A general rant about The West Wing

With the advent of DVD rental services online (I'm with Amazon but there are plenty to choose from), I've found that watching big chunky American TV is much better in big chunks. So in the last six weeks or so, I've watched two seasons of The West Wing.

The great thing is never having to wait for stories to unfold - you can watch them through to their conclusion in a couple of hours. You also get very caught up in the characters and their situation.

The frightening thing about The West Wing is that American policy seems to get decided by half-a-dozen people in the White House who have no contact with the real world, although they are all very bright, and highly driven. Frightening, because if that is true in fictional America, it's seems even truer of real-life Britain, where the Downing Street policy unit is made up of very bright, highly driven individuals sitting around, thinking up the future of the country. And all too frequently coming up with spirit-crushingly bad ideas in the process.

This leads to the horrible conclusion that the future of the country and any kind of progressive reform is in the hands of a bunch of middle-class Ivy Leaguers, who are all smart-arses with ironic humour but preppily geeky, too. The characters are, beneath the sarcasm, just so utterly full of themselves its appalling. And we are treated to all of their liberal prejudices (please: environmentalists are NOT left-wing - they're the most conservative people on the planet).

Thank God for the Republican lawyer, Ashley, so that there's somebody to argue with them. In an episode I've just watched, she makes the point that 'the more laws governments make, the more people's freedoms are taken away'. Shame Republicans seem also to be war-mongering conservatives whose main concern is to defend big business, or I might get to like them. And shame that the people in Downing Street don't sometimes thing "Hey, why don't we just leave things the way they are long enough for people on the ground to figure out how to make them work better."

Just when the worthiness of the White House staff is about to make me puke, I stop myself. These people think America is an idea worth defending. We British gave up on the national idea decades ago. In real-life, anti-Americanism is, of course, most prevalent in America. But it's nice to see some people who still think there's a big idea that's worth defending. America is a deeply flawed big idea, but since it usually gets attacked for all the wrong reasons, this aspect of the show which grates on me the most may also be one of its strengths.