Saw the first three eps of Season 6 yesterday, and after the welcome return to form that was Season 5, I'm starting to think it's almost as cheesy and clumsy as Season 4.
Problems so far:
1) The dry one-liners and banter between characters have become strained at best, and awful at worst. Example, In episode 3, why is CJ so determined to stop Josh eating cake? Why has this irredeemably questionable premise been allowed to form the basis for an entire subplot?
2)"WHAT I'M ABOUT TO SAY IS NOT THAT IMPORTANT BUT GOD I'M ANGRY!" They seemed to have replaced the understated poignancy and pathos of the best scenes in the earlier seasons with scenes featuring actors yelling limp pieces of dialogue in an angry tone.
3) There has been a serious dumbing down of the show. Watching the Israeli PM and the Palestinian sitting with Bartlett, sipping tea and arguing empassioned idealogical tosh, undergrad syle, about the history of the conflict made me cringe. Where is the portrayal of the fecking politics behind the Arab-Israeli conflict? Stuff like winning elections, keeping different factions happy, saving face - you know, the sort of thing they used to analyse so well back when the show was good.
4) The fecking melodrama. Does Bartlett really need to have a conversation with the Israeli PM in the dim late-afternoon light, in the middle of a forest? Is the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority really going to be persuaded to end a 60 year conflict thanks to a deep-and-meaningful chat, whilst strolling through a different part of that forest, with an attractive and well-meaning blonde White House staffer? And would the American president really spent hours and hours of his sitting in a hospital waiting room, seemingly with no one from the patient's actual family sitting there with him, on a day when his administration are about to sign a treaty to end the Arab-Israeli conflict? And I realise that TWW, being a network show, was always a bit melodramatic compared to the good HBO shows, but this is starting to resemble Days of Our Lives.
5) The complete abandonment of any attempt at realism. Yes, I realise that the show was never absolutely faithful to what actually goes on inside the White House. I mean, obviously, it's a fecking TV show. But at this stage it's starting to get silly. Why do the five or six central characters of the show, as a group, seem to be singularly responsible for every single part of the Camp David negotation? Where are the rooms full of generals addressing Bartlett that used to be portrayed in the early years? Where are the special interest groups, congressman, senior White House staffers, and why is there not even a single scene depicting a realistically large sized American delegation sitting in a room together?
I have a load of other issues with it, but I cannot be arsed typing any more. I'm going to persist with it and see if it gets better, but any minute now I'm expecting President Bartlett to trade his impeccable French shoes for a pair of water skis and jump over a confined marine predator.
