Yeah, you know what, occasionally I liked Josh, and occasionally I wanted to throttle him. But the thing that really got me, the thing that I found just completely baffling, was that Josh canonically had this online fan club of obsessed women who wanted to sleep with him. I'm not saying Bradley Whitford is hideous, or anything, but when one of the characters is played by Rob Lowe, and one of the characters has the online fangirl contingent, and these are two different characters? I could never figure that one out.

TWW's did not seem organic to the world it was portraying, and while I don't find it as corrosive as some do, it's more obnoxious to me because it comes from characters who consistently position themselves as the most enlightened and fair people in the room. This is not to say that it isn't also a portrayal of things as they actually are in the White House; I just have more experience with things as they actually are in suburban New Jersey, so I can speak to that better.

But I didn't feel like David Chase expected us to revere Tony as a beacon of progressive thinking while he was treating women like crap; Sorkin did seem to expect us to admire Josh, and if he wanted us to understand that he, Sorkin, also thought Josh was a sexist, that didn't come through clearly. (There's also a difference of degree here; a dink is not a felon, so the comparison doesn't always work.)

But I think it's also that Chase tries to tell you how things are, and Sorkin tries to tell you how things should be. The latter is a valid storytelling choice, but it does make it harder for the viewer to forgive hypocrisies that seem to proceed not from the character but from the creator. Sorkin usually gets by with it, to his credit, but when he doesn't, he reeeeeally doesn't, and that's just a danger of that kind of writing.

A sexist character on TWW was lazy writing, or Aaron Sorkin's truest feelings, or whatever else the critic felt like blathering about that day, but the same or worse on other shows? Doesn't get a snif.

Josh Lyman was often an ass, but was still a compelling character in my book. And a fair representation of many of that ilk in DC. TWW got hammered a lot for it's portrayal of sexism in DC, but it was pretty real.

I have no problems with people not liking that character (personally i lived for the moments when josh would "go gazebo" on someone's ass), but sometimes I don't get the critiques.

te writing in season 5 was very inconsistent, and flowed poorly. It improved again in 6 and finished strong in 7, IMHO. But YMMV. Bradley Whitford the actor is a lovely person (or is insanely good at faing it!), though. In person he makes it hard to understand why he kept gettiug cast as "yuppie scum" for so many years.

After I learned that the Josh character was based on RE, I rewatched TWW episodes in a new light. I realized what an asshole Josh really was… never realized it before. And what a great casting selection for BW. He seems to do those roles well (Billy Madison).

Hey wingers!

As for this season of RW, I watched a few episodes on Logo. I've never really watched the show, and the only time I did in the last several years was when I had to sub on a recap. But I did appreciate the fact that the openly gay guy wasn't required to be the sane voice of maturity, tolerance, and reason. It's about time television had an openly gay idiot with rage issues — that's a very underrepresented minority. (However, he was kind of hot, so I was disappointed he wasn't getting any action on the couple of episodes I watched.)

I read it, and it IS a very nice article, but it's sort of funny that the message on his casting as Josh is "Brad kept getting cast as preppy douchebags, but not any more!" Heh.