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I’ve been putting in sixty hour weeks at work so Thanksgiving was a nice time to relax, visit with family, watch some football games I had no interest in, and generally slouch about the house.
One thing I haven’t had time to do was catch up on some movies, so the cuddly and amenable mrs tbogg and I settled in to watch Tropic– Thunder (which had its moments, but, you know), Wall-E (impressed by the animation, but not by the story which lacked… something), and I finally got to watch Charlie Wilson’s War which I enjoyed immensely mainly because of the snappy dialogue between Tom Hanks and Phillip Seymour Hoffman (the best actor working this side of Daniel Day-Lewis). I have copies of Hoffman’s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead and The Savages which I still haven’t gotten around to, but hope to this weekend since I’m in a movie mood.
I was unaware that Aaron Sorkin wrote the screenplay for Charlie Wilson and it occurred to me that, while I’m familiar with who Sorkin is, I’ve never actually watched anything that he has been involved with. Which is to say, I’ve never seen A Few Good Men (due primarily to my Tom Cruise aversion and, yes, I know he was in Tropical Thunder) and I have never seen even one episode of The West Wing. Appointment TV just isn’t my thing. I’ve only seen three episodes of the first season of The Sopranos, the first episode of Six Feet Under, the first two episodes of Mad Men, and nada zip zilch of The Wire.
I am so out of it.
However, in a case of "timing is everything", today I happened to receive an email from Amazon with their Black Friday specials and, lo and behold, they have the complete West Wing for $75 which is kind of a rocking good price. Okay. I’ll bite.
Please feel free to use the comments to either tell me that I scored a great deal or you can totally harsh my anticipation and point out that I should have gone full Gilmour Girls instead. And no spoilers: I already know that Darth is Luke’s father.
Duh.
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Here’s the way I see it.
Season 1 starts out poor, finishes strong.
Season 2 is some of the best TV ever written.
Season 3 has its ups and downs, but is still very good.
Season 4 is even more spotty, but finishes extremely strong.
Seasons 5 through 7 are dead to me.
Sorkin left the show after season 4.
Not a coincidence.
Still, $45 for the first four seasons is a hell of a deal, and there are some good episodes strewn about the last three seasons.
Enjoy.
I think you should have gone full Gilmour Girls. It lost a lot after season 4.
Six Feet Under would have been another great choice. The “funeral commercials” during the first season were truly classic. The last episode was the best final episode of anything I have ever seen.
Oh, and Damages on FX with Glenn Close. Excellent.
You can get all of these TV shows through Netflix & Blockbuster. Just sayin’.
Happy Turkey Day!
Much as I enjoyed West Wing: The Early Years (yes, I agree w/ the above commenters, though I didn’t remember which season it went off the cliff), I’d rent them rather than buy them. I liked Charlie Wilson, too. For another Sorkin creation well worth watching: Sports Night, which I loved but which never seemed to find enough of an audience to stay on television.
Glad I’m not the only one who avoids movies with Tom Cruise in them. He costs me money in dental work, because his “acting” makes me grind my teeth.
Thanks for the picture. It reminds me of the televison of my youth. Back when the picture would roll up and down or zigzag to the side. We’d occasionally have to send little brother up to the roof to turn the antenna. The national anthem at midnight signoff. Three channels with more on them than there is on 200 now. Good times.
Of course, I don’t own one now. So, all I can say is West wing??? Gilmour Girls????
I agree that the first four seasons of West Wing were better, but there were some good episodes later on. The ethanol story was great, because there weren’t too many people raising questions at that time. You are really missing something with The Wire.
If you really haven’t watched The Wire, you should. We got them all through Netflix, one by one all five seasons, and I took a month to send the last one back because I couldn’t let it go. There aren’t many TV shows we actually buy any more, but that’s one I want to have.
The long work weeks must be getting to you. The name of the movie is Tropic Thunder. Tropical Thunder is, uh, something else.
The Wire is, in my opinion, the best thing that’s ever been on television.
No, no,no, not The West Wing–Sports Night. Better dialogue, a marginally better cast, and 90% less pretentious bullshit. Sorkin is best when he’s writing dialogue that sounds like smart people talking. He is at his worst when he thinks he is thinking.
West Wing – worth every penny of the $75 – even as things headed south after Season 4, the cast and quality acting made up for Sorkin’s departure
American President: Aaron Sorkin
Studio 60: Aaron Sorkin (dammit!!! one of the best shows that wasn’t renewed)
SportsNight: Aaron Sorkin – and, hey, look at that! there’s a new deluxe edition that’s out!
shaddup. I am so not stalking him.
