senioritis sets in not only amongst the outgoing administration, but among your intrepid hosts who spent most of the recording session crosstalking and stepping on each other's bits!! It's a fine thing to try to address the absolutely Kafkaesque disaster of being an incredibly powerful woman navigating a male-dominated industry. It's a bad thing to do so by setting her u...

OK now that the show has wrapped up, congrats to Matt Santos on being the new prez, time to wait what the fuck there's still 5 goddamn episodes left?? IT'S ALL SO STUPID. RIP to Sinead O'Connor, this one hit me hard for whatever reason https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbre5Fs9m8I

Hi, yeah, first time long time: does Bruno close the deal? This one's for the true sickos among us, full of polls Polls POLLS energy and quite a bit of hornt, as the election unfolds over 90 relatively harmless minutes of campaign staff interactions. Let the careerist jockeying... BEGIN Music from A.C. Newman.

I am so ready for this to be over. If only WE were two weeks out, rather than... 7 more episodes so let's call it four more recording sessions that will probably land between now and October for a nice round 5 year experience. Please, listener, spare yourself and do not watch these episodes. Music is from Keb Mo

Come bother me about end-to-end emissions and material processing eCO2 incursions if u wanna get wrecked about nuclear power. So sorry there hasn't been a miraculously ~*mArKEt baSeD sOLuTioN*~ to getting perovskites into every PV cell somehow! We coulda been casting containment buildings for gen3 reactors and trebling down on thorium reprocessing technology for the last 20 years instead of using...

Welcome back to more campaign shit that I don't give a fuck about!! With a side helping of "whoa hang on there's still an entire administration in the White House currently?? uh... let's do... World War!" The first episode starts with a direct-to-camera tribute to John Spencer from Martin Sheen. So, we're closing down the arc of Leo being alive IRL. But... not yet! He's still kicking in the show's...

These episodes are a slog and a half so we're back to throwing two together at one go, and conveniently, these tidy up the Ellie Bartlet Wedding arc which is tropeish and irritating! We solve racism with a speech, surprise! A nice soothing authoritative President Dad approach to a(nother) World War 3 type situation which is not communicated to the viewer as serious because there is far, FAR too mu...

This track leaves out the episode running in the background, in case you have your copy and want to watch along without duplicating the soundtrack! Well, as the West Wing ran out of sauce down the stretch, beset by better television (... marginally better, in the case of Crossing Jordan) on all sides and lacking its initial writers-room oomph, the producers started grasping at straws. This is one...

This track includes the episode running in the background of our commentary, if you don't have access to it! Well, as the West Wing ran out of sauce down the stretch, beset by better television (... marginally better, in the case of Crossing Jordan) on all sides and lacking its initial writers-room oomph, the producers started grasping at straws. This is one of them!! Dave and I do a live-react li...

Pseudo content warning we talk about abortion but keep it pretty clean. This shit sucks so much, the campaign is no longer even a fig leaf for shitty TV, don't watch these episodes god damn. Emma makes an only-slightly-planned guest appearance to lend an appropriate voice to a discussion of these writers' ridiculous triangulation and pigeonholing of women's rights / abortion. Happy Women's History...

If you're innocent you have nothing to hide so don't worry about defending yourself or using whatever meager power still remains to you!! Even if that's a Shitload of Power, because you're one of the highest-ranking public officials in the history of the world! Just be cool man, I thought you were cool! hahahahahaha Was (Not Was) and George Michael doing a Queen song today.

A brief whiff of fresh air as we follow the Vinick campaign around the trail for a while. However, as always there is such little daylight between Democrat and Republican positions on... well damn near everything, the staffs and their approach to issues people care about could just be interchangeable!! Midway through I completely fail at being profound off the cuff, and having thought through my g...

