Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Back to the blog

Okay, so it's been a couple of days and here's where things stand with the DVDs:

I'm back to The West Wing. I watched one episode of Danger: UXB and realized that I didn't need to see more. Sure, Anthony Andrews was lovely, but while I could understand him (mostly), many of the supporting cast were incomprehensible, plus the suspense was, you should pardon the pun, killing me. I mean, it's obvious they're not going to blow up their star in the first episode, but other guys...?

So the last couple of West Wing episodes that I've watched are the one where Edward James Olmos gets chosen to be a Supreme Court nominee (and Ken Howard plays a nasty, snooty guy--and we get the first hint of Charlie Young's numerous jobs prior to joining the White House staff, I think it's a joke that he did so many things--here, it was that he caddied for three summers at some country club; there is the hint that it was probably pretty exclusive, a theme that gets revisited in a later episode).

And the episode I started today is the first Christmas episode, where Toby gets called because a homeless guy dies on the Mall and he's wearing an old coat of Toby's that was given to Goodwill and it's got his card in his pocket. The storyline enables some exposition of Mrs. Landingham's past--that her twin sons rather improbably got killed in the same firefight in Vietnam in 1970 on Christmas Eve. (I say "improbably", because how likely is it that two brothers were assigned to the same part of Nam at the same time?)

Haven't gotten there yet, but I'm looking forward to the juxtaposition of the funeral with honor guard for the homeless veteran with the children's choir at the White House singing Little Drummer Boy.

I really, really wish they'd put together a "Music from The West Wing" CD set. Sigh.

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