Yeah, the only thing that allowed me to get past the cancellation of Sports Night was the advent of West Wing. Sorkin writes the quintessential ’snappy dialogue’ and you need to pay attention and listen carefully or you will miss some gems. I cannot comment on the show after Sorkin’s departure, but the first few years of this show got me through a lot of the Bush administration…I could fantasize about having a bright, committed president. In other words, fiction!
Sorkin never caters to the stupid. Nothing is dumbed down here and you damned well better know something about the subject matter because he isn’t there to school you. Smart People TV – something difficult to come by today.
Of course, nobody gets to eat any bugs, though…
Ditto on The Wire. Don’t know if I’d call it the best thing ever on television but only because I shy away from eliminationalist superlativism (especially considering stuff like the Alec Guinness/John LeCarré series on PBS) but it’s definitely up there in the Pantheon. I’m not ashamed to admit to turning on the subtitles until I got more comfortable with hearing Baltimore Street accents, but it was a very, very good show. I thought the West Wing was well done in the early seasons, but Sorkin’s penchant for utterly contrived dialog and simplistic preachiness always grated a bit.
aaron fucking sorkin? you’re better than that, dude!
Sorkin had some of the better written shows on TV (admittedly, that can be a low bar.
Given the week and W’s “big event,” my favorite scene (quoted from memory) when the president is pardoning one of two turkeys:
CJ: But sir, you don’t understand. The loser gets eaten.
JB: If the Academy Awards did that, I’d watch.
I’ll watch anything with Alan Ball’s name on it- True Blood for me, the latest of my guilty pleasure shows.
If you are planning on watching The Savages, may I suggest you do so with a quart of your favorite alcoholic beverage (wine coolers? Zimi?) and a Prozac chaser.
It’s billed as a “comedy” but for anyone who has elderly parents or whose parents have passed on…. Jesus.
Devil Knows Your Dead is slick.
$75? You can just rent the whole thing out from Netflix. Unless you are planning to pull out the discs every few months and watch it again, I don’t see the point of buying them. Even then, you could just rent them a second time from Netflix.
Skip the The West Wing and The Gilmore Girls (Who?).
Go for the full Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s bloody brilliant.
.
Darth is Luke’s father?
Buying The West Wing (and sight unseen at that) which I think leads directly to owning The West Wing. Seems a strange move. Consider cutting back on work.
**cough cough** favorite guilty pleasure show **cough**
Looking forward to Dollhouse. Whedan’s writing team is extraordinary, in’ it.
NOt only that, but get this: The Wizard is actually a pharmaceuticals salesman from Kansas. And Dorothy knows him!
Is that freaky or what?
.
I refuse the concept of Appointment TV. I don’t have TiVo, do have On Demand with my cable, but I’ll wait for the boxed set to watch. Being able to see the series or season from start to finish is a good thing, having the time to watch it as it comes would be nice. And hulu just doesn’t do it for me, either.
Tbogg, you must get (rent, buy, borrow, whatever) The Office from both sides of the pond, Arrested Development, Rome, Six Feet Under, 30 Rock, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and my recent purchase of childhood rerun bliss: The Rat Patrol. My Borders membership card and those 40% off any item coupons they send now and then have helped me forget that shows even get broadcast. Now I have to see if Metalocalypse has a boxed set.
The Sorkin years of West Wing were good, but there were some good years after that. “King Corn” from season six is one of the best hours of TV ever made. It is the best whole episode, although “Posse Comitatus” is close second.
I’m not that enthralled with Aaron Sorkin the writer, even though “The American President” is one of my top ten movies. In terms of movie writing, the whole movie gets pulled together with the speech by President Andrew Sheppard. It has a stage-bound feel (not surprising, seeing as Sorkin was writing plays first). I was reminded of Gary Cooper as John Doe as he talks for a long time while Barbara Stanwyk crosses back and forth in the background. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
“Studio 60″ was underwhelming. Sorkin writes with more melodrama than irony and that fits better in the halls of actual power, as opposed to the halls of faux power of a TV show.
West Wing was the best show on television, ever.
Go for the full Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
If you’re going to go Full Metal Joss Wheedon, check out Firefly- a victim of TV crib death, but still utter awesomeness with awesome sauce. The movie Serenity was pretty good too, but only if you had seen the series first to actually give a damn.
The first four seasons of West Wing were awesome! Sorkin is a genius. And, if you haven’t watched The Wire, you’re really missing something incredible. For real.
No, no, no: the best thing ever on television was Hill Street Blues. All of the shows listed above, including all of Sorkin’s stuff, owes its existence to HSB. Because of interleaved storylines, however, it’s nearly impossible to show the reruns; you can’t mix them up and show them randomly, which makes syndication undesirable.
