Moneyball (Bennett Miller, 2011)

"It's hard not to be romantic about baseball," Oakland As GM Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) sighs near the end of Moneyball. Clearly we've never chatted. Based on the bestseller that revolutionized America's pastime, Moneyball deals with the As' 2002 season and how Beane, along with a handful of statistical whizzes, evened the playing field by taking a team they barely scraped together with a paltry budget and broke the record for most consecutive wins in a season. It is also a film that captures the spirit of baseball as I see it, meaning that it is arduously drawn-out and involves far more math than I ever want to do when eating junk food and becoming, in theory, emotionally invested in the grab-assing of 'roided-up men.

Moneyball opens with footage of the 2001 American League elimination game between the As and the New York Yankees, the richest team in baseball. Intertitles contrast the teams not by score or stats but budgets, positing baseball as a metaphor for class warfare that seems especially apt in the current economic climate. Still, it's hard to see the As as underdogs when 25 people split $40 million a year to play a game. So as director Bennett Miller is trying to make me shake my head at the unfairness of it all, I was already so uninterested that the one thing that drew my eye was how incredibly old TV footage from exactly one decade ago looks.

The Social Network

David Fincher's growth as a filmmaker has been both nuanced and startling. His initial pictures are confrontational, reliant upon his experience as a music video director that make pictures like Se7en and Fight Club draining exercises in style. Far from a nihilist, Fincher crafted himself into a deep pessimist who nevertheless fought to find the good in life. He brought an old detective out of despair by ironically plunging him into the heart of darkness. He ruthlessly mocked the fascistic conformity of the emasculated male even as they supposedly rebelled against a false image, but Fincher managed to spare some sympathy for those who felt a sense of cultural disconnect.

In recent years, Fincher has not drastically altered his course so much as punched through to the other side of his bleakness. His stories are no longer stomach-churning but atmospheric and chilling, but the hearts of Zodiac and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button are essentially no different than that of Se7en: they are stories about people who are ultimately doomed but soldier on, because the alternative is even more terrifying. With The Social Network, "Fincher 2.0" develops this thread even further, and the greatest kick of the film comes from watching the preconceived notions of its two auteurs -- Fincher and West Wing maestro Aaron Sorkin -- completely invert. Here, Fincher is, for the first time, nakedly sympathetic to the ambition of a morally dubious man (though he's as critical as ever of Mark's actions), while the ever-optimistic Sorkin pens a critique of the entire idea of social networking. In fact, were a director without Fincher's confidence and commitment to his own vision attached to the project, The Social Network likely would have ended up as nothing more than the ramblings of a curmudgeon woefully behind the times.

The contrast brings out the best in both the script and the direction. Sorkin's pessimism checks Fincher's willingness to excuse some of Mark Zuckerberg's behavior, while Fincher's atmospheric direction adds layers of complexity to Sorkin's style, which relies upon people who speak like playwrights to make characters who are both abhorrently unrealistic yet bizarrely plausible and believable. His overly verbose style lends itself well to the Harvard boys who invent and squabble over Facebook: all of them put on airs, exploit family connections and ready themselves for lucrative futures that they pretend to work hard for so it doesn't look embarrassing when their trust funds mature. They believe themselves to already be the superior of everyone their age, yet they behave like the frat boys they are.

Fincher and Sorkin even manage to trace Facebook back to a childish, misogynistic stunt. We meet Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) on a date with a young woman named Erica from Boston University. Mark monopolizes the conversation, fixating on the reputable clubs that he wants to get into because the most powerful people in the world joined them in their college days. He talks so much and speaks so condescendingly to Erica that she finally calls him an asshole and leaves. In a huff, Mark returns home, drunkenly blogs about the breakup and subsequently hacks into the photo databases of Harvard's various dorms and creates a site where male students vote on the hotness of Harvard women. At four in the morning, the site gets so many hits that the university's servers crash.

