We open on Bartlet passionately delivering a speech like it’s his own personal St. Crispin’s Day, but, worryingly for the senior staff, he’s just lost five votes for his new initiative on gun control. (More worryingly for this reviewer, it appears Josh has fangirls. Takes all sorts, I suppose…) But if Wick looks like an utter tit in this episode, the senior staff look a lot worse. Just as we’re growing to like these characters, Five Votes Down shines a bright light – possibly the kind with the power of a million candles – on the imperfections that bugged this reviewer so much in the pilot. We see our heroes through the eyes of others this week, and the view ain’t exactly pretty. Josh attempts to bully his way through the episode and comes across as overconfident, egotistical and in dire need of a slap. Even Leo is pulled up for trying to manipulate a black congressman by raising the issue of gang-related deaths (“Don’t tell me how to be a leader of black men. You look like an idiot.”) The truth becomes apparent as the episode develops; it’s a crappy law. Bartlet and his government talk big, but they don’t always try hard enough when it’s time to take action. What’s more, they’re arrogant enough to think no one in Congress has noticed. It’s a brave stunt to pull just as the audience is starting to feel comfortable, but it’s the right move. Sorkin’s retro style always leaves him in danger of painting a rose-tinted picture of the West Wing, and if Bartlet’s government is portrayed as perfect it would stretch the show’s credibility to breaking point. On the surface it seems a bit pointless as a subplot, but it does allow the brilliant Richard Schiff to turn the deadpan Eeyore act up to 11 (“there’s literally no one in the world that I don’t hate right now”) and leads to a silly-yet-entertaining cameo from Bartlet – dosed up on back medicine and half-delirious – which makes a light-hearted contrast to his performance last week. We also get our first real glimpse into Leo’s personal life. Our favourite craggy-faced Chief of Staff’s capable veneer cracks this week as wife Jenny thinks he considers his job more important than their marriage. “It’s more important than my marriage now,” he tells her honestly, if a bit tactlessly, and at least he has the good grace not to be surprised when she packs her bags. When he later confesses all to the VP, we discover both Leo and Hoynes are alcoholics, and you just know this plotline is going to run and run. So Hoynes has his eye on the Oval Office, Leo is in danger of falling off the wagon, and the White House may well be in line for some political retribution after Josh’s misguided attempt to throw his weight around. After the high drama of last week, Five Votes Down is a relatively quiet episode, but this reviewer senses it’s merely the calm before the storm. Give it a week or two, and it’ll all kick off… Read our review of episode 3 here.
title: “The West Wing Season 1 Episode 4 Review” ShowToc: true date: “2025-07-02” author: “Grace Placko”
It’s Big Block of Cheese Day in the White House, on which Leo insists the senior staff meet with people and organisations who struggle to make their voices heard. The staffers are finding it hard to take the whole thing seriously: Sam is sarcastic and dismissive towards a UFO-obsessed nerd stereotype, CJ struggles to be polite at the suggestion of an 1800-mile ‘wolves-only highway’, and Josh merely gives us a disdainful, “Is today Total Crackpot Day again?” The realisation leads to a whole bucketload of Lyman angst. Josh visits his old therapist and admits he can’t get Schubert’s Ave Maria out of his head – it reminds him of his sister, who died in a fire while toddler-Josh ran out of the house and saved himself. Even the best US dramas can be overly fond of these all-too-convenient psychoanalytical plot devices, and only rarely does it feel wholly convincing. (If you love this kind of thing though, please do go and watch Season 2’s Noël, in which the Freudometer is turned up to eleven to great effect.) But it does lead to a goosebump-inducing scene with CJ, in which Josh describes in frighteningly plausible detail how a third of the human race could be wiped out with the smallpox virus, as Ave Maria plays hauntingly in the background. This is one of the many things The West Wing does so well – in the midst of all the witty banter and Big Block of Cheese silliness, it suddenly whacks us on the collective head with the serious stick and gives us something downright scary to think about. It goes without saying that both Whitford and Janney handle the scene brilliantly. They always do. Richard Schiff’s curmudgeonly performances just get more and more compelling each week, although Sorkin strikes an off note here by having Toby rant about McCarthyism during a discussion about violence in film. It’s clearly the writer’s own voice coming through, and it’s annoyingly intrusive – if you’re going to use your characters as mouthpieces for your own political views, you’ve got to be a sight more subtle than this. Of course, The West Wing’s detractors would say the entire show is a mouthpiece for Sorkin’s own political views, but being a big soft cissy bleeding-heart Guardian-reading liberal herself, this reviewer is usually too busy agreeing with him to criticise. It’s bittersweet smiles all round by the closing scene. Sam and CJ have dropped their scorn (well, sort of) towards the Block of Cheese crackpots, and Bartlet’s daughter Zoey (Elisabeth Moss in her pre-Sterling Cooper days) has turned up to make chilli and be adorable. As for Leo, he just “can’t get over these women”. The menfolk of the West Wing stare in admiration at CJ, Donna and Mandy, and two out of those three deserve it a hundred times over. But when Leo describes Mandy as “going punch for punch with Toby in a world that tells women to sit down and shut up”, it sounds more like a comment on an episode of Mad Men. While the world circa 1999 was by no means rid of sexism or the glass ceiling (and it still isn’t) someone should really have pointed out to Leo that a) things had moved on somewhat since the 50s and b) in Mandy’s case, someone probably should tell her to sit down and shut up, because she’s horrendous. The most significant moment – arguably more so than Bartlet’s speech (“with outstretched fingers, we touched the face of God”) – is Josh’s decision to hand back his Armageddon card. if disaster strikes, he wants to be there to comfort his loved ones. The Crackpots And These Women was, for this reviewer, the episode in which Josh became truly likeable. We’re beginning to delve deeper into the main characters’ backstories and personal lives now, learning who they are and what makes them tick, and – with the obvious exception – they’re looking less like characters and more like real people every week. Let’s hope Toby and CJ get the same attention soon.
