Two TV Shows, Alike in Inaccuracy
What the West Wing and The X-Files both got wrong about America.
Just diving right in while ignoring the fact I created this Substack two years ago and haven’t done jack squat with it until now.
We all (I assume) have our comfort watches: those TV shows and movies that get us through the tough times. We’ve needed those a lot of those lately, dating back to — take your pick, depending on how old you are: the Cold War, 9-11, Iraq/Afghanistan, Trump, the pandemic, Trump 2.0. It’s perfectly understandishable that current events would make one want to curl into a fetal position on the couch and zone out for a few hours.
We’re all over the place in my house. My kids watch Dead Poet’s Society, and the Mighty Ducks trilogy (yes, even the third) when they’re not sharing skibidi toilet memes (I may not be entirely up to date on that one). And my wife and I have revisited the likes of E.R. and The Sopranos.
As is the case with healthy relationships, we also have our own individual entertainment pillow forts. I do an X-Files rewatch every few years, for example, and may or may not have recently re-re-watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy. My wife, who is not a colossal dork, goes back to stuff like The Good Wife or The West Wing.
Disparate choices? So it would seem. But it was while on my nth viewing of "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man" that I realized the programs we return to so often — namely West Wing and X-Files — have much more in common than I’d previously realized.
On the surface, the two shows couldn’t be further apart. The West Wing spawned the annoyingly ubiquitous “walk and talk” drama, this one purporting to give the audience a behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of the White House. The X-Files is a science fiction drama/conspiracy thriller about extraterrestrials and government cover-ups. What could these shows possibly have in common?
Not much, except that they’re both completely implausible.
Take The West Wing, the second entry (after The American President) in Aaron Sorkin’s Oval Office Cinematic Universe. It elevates AP’s Martin Sheen from Chief of Staff to the role of President Jed Bartlet, a professor of economics who worked his way up from the New Hampshire state legislature to Congress to Governor to President. Bartlet also has a Masters and Ph.D. and is a Nobel Laureate in Economics.
If that wasn’t implausibly impressive enough, President Barlet also brokers a peace treaty between Israel and Palestine and cedes power to the Republican Speaker of the House when his daughter is kidnapped. No word on if he could also play sax.
On the other side of the coin, we have The X-Files. The series debuted several years before The West Wing, and featured a distinctly unsympathetic view of certain aspects of the federal government. For not only was a shadowy intelligence organization actively working with extraterrestrials to colonize Earth, they were also responsible for the Kennedy and MLK assassinations. Oh, and keeping the Buffalo Bills from winning the Super Bowl (as of this writing, that’s still in place).
Aside from each having banging theme music (my mom still has the WW score as her ringtone), the shows would appear to be … dissimilar. In The West Wing, educated public servants of good conscience strive to make their country a better place. In The X-Files, those people also exist, but the government itself conceals a cabal of power brokers and industrialists bent on controlling mankind.
In reality, they’re both products of unrealistic expectations we have about the federal government.
That the government doesn’t care much about its citizens is hardly news, especially if your roommate left his copy of Howard Zinn on y’all’s board-and-cinder block bookshelves. But this most recent ascension of con-men, sex criminals, and zealots (sometimes represented in the same person) to the highest echelons of power is more, what’s the word, “overt.”
I’ve dogged on The West Wing in the past (trust me on this, my old blog is offline) for being the apotheosis of the liberal Hollywood fantasy about government. And it is. From its Nobel Laureate President representing our fever dreams about gun control and peace in the Mideast, to the idea that any administration would use the opportunity afforded by two open spots on the Supreme Court to nominate one liberal and one conservative Justice. You know, in the spirit of judicial rigor, or something.
You don’t have to go further than that last example (imagine William Fichtner bawling about how much he likes beer), but that was always what Sorkin wanted. He called the show “a valentine to public service” and admitted they were “fairly heroic.” The further we get from its initial run (the last episode aired in 2006), however, the wider that gap between fiction and reality becomes.
The X-Files doesn’t try to tell us the government is run by high-minded intellectuals unsoiled by political realities. Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully operate in a bureaucracy populated as often as not by officious careerists and incompetents. What creator Chris Carter was trying to sell was the idea that a vast conspiracy has operated for decades under our very noses without attracting the notice of anyone but one rogue FBI agent.
Conspiracy theories were a lot more fun prior to this century, weren’t they? Grassy Knoll enthusiasts and the like were mostly relegated to letters to the editor and Richard Linklater movies. The X-Files’ rise in popularity paralleled the growth of the internet (with occasionally regrettable results). This newfound ability to share grey alien hypotheses in chat rooms and Usenet groups seems almost quaint compared to what’s currently being spread on X and Joe Rogan’s podcast, to name two of the biggest offenders.
What burst the balloon in both shows was, coincidentally, 9-11. Aaron Sorkin’s thoughtful optimism limped on after the Towers fell, but The West Wing was notably deflated. As for The X-Files, amusing theories about the government hiding UFO evidence soon gave way to loonier speculation that the attack was an “inside job,” an assertion that, were it made to anyone with experience in: project management, politics, corporate culture, or basic human nature, would cause them to laugh until blood came out of their ears.
We may or may not be in the “land of wolves,” but we’re definitely not in a place hospitable to favorable views of the executive branch or internet cranks. Carter was the last President who operated with anything approaching a moral compass, and he was crucified for it at the time. Meanwhile, billionaires and those with the widest reach in media are still clinging to lies about the 2016 election and COVID conspiracies.
The West Wing and X-Files are perfectly good shows, fit for revisiting for nostalgia or comfort reasons. But this is the land of discomfort now, to say the least.