The Social Network is structured around two separate lawsuits over the ownership of Facebook. One pits Mark against Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both Armie Hammer), wealthy, Olympic-level rowers who came to Zuckerberg after his stunt with an idea to create a social networking site for Harvard students. They intended it as a casual dating site, but Mark went home and set about making not "Match.com for Harvard" but a place that allows him to take all of collegiate socializing and place it on the Internet. A month later, Mark tells the Winklevoss brothers he cannot complete the assignment, shortly before he launches The Facebook in its infancy.

The other lawsuit finds Mark being sued by his best friend and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield, looking uncannily like a young Jean-Pierre Léaud), who alleges that Mark cut him out of the profits even though he provided 100% of the start-up capital. The Winklevoss lawsuit pits two forces of equal arrogance against each other, but Eduardo's indignation during deposition meetings comes from a sense of personal harm.

Even so, none of these young men is any moral example. The Winklevoss twins come off as the sort of smug rich boys who will get cushy jobs in their father's law firm. When Mark launches Facebook, they pull strings to get an audience with the Harvard president to demand that the school shut down the site and expel Zuckerberg. When the president calls them out on their absurd sense of entitlement, the brothers looked shocked, as if anyone can bring a petty squabble to the head of the university. Saverin never shuts up about his own well-connected father, and his lawsuit for a portion of Facebook's profits seem less a matter of money than an attempt to win back his dad's approval. Saverin gets edged out of the picture by Napster founder Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), whose smooth-talking victim complex suggests the late stages of a cocaine-induced breakdown.

Then, there's Mark. Fincher always keeps Eisenberg separate from others, and the actor never looks comfortable when forced to deal with people. His site opens up socializing, to the point that anyone has access to everyone, and young men and women begin behaving irrationally over the transparency of their lives. The irony of his own ability to connect with anyone should be lost on no one.

In telling Mark's story, Fincher clearly draws from Orson Welles' great Citizen Kane, the story of a young media mogul who grows old and dies alone. Like Charles Foster Kane, Zuckerberg is indisputably a prodigy, a man of ambition and focus who builds upon the suggestions of his guides until he no longer has to stand on their shoulders. And like Kane, he cannot find true happiness in his work. Eisenberg occasionally breaks off all attention from the world to stare into space, and his utter lack of social skills hint that Mark may have Asperger's. But social discomfort does not fully explain the open arrogance in Mark's dark smirk. When a lawyer suggests that Mark's behavior toward the wronged parties stems from his resentment of never being invited to join one of the big-time Harvard clubs, Mark snidely replies that he currently has enough money to buy them and make them into game rooms.

The empire Mark builds doesn't have the grandeur of Kane's newspaper supremacy, but its influence runs far deeper. Groupies line up to sleep with the founder of Facebook, and we see how quickly Facebook becomes a part of people's lives. Within weeks, "Facebook me" has entered into Harvard's lexicon, and couples devolve into major, terrifying arguments over how often a page is updated to match a relationship status. Fincher seems to draw from his own Fight Club at times, portraying Facebook as something that sets off a cultural revolution that cannot be contained. Not even Project Mayhem is as widespread as the site where everyone -- including yours truly -- goes to post menial BS that can be taken for so much more. With businesses willing to terminate or not hire someone based on photos posted online, the issues of privacy that Zuckerberg casually steamrolls over to be popular carry a weight he does not or cannot contemplate.

The more social networking links people, the bigger the barriers, physical and mental, are formed in the real world. When Mark moves out to Palo Alto on Parker's advice, Eduardo heads to New York to work as a finance intern and seek advertisers from traditional routes. The 3,000 miles between them enhances the schism between them, with Saverin pursuing a business model that's proven but won't maximize profits for this kind of venture and Zuckerberg falling further and further into Parker's clutches. The two friends share an awkward exchange when Saverin finally comes out to California, and though the subject is not directly broached at the time, they both know that Eduardo is out, and the fleeting moment of friendship between them won't reverse what's coming. The irony of Mark's disconnect is compounded by the workers he hires when Facebook grows rapidly: anyone updating the site for better usability and interaction is described as being "wired in" and cannot be spoken to as if in stasis. The levels of impersonality between people mere feet away is bewildering even though we're living in this changed world now.

