Monday, April 24, 2006

The Long Goodbye

It's sad that the wind-up of The West Wing is at times indistinguishable from that of Will & Grace. A commercial break features Will and, er, Grace hugging, and then we cut back to WW with Josh and Donna cuddling. I, too, like teddy bears and icecream, but only in designated times, such as during a chick flick or a particularly good episode of South Park.

(And to be difficult, I'll ask - is it a good idea for the President's chief of staff to be getting it on with the First Lady's chief of staff? Just a question to leave out there...)

I'm left comparing the end of the Wing with the last few episodes of NYPD Blue - which ended with an episode that could almost have served as a pilot for a new and completely watchable show - Sipowizc as a "Boss" breaking the young detectives in? Plus, no Medavoy? Sign me up...Bizarrely, the Wing seems to be having the same effect on my mother, despite my careful explanation that what she's just feeling is the residual affection built up over the first 3.9 years of the show (I'm not sure I've ever really forgiven them for having Zoe kidnapped and not bringing in Jack Bauer to get her back...) Which they are shamelessly preying on by tossing what must have been a boatload of cash at Rob Lowe.

Just to make myself unhappy, I watched last night's episode and followed up with the first episode of the second season (which they blatantly ripped off by having Josh barge into Sam's boring-ass-law-meeting.) Which mainly served to increase my anticipation for Studio 60, the new Sorkin/Schlamme show (apparently, the vastly underrated Sports Night meets SNL, hijinks ensue.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's not a ripoff; it's an homage!

Ahistoricality said...

Technically, I don't think it's either: cheap parallelism, time is cyclical, etc., is lazy writing. What the heck happened to Sam Seaborn's House seat? I missed a memo.