The West Wing: Season 6 (2004-2005)

On re-watching season six, in relatively short order, I was impressed with how well developed it was, and how it transitioned from satisfying story-arc to satisfying story-arc in a way its immediate predecessor season never did. This is probably the strongest of the post-Sorkin seasons, and one of the things that makes it so is that the series transitioned into something else, away from the soft-toned neo-Capra, into something a little more real, as well as more politically balanced, with Alan Alda’s Republican Senator Arnold Vinick being perhaps the most fully developed and fascinating Republican character, well maybe ever. I’m gonna 5 out of 5 it.

Worth noting are the many similarities between the series 2006 campaign and our present election cycle. First off the Republicans, an older maverick Senator with a semi-strained relationship to the party base, Arnold Vinick of California (John McCain of Arizona) wins the parties nomination. Vincik defeats an early front runner who was made viable by his handling of a national cries, Fmr. House Speaker Glen Walken in the aftermath of the Zoe Bartlett kidnaping (Rudy Giuliani and 9/11). The last major Republican rival to be vanquished by the nominee is a charismatic southern preacher, Don Butler of Virginia (Mike Huckebee of Arkansas).

For the Democrats you have a contest in which a likely early front runner drops out before officially announcing, Pennsylvania governor Eric Baker (fmr. Virginia governor Mark Warner). So the contest is mostly between a relatively uninspiring establishment pol, vice president Robert Russell (senator Hillary Clinton), a southerner who’d been out of the game for a little while and is later supremely damaged by a affair of years previous, fmr. vice president John Hoyns (fmr senator John Edwards), and the eventual nominee, a liberal racial minority and relative newcomer, Texas congressman Matt Santos (Illinois senator Barack Obama). There is a protracted and bitter primary campaign, a divided party, and eventually the nominee chooses a party establishment figure with loads of experience as his running mate, Leo McGerry (Joe Biden). Additional parallels in season 7 may be pointed out by me later.