Fincher and Sorkin make tension out of the ostensibly banal subject of website programming by depicting how empty it all is. Mark, Saverin, the Winklevosses, not one of them has enough personality to hang a hat on. These are the people who created a way for all of us to fit our background, current statuses and interests onto a single page, as if Facebook was just a way for everyone to look as dull as them. The twins host raunchy parties while Mark decides to find an intern by holding an elaborate drinking game where the player who codes properly while hammered gets the job. These are just boys, yet they play with levels of money most of us cannot fathom. Couched in the vicious fights for intellectual supremacy is the suggestion that these are the sort of people who control all the money, spoiled kids and broadly unethical wunderkinds who receive respect for breaking numerous laws simply because they look cool in the process. When Saverin jealously prods Parker for losing to the courts on Napster, Parker still claims victory. "You wanna buy a Tower Records, Eduardo?" implying that he unleashed peer-to-peer file sharing to destroy the industry that would not work with him and recognize his talents.

Yellow-green dominates the color palette, as if someone finally got so sick with envy at the accomplishments of another that he finally vomited. The electronic/industrial score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross throbs and hums like a migraine headache, occasionally fading but never disappearing. Ominous without being ornate, the score captures the emotion of the film perfectly: cold but searching. It keeps looking for an outlet and finds none, always trapped by the insular attitudes of the characters, who only become lonelier as the film wears on. Its vaguely 8-bit sound deepens into more expressive tones, returning to motifs that suggest not just a thematic continuity but a personal stagnation on the part of young men who refuse to start acting like adults. Paranoia flecks their isolation, from Parker's obsessiveness over those who shut him down to the rumors that flame through instant Internet contact. It's almost funny how a student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, is seen as a deadlier social weapon than any of the national papers Kane's empire ran.

Much of the substance of David Fincher's films can be gleaned from his opening credits, something the great video essayist Matthew Zoller Seitz and Aaron Aradillas are currently demonstrating with their pieces for the Museum of the Moving Image (part one found here). As ever, the atmosphere and character of The Social Network can be seen in its own opening. Rejected by Erica, Mark marches home as the camera glides over Harvard (or at least the shooting locations standing in for Harvard), showing all the interesting sights and people Mark could be interacting with instead of running home to blog. The score bristles with dark tones, and for all the camera's grace, you begin to fear that he might be planning something to hurt the girl. And, in a way, he does, insulting her online and subjecting her to verbal abuse from other misogynistic guys. It establishes Mark as a man who cannot let things go, and Erica manages to float around the back of his mind the entire film, as if he made Facebook solely to prove himself not an asshole rather than simply apologizing and acting more nicely.

Still, you never fully hate anyone in this movie, even if you want to give them all a good slap. Mark becomes the youngest billionaire in the world, but he has no one to enjoy it with, and his incessant invasions of privacy ensure that even the public that uses his site like a drug does not admire him. Like Facebook itself, The Social Network stays constant just long enough for you to get used to it before something changes, not in the narrative so much as the mood. Arrogance gives way to the insecurity motivating it, which in turn morphs into loneliness. When Mark sits by himself at the end, surfing his own website in that bizarrely fixated way of his, the chasm of darkness around him and the implication of his lawsuit with Eduardo make him resemble less Charles Kane than Michael Corleone. He's the most powerful man in the world -- just read any ranking of the most influential people -- and he has nothing to show for it and no amount of clicking 'refresh' will change that.

The West Wing — Season 4

[Warning -- contains spoilers for the last season and possible minor spoilers for this one]

Well, nothing is forever, I suppose. After an ever-so-slightly flawed first season and two of the finest seasons of television I've ever watched, The West Wing finally slipped a bit. Oh, it's still heads-and-shoulders above 98% of any TV that was airing at the time or indeed has ever aired, but Sorkin finally got carried away with himself with one too many flights of fancy. The fourth season of his transcendent show still flirts with the high-water marks of past seasons, it sadly marks a slide into the merely above-average.

