Commander In Chief

So. Commander in Chief.

I loved The Contender. I think Rod Lurie is an amazing writer and director. I've loved Geena Davis in just about everything since Buffalo Bill. (In the interests of decorum in her new role as leader of the free world I won't wax too much on her performance in Tootsie, which might well have induced my passage into puberty.) Kyle Secor? Crazy Good. Donald Sutherland, some sort of scary shaman-actor.

I was the guy who ate up The West Wing like it was chocolate given to a POW who'd been held in a bamboo box for years. I loved WW because it seemed to finally, finally deal with the part of politics that I thought had to be the point, in the end. Call me a crazy idealist, but at some level, somebody had to believe what they were doing, didn't they?

Now the West Wing certainly isn't what it was. It's a show that has had an unexpected ninth inning rally, but no one really expects it to take the pennant. So if there's a guy who can carry that water, and give a political show that actually makes you think about stuff, then I believe Rod Lurie is that guy.

And I think he's off to a great start. Serioulsy. I'll be PVR'ing Commander in Chief. Not just for Geena Davis -- though -- well, I don't really want to talk about that too much anymore, a guy must have his secrets, but anyway --

The Pilot, though it didn't achieve anything near the lyricism of the West Wing pilot and certainly lacked the Godlike entrance of The Sheen...did have its charms, and little instructive things that make for good pilot shorthand.

-The Hillary Clinton jokes, "That didn't go over too well." I'm a great big fat Hillary Clinton fan, and I laughed at every one. Kyle Secor's suffering in those scenes as FLOTUS was sublime.

-The Conservative Daughter. Nice shorthand. It could have been a stunt, but the actress is good, and as an opposition in your house moment, I buy it fine. I also found the scene with the President's secretary rather moving.

-The fact that the dying President was portrayed as a decent man. Good...you've got to care about this guy to give the transition complexity.

-The fact that they name check Gore and Cheney. This isn't WestWingWorld. This is our s.

The Dittoheads will doubtless howl that Donald Sutherland is playing a standard heavy, once again proving the perils of literalism. You need a bad guy. Giving that role to Donald Sutherland is like digging up Babe Ruth and raising his zombie ass to make sure that weird sh*t that went down with the Bosox last year never happens again. They have called in a rainmaker, g. Testify.

But watching the show I can't help but think that Lurie has lost an opportunity off the top. And it's an opportunity that only a Democrat would blow.

We-who-are-American-and-watch-from-afar see y'all and your stuff a little differently up here. It's amusing in extremis that a little TV writer in our national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, a guy named John Doyle, every once in a while becomes Bill O'Reilly's whipping boy because he expresses amusement at the absolute toilet-trajectory that American political discourse has become. Inevitably, the fulsome O'Reilly talks about the Globe as a "liberal Canadian Newspaper," which pretty much makes any thinking person in Canada laugh so hard as to pretty much need oxygen.

American debate is so polarized and through the looking glass now that it's imbued with fantasy.

And the Democratic tinge on this fantasy is what I call, "the fantasy of the independent."

Mackenzie Allen, Geena Davis' character in Commander In Chief, was chosen for the Veep slot by a (presumably) conservative Republican because she was a woman, and an independent. So when he dies, and she doesn't resign, she becomes not just the first female President of the United States of America, but its first Independent President.

This is a Democratic fantasy that's cropped up before: they used the same trope on last year's so-much-early-promise- so-utterly-squandered WB drama Jack & Bobby. The future President in that show was a Republican who quit the party and ran, and won, as an independent.

And that's where they lose it a bit. Dems are dissatisfied with the polarization, they're dissatisfied with both parties, so they buy into this fantasy of a person who could be above all that.

I'm a big believer in a pox on both your houses, but here's the thing...

Republicans aren't.

Seriously. John Rogers, I think, wrote a great post at Kung Fu Monkey about Republicans. Specifically, where have they all gone? I mean, look at it, they control the three levers of government, yet spend all their time screaming over how they're still getting screwed in the cowed, non-existent liberal press. They spend like drunken sailors, refuse to make any fiscally responsible decisions (you know, the things that they're supposed to be good at) and concern themselves with all sorts of issues of individual liberty and choice (you know, the things that they're not supposed to care about.) The religious neocon takeover of the Republican party is so total, and so outsized, that if Lurie wanted to be really, really subversive, he didn't need to make Mackenzie Allen an independent.

He could have made her a Republican.

An honest-to-goodness, old-school, big tent, socially progressive but fiscally modest Republican. You can say that maybe that wouldn't have created enough conflict for the character, but you're wrong. As it is, the show will speak only to that battered West Wing refugee constituency. The Zombie Republicans (musssst.. ssssavvveee.... Sccchiiiavvvo...) that live in Washington now won't see an independent: they'll see a liberal media dupe.

Only Democrats dream of Independents that will save our democracy. The Republicans are either closing their eyes and thinking of England while the leaders of their party (the party, after all, that did free the slaves--remember that..) run roughshod over the constitution, their own principles, effective government, and pretty much everything except the extension of their own power -- for the second time in 30 years, by the way...wow...hope you REALLY enjoy that tax cut...

...any way, in the midst of all this, it would be quite interesting if the person up there talked not like a Hollywood liberal fantasy independent, but like an honest to goodness, used to be Republican. That would have been some heap interesting show.

But I guess it is television. Ah well.

Commander in Chief loses a couple of points for making the President's first crisis a real "women's issue," for the juice on the blouse, the little kids singing in French, and the petty stunt of turning off the telePrompTer...I mean, Donald Sutherland is evil...don't have him do party tricks...but overall, it's earned a conditional pass from me. For now.