Word: sorkin
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...After a while, the real fun of the show becomes seeing what unnatural questions Sorkin will plant in the student's mouth so as to free, Open-Sesame-like, another imprisoned piece of canned wisdom from the staff members. "What was the first act of terrorism?" one student asks - and look! Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff) happens to have on the tip of his tongue an anecdote about the Muslim assassins of the 11th century. A girl asks Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe), "What do you call a society that has to just live every day with the idea that the pizza...
...point Sorkin also indulges his love of cribbing speeches from the Internet. You might recall the episode in which President Bartlet tells off a Dr. Laura figure who's been preaching that the Bible calls homosexuality an abomination, reeling off a list of petty misdemeanors that some passages of the Bible advocate punishing with death; the rant cam pretty much verbatim from a widely circulated anti-Laura e-mail. In "Isaac and Ishmael," Toby explains that the people of Afghanistan are not to be blamed for the excesses of the Taliban. The Taliban, he says, are like the Nazis, ordinary...
...classroom setup the product of an understandable rush job? Maybe. Was it Sorkin subordinating the needs of drama to get out a message? Sure, but post-disaster charitable feelings aside, it's not as though he's never done that before. In the end, you have to wonder whether it ever occurred to Sorkin that it might be the slightest bit insulting to essentially represent the home audience, within the story, as schoolchildren, who need to be gratefully taught his lessons...
...victims. The second is the other running storyline, in which the chief of staff (John Spencer) interrogates an Arab-American staffer wrongly accused of being a terrorist mole (Ajay Naidu, whom you might remember from "Office Space"), which occasionally achieves a nuance and unresolved ambiguity that Mr. Sorkin's Civics 101 doesn...
...course, precisely because it's so timely and urgent, it would have deserved to be singled out if it had been brilliant - which Sorkin is capable of when he stows his soapbox - so to overlook its less-than-brilliance would be condescending charity that Sorkin does not need from me. Besides which, I live in New York City. I claim no special victimhood, but I've seen firsthand the effects of the crimes of Sept. 11 on neighbors, friends, complete strangers. Which is to say, I need no reminder that these are horrible times, times that demand kindness and goodwill...