The third season ended with the overflow of goings-on that was "Posse Comitatus," in which the possibility of a new beau for C.J. was tragically cut short, Bartlet had a mini-battle of wits with Governor Ritchie, Charlie pushed wacky-but-likable Deborah Fiderer (Lily Tomlin) as Mrs. Landingham's replacement, and the President relucantly decided to assassinate the Qumari ambassador for his involvement in terrorist activities. That's a lot to handle, but unfortunately Sorkin decided to just move on from the death of Simon Donovan without ever really showing C.J. deal with it in order to make room for Qumar and the re-election campaign. I guess the message there is that life goes on.

Nevertheless, the season gets underway in style with the uproarious and insightful two-parter "Bartlet For America," in which Josh, Donna and Toby find themselves trapped in the middle of Podunksville, America after the motorcade leaves without them. It leads to some more flashbacks of characters dwelling on what brought them to Bartlet, and the present-day scenes are filled with some of the shows best gags and one-liners. It's an auspicious start to follow up on a killer season finale.

Then things go awry for a bit. Because Sorkin makes Governor Ritchie out to be a two-dimensional chimp of a man, we know he doesn't stand a ghost of a chance (yes, I know that such a character ran the real world for 8 years, but since the show never brings up mass corruption and cronyism I know Ritchie had no shot). Nevertheless, we have to sit through 7 episodes of "suspense" as somehow Ritchie pulls ahead even in Bartlet's home state, New Hampshire, which is too ridiculous for words. We're really not given any concrete reasons for Ritchie being popular with anyone, much less posing a threat to a wildly popular incumbent, but you have to have some conflict, I guess.

Ritchie of course loses and things start to pick up for the most part. With such a terrible character gone, things can't help but look up. Sadly, the next few episodes fail to capitalize on the momentum of Bartlet's win and the characters even mention how they're just basking in the victory for the moment. That's great guys, but what about the terrorists? Even the Christmas episode doesn't stand up to the previous installments; "Holy Night" introduces Toby's father, who used to be a hitman for the mob, because hey, why not? It also introduces one of the worst characters I've ever seen distract me from an otherwise great show: Zoey Bartlet's new French boyfriend.

Now, I don't remember his name because I simply don't care, but I'm willing to wage money that it's Pierre, Jacques, Jean-Paul, or (if Sorkin just went all out) Jean-Pierre. Hang on, Wikipedia tells me his name is Jean-Paul. Of course it is. Jean-Paul belongs on that list of characters like Jasmine in Angel or Pyz in Veronica Mars, the forced foil to established characters that never quite fits with those characters and instead just wanders around sucking the life-force from the screen. JP fills the role for Charlie, who separated from Zoey for reasons we're never told, as he somehow finds himself in the White House constantly, ostensibly for no other reason than to taunt Charlie because he's tapping that now. Eventually he brings about a terrible event for the Bartlet family, so I can only pray that when I pop in the first disc of Season 5 it shows his body being cremated by Secret Service officials.

Things pick up, funnily enough, with an episode that has almost nothing to do with politics. In "The Long Goodbye," C.J. returns home to see her Alzheimer's-stricken father and must decide how to handle the situation. It's heartbreaking and real, even if the actor playing the father slips in and out of the real symptoms of someone in the advanced stages of the disease (and trust me, I know). From there the show picks up to the same level of quality it enjoyed in past seasons, as the the Bartlet administration must handle a crisis in the fictional Kundu. We also meet Will Bailey, a marvelous character who essentially swaps places with Sam Seaborn when Sam promises Will he'll run for the House in Orange County. Will has a lot on his plate when he arrives at the White House and becomes Toby's direct subordinate on the basis of his skill; in protest of this promotion, the writing staff up and quits, leaving Will in charge of four bubbly look-alike interns, three of whom are all named Lauren.

The finest of these late game pre-finale shows is "Evidence of Things Not Seen," a gripping hour of television where the White House literally comes under fire. The Qumari threat has been bubbling under the surface all season long, but it finally begins to genuinely show itself in the confusion of the small attack. Did the Qumaris fire the shots, or was it just some wannabe anarchist? It all culminates in the usual stellar two-part finale; "Commencement" is one long thriller, unsettling somehow even from the start even though it opens with the President's elation that his daughter is graduating college and that he gets to give the address. Zoey goes to a party afterwards with Jean-Paul, and things go terribly, terribly wrong. An event occurs that is so shocking that Bartlet makes a shattering decision in the follow-up, "Twenty-Five," easily one of the top three episodes of the show so far.