The whole thing about Charlie Wilson’s War, and something that is only briefly and obliquely hinted at in the final scene: Everything that Wilson and his friends did led directly to the rise of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, and thus to 9/11, Iraq, and eight years of Bush instead of four-and-out with no murderous invasion.
Ah, geez, please don’t let anyone tell you that Studio 60 was some great, unappreciated, genius piece o’ work. Even its stars have disavowed it (look up D. L Hughley on the subject). Hell, even Sorkin himself has acknowledged that he was, um, working out some of his own issues in it, which didn’t necessarily complement the storytelling process.
If you’re going to go Sorkin–and there’s no reason you shouldn’t–you can’t do better than The American President and Sports Night. Intelligent without showing off, and with great stories.
Tom Cruise isn’t talented enough to carry A Few Good Men, and the highest-up commenters are dead right about The West Wing. I pretty much stopped watching seriously after 9/11, because watching fake politics seemed somehow trivial. But then our real politics took such a gruesome turn, and TWW provided a refuge. It just wasn’t as tempting a refuge anymore.
But it’s fun. And it’s going to be even more fun watching it for the first time, knowing that Rahm Emanuel was the model for the character of Josh Lyman. So, what does it matter what we think? It was a good deal for so many seasons of television!
Another plug for Sports Night, from someone who has also never seen anything else Sorkin has done. Mostly, actually, I watch PBS and the documentary channels, but lest I sound like a holier than thou asshole, I will say the TV is nearly always on. (I’ve got miles of nature documentaries on DVD. It creeps my partner out.) So I’m a couch potato, just one who’s averse to standard dramas and sitcoms.
Sports Night, however, is excellent, on the strength of the dialogue alone.
It’s hard to beat FREE if you want to catch up on some movies, (TV shows too), current hits and classics). Check out Fancast.com
The movie library is at http://www.fancast.com/movies
and TV at http://www.fancast.com/full_episodes
The classic films up right now feature an Orson Welles collectioon, including “The Stranger.”
(And I just watched “Raising Arizona” which I had never seen – good stuff.)
The West Wing was genius. You are going to love it.
Another vote for Buffy!!!
I’m hoping to finish Farscape, plus getting Season Two of Torchwood from Netflix…
The L&T Casey owns the entire Buffy series on DVD and while she did not take them to school with her, you can bet she will be watching them for the umpteenth time while she is home for Xmas. Big, big, big fan…..
I love love love Sorkin’s writing and I have yet to see more than two or three episodes of Sports Night, so I can’t really speak to that, but the first four seasons of West Wing are pretty awesome. (Season 5, the Time of Neglect, is better viewed as a rocky transition, but it really does pick back up, imho, in later seasons.)
But oh, y’all. Do yourselves a favor and get the entire series of The Wire. Do it. Do it now. Now now now. You will be glad you have the whole thing so that you can binge and rewatch at will. You will also lose a weekend or two to it. Don’t worry. It’s normal.
Last episode of Six Feet Under truly is the best series finale of any show.
The Savages and Before the Devil Knows your Dead are both pretty good movies. Not excellent, but pretty good, and worth watching.
Watch out though. The beginning of “Devil” has a whole lotta naked P.S.H. It can be quite hard to stomach if you’re not expecting it. So, be warned, and make sure the kiddies and anyone easily traumatized are out of the room before you press play.
I too loved the dialog and interplay between Hanks and Hoffman in Charlie Wilson’s War. I went into it knowing that what Wilson wrought gave us 9/11 and so many things yet to come, and I think if you knew that you could see the intense regret of Hanks as his character is given that award at the end of the film. If you didn’t know about this aspect of our covert involvement then you just thought it was a fun romp with snappy dialog and boffing Julia Roberts, proof once again that being an informed viewer is more fulfilling and nuanced than just mindlessly rooting for the Wolverines.
West Wing was quite wonderful until Sorkin’s departure. I recall the very first episode of the next season as being a poor imitation of all that came before, as if a bunch of kids were staging the show in their backyard, with a bed sheet on the laundry line as a curtain. It literally fell off a cliff when he left. I made it one more episode then walked away.
The Wire is not to be missed. Excellent writing and acting, compelling plot lines, and Baltimore.
What more could any one ask?
The dialog alone is worth the effort.
The wife and I are watching it right now on DVD (I for the second or third time, she for the very first), and it really is a pleasure.
And, I’ve just ordered Season 2 of _I Spy_
Another vote for Sports Night and Firefly. I did like Studio 60 but I am a sucker for anything “backstage,” so I can’t really recommend it unless you too are into that.
Very, very dated but still worth watching, and you can get at least 3 seasons on DVD: Have Gun, Will Travel. It’s amazing how well it still holds up, and Richard Boone alone is worth the price.
