west wing

Aaron Sorkin, I love you, but we need to talk.

As many of the West Wing faithful have gleefully discovered, all seven seasons were recently added to Netflix Instant, which means I know what I'll be doing for the next few months.

The West Wing isn’t a perfect TV show in its depiction of women, but it’s better than most. So what went wrong with Sorkin's newest show, The Newsroom, which struggles to present even one plausible female character? 

As a sad teenage liberal, disillusioned with the Bush administration, I grew up on The West Wing. The political world that Sorkin depicted—one that passed the Bechdel test, where women’s reproductive rights mattered to the president, the press secretary was a woman, and the first lady was as awesome as Rizzo in “Grease”—wasn’t a reality then, but watching The West Wing made me think it could be.

Less charitably, The West Wing is porn for liberals.

I wasn’t sure it would hold up this time around. But it does. The writing is still excellent, and the issues explored on the show—gun control, abortion rights, marriage equality, gender parity, terrorist threats—aren’t any less timely now than they were in 1999.