For all my criticisms of this season, even at its weakest moments it contains enough to Sorkin's wit to make it entertaining, even if the plots get just too ridiculous at times. But the sheer two-dimensionality of Ritchie and Jean-Paul grates, and once again Sorkin just flat out declines to explain where peripheral characters go. Near the end of the season Josh and Donna pick a new Associate White House Counsel, who eventually uncovers a scandal. But far more interesting than that was the fact that Josh and Donna mention that the man, a Republican, was the perfect replacement for Ainsley Hayes. I didn't even know Ainsley Hayes had left! I understand that Sorkin wrote every last one of these first 88 episodes, but swallow your pride and hire other people if you can't keep track of things.

Nevertheless, this is a damn good season of TV, and a bit of a watershed moment. After this season, Sorkin and executive producer Thomas Schlamme departed the show citing difficulties with the studio. Without its two dominant runners behind the show, The West Wing fell into the hands of E.R. producer John Wells, a move that I've widely read meant the end of the show's status as a must-watch, but I'll just have to wait and see. But whatever happens after this will hardly dent my love for these first four seasons, even this occasionally tedious one. For my money both "Commencement" and "Twenty-Five" belong on the short list of the show's greatest episodes, and "Evidence of Things Not Seen" and the two-part premiere belong somewhere on that list as well. Now I must brace myself to see what new direction the show will take.

The West Wing — Season 3

**Warning- may contain spoilers**

After the nonstop excellence of the show's second season, "The West Wing" had a hell of a challenge ahead of it; surely nothing could compare to the bar set. But I learned not to sell Aaron Sorkin short, as he delivers yet another classic season of television.

The last season ended on a cliffhanger of sorts with the President poised to answer whether he would seek a second term. However, like all shows of the 2001-2002 season, "The West Wing" was impacted by the events of September 11th. Postponed a few weeks out of respect, the show returns not with a continuation of the story at hand but a special one-off episode written by Sorkin to address the issues that 9/11 brought up and to raise money for affiliated charities. The special, entitled "Isaac and Ishmael" revolves around a terrorist threat that locks down the White House while a group of specially selected students are touring. To keep them calm, Sam and the other staffers speak to the group about terrorists and what motivates them. As this goes on, Leo and the Secret Service confront a Muslim staffer...just to be safe I guess, because they figure out quickly that he's done nothing wrong.

I know what Sorkin wanted to accomplish with this episode, but it's heavy-handed and comes off like a PSA rather than an episode. Then again, at the time, I can understand why Sorkin was so blunt. I may be young, but I remember the hate, the unabashed open hatred of anyone who even "looked" Arab after 9/11. The message is clear to anyone remotely level-headed (and probably to the entire target audience of the "West Wing"), but Sorkin's insistence on trying to educate everyone makes it stifling.

However, once we really return to the season's canon with the second episode, things get right back on schedule. We learn that Jed Bartlet will indeed seek a second term, and he'll weather whatever Congress throws at him. The last season showed Bartlet and his administration trying to pass their legislature in a Republican-controlled Congress, and this season continues that by having the Republicans come down hard on Jed. My favorite aspect of this is that Sorkin never demonizes them for doing so; indeed, he lets both Jed and Abigail know that what they did was wrong, plain and simple, and they have no right to be outraged or indignant over their treatment.

The MS scandal finally concludes with a run of superb episodes, chief of which is "Bartlet for America," in which Leo testifies how long and how much he knew of the President's illness. I love the flashbacks for this series almost as much as I love the ones of the "Buffyverse;" they always offer such rich insight while remaining immediately entertaining.

In the wake of the huge MS arc, Sorkin needed something big to plug the gap, and he filled it with an explosion of new subplots. Apart from Bartlet gearing up for his re-election campaign, Josh hooks up with a feminist leader and the two constantly debate over legislature important to women, Sam gets duped by the Republican campaign into getting a negative ad on the Bartlet administration played on the news, and, most importantly, the United States must contend with the rising threat of a terrorist attack in the fictional Middle Eastern country of Qumar.

