Presidential Nitpicking

On an episode of the The Simpsons (a program of which it might be said that many, many a truth is spoken in jest), Lucy Lawless (Xena, Warrior Princess) voices her cartoon self facing a group of hard-core fans at a convention. As they throw mind-numbingly obscure questions at her about minute plot inconsistancies, continuity errors and contradictions in the "Xena-world", she has a swift and final answer, based on years of experience in dealing with such nitpickers: "Well, on Xena, whenever you see something like that," she declares firmly, "a wizard did it."

The dangers inherent in writing, week after week, about a fictional something with a real manifestation in the real world are obvious. There are no wizards in the "real" world of Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing on which to hang inconsistancies. Coupled with Sorkin's fabled penchant for knocking out scripts at the last possible moment, it is inevitable that sometimes details will be wrong.

The Attorney-General, described in a conversation between President Bartlet and Leo McGarry in a discussion about race as being Black, is introduced in a later episode and is manifestly White. In another episode, President Bartlet talks a young Navy sailor through a hurricane which those in the know say the US Naval Fleet couldn't possibly have really been caught in due to the modern meteorlogical methods at their disposal. The assassins in the notorious final episode of last season could never, ever have been in the depicted location during a real Presidential appearance, say those with some experience in these things - at least, not without Secret Service collusion.

It is in the newsgroups such as alt.tv.the-west-wing and in the many West Wing discussion groups on the net where these apparent errors and a small handful of others are debated ad infinitum. Was the Attorney-General replaced in the time between the Bartlet-McGarry conversation and the appearance of the Caucasian A-G? Is the business of predicting hurricanes, it is wondered, more difficult than the US Meteorlogical Service and the good men and women who work for it would care to admit? Were the assassins better-hidden than the for-television lighting suggested? (This last conjecture illustrates the strange twists the blurring of fiction and reality in these debates can take.)

It all becomes too much for some fans. They are offended by what they perceive as criticism and wonder why, if people are so critical of the show, they bother to watch it, or at least why they bother to post their nitpicks publicly.

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