Why doesn’t it show up for $75 on my screen? Too late? Story
o’ my life..anyway…that seems like a great deal. Sure, it could be annoying but it had some beautiful writing and acting. I’d love to have “Sports Night”, too.
Big vote for “Buffy” here. In that vein, in a way (and no pun, intended) – it’s slight but I’m enjoying a used set of “Reaper”, got it for about $17.
“The Shield” remains one of my favorites and the series finale was one of the best I’ve ever seen. Far better than “The Sopranos” although I enjoyed that at the time.
And I’m Tivoing (in HD) “Doctor Who” and enjoying those very much. Not so sure I’d lay out the big bucks for the series because it’s so expensive.
Ahem. The best actor working on either side of Daniel Day-Lewis. What Hoffman lacks (the looks, the body, the glamor) he more than makes up for with acting ability. He’s got to be the best American actor working today and could be the best regardless of nationality.
Hoffman’s initial rant in Charlie Wilson’s War should have won him the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. I like Javier Bardem and I think he’s a fine actor, but his performance in No Country for Old Men, good as it was, was not (in my opinion) the equal of Hoffman’s in Charlie Wilson’s War. I guess the Academy was afraid that Anton Chigurh and his “air gun” might still be at large.
$75 bucks is a good deal on the West Wing, though I’d never lay out cash for it (good show, but once you’ve seen it a couple of times… plus it’s widely available through, ahem, other means) but I would for:
-The Wire (first four seasons especially)
-Deadwood
-The complete House of Cards trilogy: of House of Cards, To Play the King, and The Final Cut
Also:
-Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister (have ‘em, love ‘em, guard ‘em with my life)
All of the above are also widely available through ahem other means, but these are worthy investments and worth their weight in gold.
Re PS Hoffman, I’ve admired that guy since he appeared in Magnolia. I don’t know of any films with him preceding that one.
Recommend “Dead Like Me” a 2 season show on showtime? It’s out on DVD and it is excellent.
Other winners (not in ratings) Wonderfalls and Eerie, Indiana.
Also for the holiday if you haven’t seen it is A Christmas Carol with George C. Scott as Scrooge…best one ever.
One last recommendation for people of our…cough…age…
Twilight Zone, 80’s version, episode “The Minute Men” with Adam Arkin. One that stays with you forever. Also on DVD.
Sorry, Mointenedbink, but the best Scrooge ever was Mr. Magoo.
Best Scrooge ever was Alistair Sims.
“West Wing” was more than great TV: It is no mere coincidince that when Bush wanted to declare his little “War on Terra” that he did it just in time to pre-empt “West Wing” for most DFHs.
I also own the entire series of Firefly (which is amazing)… both of those shows are pure genius and absolutely guilty pleasures of mine.
Though “The West Wing” quality did drop off some post-Sorkin it remained better than most TV crapola and the show’s final season finished quite strong, including some eerie foreshadowing of the just concluded Obama-McCain campaign dynamics.
Sorkin’s attached to the film version of Sondheim’s “Follies,” slated for 2012.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1172993/
Another vote for “Sports Night.” My wife and I were caring for our newborn daughter during Season 1, so my watching was a little, um, spotty. But I got the series on DVD a few years ago and it was even better than I remembered. And it got killed after Season 2 despite drawing bigger audiences than some shows that got renewed. Grr.
Funny- I started with Firefly, met a dedicated Firefly fan who said “if you liked that you should check out West Wing”, then thrust season 1 in my hand. Two weeks later I bought the boxed set. Season 5 struggled to regain it’s footing after Sorkin left, but it eventually rediscovered it’s tone in seasons 6 and 7 when it reverted to multi-episode story arcs instead of one off, issue-of-the-week drama.
“Sarcasm: The grumpy man’s wit”
Thank you Mrs Landingham, I still use that one.
As for Buffy, Seasons 1-3 fantastic, rest a bit meh. Angel is pretty enjoyable too, more from season 2 onwards.
Avoid Sorkin’s “Studio 60″. It’s adult actors engaged in high school level debates disguised as a show about an unfunny sketch comedy show.
The Wire. Sports Night.
Without question, two of the best shows ever, from one non-TV watcher to another. But season one of Sports Night has issues (and an obnoxious laugh track); you might want to start with season two.
The Wire.
The. Best. TV. Show. Ever.
Get it, Watch it.
The complete series that I own include the runs of Star Trek – The Original Series and Deep Space Nine, Futurama, and Kids In The Hall (although not the movie), plus Firefly and the live-action Tick which hardly count since they didn’t last an entire season, plus Strangers With Candy, again without the movie. So, you know where I’m beaming in from.
I liked Wall-E, although I wondered how the humans could walk even a little if their bones were so vestigal that they didn’t even connect any more. Cute robots were cute, anyway.