"Isaac and Ishmael" had a good concept but was clearly Sorkin's attempt to appeal to even the lowest common denominator to temper their outrage with contemplation. However, the ending Qumar arc is very much Sorkin working within the actual parameters of the show to deal with the subject of terrorism. A failed attack on the Golden Gate Bridge reveals that Qumar's ambassador to the United States is actually a terrorist organizer, which puts more pressure on President Bartlet than ever before. He and his chiefs of staff debate on how to handle the situation, but eventually only one course of action becomes feasible: they must assassinate the ambassador.

Everything comes to a head in the astounding season finale "Posse Comitatus." As with last season's "Two Cathedrals," it manages to both tie up loose ends and spark a whole new wave of interest. After meeting his Republican opponent, Bartlet vows with increased vigor to win his re-election, while CJ's budding romance with her Secret Service bodyguard is cruelly cut short. The assassination itself sets up a big question for the next season: how will Qumar respond?

When it comes to season finales, I think I'd have to put Sorkin just behind Joss Whedon as the best writer. So far all three season finales have been among the best the show has to offer, and some of the best TV around. Even the first season's big cliffhanger earned its suspense. While I tend to pick the finales out more than anything else, I don't think the actual bulk of the season is weak; on the contrary, it continues the last season's trend of thorough excellence, to the point that picking highlights from the middle is hard. Special mentions would have to go to the aforementioned "Bartlet For America," as well as "The Two Bartlets" and "Hartsfield Landing," in which Jed must come to terms with his abusive childhood, mainly because Toby brings it out of him.

The big weakness this season is the Republican candidate, Florida Governor Robert Ritchie. Clearly a parody of George W. Bush, Ritchie is the anti-intellectual candidate, establishing himself as the opposite of the "elitist" Bartlet. Sorkin fleshed out a number of Republican characters in the course of the show, but Ritchie is so one-note as to be painful. He's just setting this up to be the 2000 election the way Sorkin wanted it to turn out.

Ritchie serves to get in a bunch of jabs at Bush. "Why would they pick him when there are so many qualified Republicans to choose?" ponders Bartlet aloud. Ritchie challenges Bartlet to a clean campaign (even though Bartlet has run all of his campaigns so) only to start throwing out loads of dirty tricks. Look, I don't like Bush either, and I know the "The West Wing" has a liberal bias, but I expect something a bit subtler. Frankly it doesn't even make sense why the Republicans would run Ritchie as the folksy, relatable candidate when Bartlet is so immediately likable. Take the exchange between Charlie and Jed when Jed helps him with his taxes; when Charlie discovers he actually owes money instead of getting a refund, Jed just smiles, holds out his hand, and tells him "you don't even need a stamp. Pay up." He doesn't need to manufacture an image of relatability; he simply is.

Thankfully Ritchie stays in the background - he only appears in one episode- and the focus is more on the staff convincing Bartlet to run as himself and not what he thinks he should be to fight Ritchie. Combined with the rest of the season's predicaments, it makes for another thrill ride of issues and scandal that kept me on the edge of my seat. It's not quite as powerful as the last season, but its still superb.

The West Wing — Season 2

**Warning- may contain spoilers**

I could barely contain my excitement when I opened this box set Christmas morning. I almost wanted to immediately rush into my room, family gathering be damned and plop down to continue watching after the first season so thoroughly enraptured me. Of course I didn't, but the second the family packed it in I put a Do Not Disturb sign on my door and went back to the Capitol. The first season, though flawed in minor spots, set the bar incredibly high, but this season blows it out of the water.

At the end of the last season, President Bartlet and the staffers who surrounded him were fired upon by a group of gunmen. It ended up a bit of a cheap cliffhanger (although it's a hell of an episode), ending before we knew who was shot and why it happened, and forced viewers to wait months to find out. But the two part season premiere, "In the Shadow of Two Gunmen," answers the questions in a way that not only makes the wait worth it but surprises us with a deep insight into what brought the characters to work for Bartlet. As it turns out, White House aide Charlie Young's interracial relationship with the President's daughter Zoey was the basis for the attack; the President wasn't even the target at all. To be honest, I question the intelligence of someone who tried to shoot anyone in the vicinity of the President of the United States, but then one less racist in the world (even a fictional one) is fine by me.

