Melbourne has turned on a glorious day for Easter Sunday – sunny and warm with a sky that goes on for miles and mile of uninterrupted blue. The kind of day that makes you wish you were the orange cat and could nap in a sunny spot all day…or at least nap and read in a sunny spot all day. The kind of day that makes it hard to keep one’s butt in the chair.
The kind of day you want to just go on and on and on (much like four day weekends).
Speaking of not wanting things to end, can I pause to mourn the West Wing for a bit? It’s not quite over here in Oz, we’ve got a few more episodes of S7 to go. But each Saturday night I get myself into a sort of bittersweet state. Hopeless fangirl joy at new episodes and seeing things wrap up the way they shoud and hopeless fangirl despair that soon there will be no more (apart from on dvd…season 7 is winging its way to me from the US as I type). Not helped by the episodes tugging on the heartstrings pretty hard – particularly last night’s. I don’t want to let the characters go. Aaron Sorkin, as has been discussed elsewhere on my blog, is one of the TV/screen writers I just love (along with Joss and Amy Palladino and Shonda Rhimes).
I’ve loved the West Wing from the first moment I saw it. Which is weird because my interest in politics (or rather, politicians), other than to roll my eyes in despair a lot, is low, low, low. So how does a show about American politics hook itself into my head and heart so easily? It’s the characters. The funny, human, quixotic, try-hard-fall-down, screw-up, transcend, brilliant, dorky, romantic, dream big characters. Write that sort of character in any medium and I’m all yours to the bitter end. Which is approaching too fast for my liking for this particular set. They’re very real and I want to keep visiting with them. To the point where last night I dreamed about telling Bradley Whitford “No, Josh, you can’t leave”. LOL. We’ll blame that one on too much Easter chocolate.
All too soon, I know that my little West Wingers will join other big love shows of mine like Buffy and Firefly and Farscape on the DVD shelves next to the big sign saying “Why oh evil tv programming gods, why?” (Okay I accept that sometimes shows must end but some of them are also cut off in their prime while reality drivel multiplies like fungus – this confuses me). Where they will rank up there with my favourite books as comfort food for the girls. Hopefully while they get their fix, I’m learning something about how to make my own characters live like that for a reader….because I think for a writer, the ultimate compliment has to be “I just didn’t want it to end”.
