Hi friends, and welcome to TV Tuesday! Today I’m going to be talking about season one of The West Wing. I have to be honest, I didn’t think I was actually going to enjoy this show as much as I currently am. It was a very last minute decision to watch this, and I feel I have made a great choice. So let’s talk about it.

So season one was so well done; when you start the show with the president crashing into a tree, and one of the president’s men accidently sleeping with a call girl, you have me hooked!

I’m not going to bore you with the technical details of the ins and outs of the show, as it can get rather boring, and I feel like CJ a lot of the time, not completely sure what everything really means.

So let’s get into it. The West Wing is about the President of The United States and how to run the White House, essentially, but obviously it’s a lot more than that. Most scenes take part in the west wing of the White House (where the president has his office), and takes part with a lot of meetings electing people, proposing bills, it’s all very political, yet it’s very good. It’s actually comical and I love it. The actors are all rather hysterical, and they throw jokes in everywhere, or witty remarks which make everything easy to watch, and to understand better.

So aside from making very big decisions the plot centers around our main characters. President Josiah Bartlet, or Jed his stories are wrapped around his family, and as of the first season we have only met his wife Abbey, and his youngest daughter Zoey. His wife is a big wig doctor who travels the world. We find out she’s the only one who knows he has MS, until she tells Leo, his best friend, which is a very sweet moment.

Jed’s daughter, Zoey I know doesn’t like giving her father mini heart-attacks, but she does it anyways. She’s about to start her first year of college, and that leaves her open, and so she gets lots of security which she hates. I love when she meets Charlie, her father’s personal aide, and they start to date. This leads to death threats because he’s black, and she’s white. I love that he doesn’t care about any of it, he is such a good guy.

I love his introduction, he starts off with a job interview and Josh thinks he can do a lot more. The President actually likes him too and bam he has his job.

Leo has a very up and down introduction. We learn that he is a recovering alcoholic, but then it gets leaked that some of the presidential staff are doing drugs, which leads to finding out that Leo has a drug addiction as well. When he leads the press conference to admit it, things go downhill, but it does get better, because worse things always happen.

Josh is a funny character. He is the Deputy Chief of Staff to the President. Halfway through the season he meets Joey Lewis, who at first he thinks is a man, but turns out she’s a deaf woman. He ends up really liking her, and once she starts to work for the president, because of him, everyone starts to give him advice on how to get with her; I have to say it’s quite hilarious. Josh is cute when he’s flustered.

Josh and Donna’s (his secretary) relationship is very cute, and funny. She is always bugging him, they act like a married couple, and it works well.

Mandy is annoying character to me. She comes onboard at the beginning of the season and from the start she’s a shit disturber. So when the end of the season comes along and the presidential staff find out that there is a paper she wrote about taking down President Bartlet, and that is was leaked to the media, well shit hits the fan. But the president lets her off because she wrote it when she was working for the opposing side, and she was just doing her job. I still really can’t stand her, even though I love the actor who plays her.

Toby is an angry old Jewish man, and he is so stereotypical it’s not really funny, but he has witty remarks, and he becomes likable after a little while. He’s the one everyone calls when they need to put a fire out, and there are a lot of them.

Like Sam and his call girl friend.

Oh Sam, he’s so innocent, it’s cute. He has a running thing with Leo’s daughter, and I like that. Every so often the call girl thing will be brought up, and by the end of the season I think it’s time we gave that up because I highly doubt he still feels the need to save this woman, as she has graduated and is well on her way to becoming a lawyer.
Anyways Sam writes all of the president’s speeches, and he’s an instant loveable character.

I’ve saved CJ for last because she is my hero, and my favourite character on the show. CJ is the press secretary, which means she has to handle the press and give them briefings on what the president has to say on whatever given topic. The amount of crap that she has to go through in the season I’m always going ‘you go girl’ whenever she really hits her mark.

She’s truly a talent. I love, love, love her running love affair with Danny, one of the press. Everyone knows him, and they all kinda know that the two of them have a thing. Gosh they are too cute. When Josh tells him that she loves Goldfish, he goes out and buys her an actual fish. The look on his face when she tells him the crackers, it’s priceless. Ugh cuteness to the max.

Although mixing work with pleasure can get tricky; and it does as Dany is the favourite but once those feelings got involved the two can’t even look at each other without being hostel.

This show really hits it’s mark in the first season. Some of the more political things they talk about are gun control, gays rights, gays in the military, and the military in general (which they still have issues with in the US, how far have the US really come?)The season finale I’m a little bummed about. They did a great job with it, but I’m so mad with where they ended it, why did it have to be a cliff hanger?

The president is asked to speak at a school function about younger people voting, and most of the episode is preparing for this. In the end when they are leaving there is a mass shooting, and it just ends! I need to know who was shot, what’s going to happen; you can’t just end it there. Although great tactics for getting viewers to tune in for the next season.

We also get informed that Toby’s brother is stuck in space, due to a complication with a door and they can’t him and his crew down. This is the first time we’ve seen Toby at all saddened and with so much emotion. Even Josh has a lot of emotion in this episode and he didn’t really have big emotional plots. 

This show has definitely captured my attention.