The flashbacks of the episode set up much of the emotional arc of the season. Indeed, even though the Bartlet administration begins to come into its own this season, the real focus is on the characters. The character who gets the most setup here is Josh; wounded severely by the gunmen, Josh spends much of the first part of the season coping with post-traumatic stress disorder. Yet he is never pushed to the sidelines, never dismissed, and never exploited for cheap sympathy.

Ultimately the focus of the second season rests on the Bartlet administration really setting down policies after the first season's excellent "Let Bartlet Be Bartlet" pointed out the administration's wheel-spinning. Jed and his staffers cover a wide range of topics, from a proposed crackdown on racist groups in the wake of the premiere to a nuclear test ban. Then, we learn of the President's MS, which launches a whole new plot concerning if he lied to the public and whether or not he will run for a second term.

This final arc shows just how thought out the season was from the start. In the premiere, we see how the staffers, ideologues all, threw away their careers to work for Josiah simply because they finally found something to believe in. Thus, when Bartlet finally confesses to them his multiple sclerosis, it devastates them. Sorkin knew he was going to tear them down, so he gave us their zenith at the start.

The loss of his staffers' trust, a slew of his biggest political decisions yet, the inevitability that he must tell the people his secret, and the death of a close friend bring Bartlet to the brink in the jaw-dropping season finale "Two Cathedrals," in which the President finally breaks down in private and curses God for his woes. His tirade is made all the more impressive by Thomas Schlamme's impeccable direction, some of the best you'll ever see on a television program. When he stands in front of a press conference and they reporters ask him if he'll run again, Sorkin and Schlamme end the episode thinking they've once again hung us on a cliff. But you can see the answer plainly on Martin Sheen's face. Everything about this episode is perfect.

The best part of this season is its flow; apart from the premiere and finale, it's hard to pick out individual episodes. I mean that in the best possible way. Instead of standout episodes, the whole thing moves along with such narrative force that you'd almost suspect it was some sort of detective program; the notion that it is instead simply a look into political issues is almost baffling.

The only flaw I can find in this season is the occasional disappearance of minor characters. Mandy, the ill-fitting, useless character from the first season, simply vanishes without a trace. I admit I was too happy she was gone to look a gift horse in the mouth, but this issue arose again when White House Counsel Lionel Tribbey up and left to be replaced by Oliver Platt's Oliver Babish. I know it must be hard to keep track of things in this massive ensemble drama, but you can't just switch people for no reason; even tired TV cliché reasons are better than nothing.

Still, that is the only issue in an otherwise perfect season of television. Even though no one character gets more than a moment in the spotlight (how could they with the show's structure?), we get astonishing amounts of insight and personal evolution. From as objective a standpoint as I can judge, "Two Cathedrals" might just be the best hour of TV I've seen. It's not quite my favorite ("Angel's" "Not Fade Away" still reigns triumphant in my heart), but rarely will see a character so thoroughly devastated in the course of 42 minutes. What few flaws existed in the first season have given way to an idealistic yet grounded exercise in narrative of a cinematic scope, one that I can't wait to watch again.

The West Wing Season 1

Why aren’t there more shows about politics? Maybe it’s just because the 2008 election was the first I could vote in that I think politics is fascinating; Barack Obama’s campaign made politics exhilarating, bringing the actual people into the fold more than any of us have ever seen. Politics weaves such a dense web of intrigue, drama, and pitch-black schadenfreude that it’s a gold mine for drama. Or comedy, for that matter. Yet we have only The West Wing, an in-depth, highly acclaimed look into the executive branch that has already been dubbed a classic by fans and critics alike.

Following the inner workings of the executive branch, The West Wing introduces a wide range of characters, all of them driven and optimistic. Staffers write speeches, research events, work on damage control for every political blunder, and spew fast-paced, witty dialogue while moving in a near breakneck pace throughout the White House in a move dubbed “The Walk and Talk.”

