Inappropriate Content: Commander in Chief

This fall, you may have heard, a woman will be president. I missed the pilot of Commander in Chief, but caught up thanks to the good folks at Television Without Pity. Now that I've seen a couple episodes, I'm filled with longing for the days of yore, heady days when Aaron Sorkin was still writing The West Wing.

It's not that Mackenzie Allen, or Mac, is a notably bad president or anything. Aside from naming her son Horace (a lapse in judgment I'm inclined to blame on her somewhat boobish husband, Rod) she is in fact doing very well under difficult circumstances.

It's just...well, where Sorkin would moderate, Commander in Chief polarizes, and so demonizes. The show's GOP house majority leader is a Donald Southerland so evil he actually wears a black hat. Granted, it's a funeral, but still. He makes Tom DeLay look good, or a least less bad, a feat that requires a significant evil quotient.

Not that it's a partisan show, because the Democratic senate leadership is just as evil, if somewhat better dressed. Mac herself is an independent who a Republican president brought on his ticket as stunt casting. Now the president is dead and she's running things by putting the country first and not her party. If this sounds a little familiar, it's because it's exactly the same as the plot of Tom Clancy's novel Executive Orders, only with a woman, and also they took out the plot point where a crazed Air Japan pilot slams his 747 into the Capitol building: presumably, that would have been in bad taste.

Well, tastelessness aside, Commander in Chief and Clancy do share a common fantasy: a knight in shining armor riding in on something horse-like (Clancy's Jack Ryan likes biking and motorcycles, Mac kayaks up the Potomac, helicopter escort in hot pursuit) to run this country for the people and not the special interests.

I'm pretty sure the Constitution has a few things in it to keep anyone from taking over the country, for the people or otherwise. That sort of thing made Madison jittery, you know. But don't let that stop you from having fun. Geena Davis still rocks hard core.