No not THAT problem you SICKOS Another tedious day-in-the-campaign-life episode focusing on Matt Santos checking demographic boxes and generally cleaving to the most anodyne Political Operative Wisdom possible. Thank goodness their team now has both Janeane Garofalo and Marlee Matlin on it I guess, guest star power!! This is when the absolutely most bizarre "controversy" pops up and oh man is this...

We're back baby! We made it... two two-week periods in a row! Fuck yeah. Wish I had anything even approaching as positive a reaction to the material we consider in the first episode of the 7th season of this show. It's bad, folks! I'm so bored, I do not care about how you think campaigning needs to go or what logistics are where or even really about the damn space shuttle. Americans WILL NOT CARE,...

OMG we're back!! To finish season 6 FINALLY FUCK YOU SHOW. Neither moves nor covid nor laze of brain shall keep us from finishing this accursed project. Music by Rush

Oooooh big bright lights big arenas wow once every 4-8 years we get to do what the Sporps Mans do every weekend!! Let's... MAKE SOME RUUUUUUULES!! If I could be candid for a minute, we're at the point of the show where I am noticeably running out of things to say so I apologize for being more incoherent than usual today, I feel like I swung between baby and galaxy brain with literally nothing in b...

Fun guest stars abound! Early-00s "atheist" takes mercifully do NOT in this episode, wherein the writers tackle Churchiness and theocrats demanding fealty to both Heavenly and Earthly power in the most kid (literally) gloves fashion possible. The ongoing explication of Senator Vinick's Good Republican status must of course include a healthy dose of what was acceptable in 2005 to write about not be...

This episode marks not only the absolute dregs of fan opinion it's probably, I M H O, the one that actually legitimately represents the show jumping the shark. It's got all the hits: exceptionalism, bad costuming, spontaneous language fluency! There's rumors that Fidel is dying, just like there's always rumors that Fidel is dying, and so all of a sudden Leo and Kate Harper are like... secret-agent...

It's Spanish for "the palabra". Oh boy a whole episode wrestling with representational issues in high-level executive office!! If only we hadn't seen this theory's propositions have their baby brains splattered across the concrete rocks of reality for 8 long goddamn years ultimately leading into the firm entrenchment of a Christofascist rump state theocracy. A BLACK MAN, WAS PRESIDENT. Racism is o...

Some fun speculation re: how kids would vote, carried in the episode by some excellent child actors giving the Ol' College Try to Toby and Annabeth. Ultimately, they experience the most best possible thing politics nerds (hello Emma) could experience: SENPAI ACKNOWLEDGES THEM. Otherwise there's a buncha random garbage going on as what we surmise is an attempt by the writers to bring a new generati...

Wow, you say that the Colorado River no longer reaches the sea AND Lake Mead is dry? Uh, have you tried No they're not? What if you commissioned a focus group or something? Cliff Calley is BACK and you can hear Stu develop his opinion on the character as he speaks it to himself aloud lol. Our favorite "Good Republican" is gettin' poached from his cushy corporate job by CJ. The actual bombshell in...

Stu says "ultimately" like seventeen times this episode so, I guess be forewarned, it was irritating to edit myself lol. We have a big scrambly mess of an episode wherein the writers seem to be DESPERATELY trying to portray the inner, cynical, overanalyzed mechanics of a bog standard political campaign as cool. They fail. There's nothing fucking cool about ad buys, about debate rhetoric or rules,...

Any day now, Iran will do a Bad Thing, and it turns out today was that day in West Wing Universe. Note that of course any response by the international community will only result in Iran doing FURTHER BAD THINGS. Always Be Centrifuging John Marbury is back and yuck, gross. I'm very tired so I have little further sparkling wit to add to the notes. Music is Ben Britten's War Requiem which might as w...

I'm positive there are nice parts of Iowa because I've been to a couple of them. There's a t-shirt / dropship company that makes funny screenprinted items in Des Moines. There's a donut company and at least two very good breweries in Sioux City. There's one pub in Sheldon where a great friend named Dara served us a shitload of beer as we tried to keep warm tromping around scaring up single digits...