All of the major characters are amazing. Communications Director Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff) is a loyal idealist, who stands by his President but is less willing than others to compromise for the sake of politics. Press Secretary C.J. (Allison Janney) trades more witty barbs with White House Correspondents than someone could ever get away with in real life, but it blurs the line between her and the reporters and creates more of a friendly atmosphere. Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) is the president’s best speechwriter (and the only one Toby considers his “equal”) who cannot seem to hold down a steady relationship to save his life. Charlie Young (Dulé Hill) was created in response to a complaint from the NAACP over the lack of diversity in the show, but he becomes one of the most interesting (and most realistic) characters in the series.

My two favorite staffers are the leaders: Chief of Staff Leo McGarry (John Spencer) and Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford). McGarry, a recovering alcoholic and valium addict, is the glue that holds the executive branch together; he is forceful yet genial and both commands reverence and seems like an ordinary fellow. Lyman, on the other hand, isn’t as charming, at least not to people on the other side of the aisle. He is bold, brash, acerbic, and doesn’t care who he offends. He starts problems from the very start of the series; the first PR nightmare we see in the show stems from Josh’s crass remarks about religion. As the season progresses, we see more and more of Josh’s political cunning and brilliance, and he becomes the most interesting of the staffers.

The West Wing was apparently conceived as a show in which the president made at best cameo appearances. But that all changed when Martin Sheen was cast, and it was the smartest move Sorkin and co. could have possibly made. He establishes his character in his very first scene of the pilot episode: when his aides try to smooth things over with religious leaders after Josh makes a crass joke about God, he confidently strides into the room, not to fanfare, not to applause, hell, not even in a suit. He hobbles in on a cane (he’d been in a bicycle accident shortly before the events of the episode) wearing a track suit, greets the religious leaders warmly, then proceeds to tear them apart with a smile on his face. Up until that point he is a ghost in the background, only referenced to joke about his bike accident, only to sweep in with quiet confidence in a flash. The rest of the episode shows that “The West Wing” could have been a great show had it stuck to its original format, but President Bartlett guarantees its immortality from the get-go.

As is always the case with great entertainment, it’s the little things that make it so memorable. The witty, disarming back and forth between Jed and his naval doctor. Jed accidentally taking both Vicodin AND Percocet for his back pain and ends up jovially fawning over his staff the way a drunk person confesses his deep platonic love for his friends. The basketball game in which Jed brings in an All-American Duke player just to crush Josh and Toby. C.J. lip-synching to “The Jackal.” All of them completely unnecessary, and all of them wonderful.

Even here in its first season, which is clearly finding its footing, there are a numerous moments. “Celestial Navigation” is a fun look at the Bartlet Administration’s PR snafus and features a fantastic performance from guest star Edward James Olmos. “Let Bartlet Be Bartlet” announces a more serious turn for the show, and the finale contains a shocking cliffhager. The best episode is “In Exclesis Deo,” in which Toby arranges a military funeral for a homeless veteran. It is moving and simple and all the more powerful for how little the President appears, which makes it more personal.

Despite the high quality, The West Wing clearly has a few kinks to work out. The relationship between Sam (Rob Lowe) and the call-girl Laurie starts out great, then continues until all humor and depth is stripped of it, particularly when she somehow gets past background checks into the State Dinner (the weakest episode of the season, by the way). Mandy is a pointless, one-note, annoying character who just doesn’t work; happily, Sorkin seems to have figured this out early on and quickly wrote her out of the way. As fascinating as the show is even from the start, the administration doesn’t really do anything, which is finally pointed out by the characters in “Let Bartlet Be Bartlet,” which heralds a new direction for the show.

Still, it’s impossible not to love this show from the start. Bartlet is the perfect president, one with idealistic liberal ideals but with an ability to see the other side’s point of view and an unwillingness to back down. Martin Sheen IS Bartlet and this is the finest work of his career, and he was in Apocalypse Now. The West Wing is certainly a fantasy; everyone is far too optimistic considering the years of political conditioning they have to go through to get to their positions. But it puts political issues into layman’s terms without treating the audience like a moron, and it creates some of the most fascinating characters ever made.