COMMANDER IN CHIEF

After everyone's glowing reviews -- glowing in the way that embers glow -- I took my time watching the Commander in Chief pilot. The show so quickly betrays the truth of the main character -- or any main character -- that it became unwatchable.

The driving question is: the President is dying. Everybody wants the Vice President to resign so they can get a Vice President that the President likes better.

I'm sorry. People are asking a politician to resign her office because it's the right thing to do. Someone who suffered through an election campaign. Someone with the strength to win a campaign.

Are you kidding?

I know there are mitigating details in there -- she's not a career politicians, whatever -- but those just make the story more ridiculous. This woman actually asks her kids what they think she should do. Like it's a serious question.

It's like The West Wing, if Aaron Sorkin had never read American politics, and didn't have Dee Dee Myers and Peggy Noonan -- real Washington insiders -- on staff.

The reason I'm going to watch a show called Commander in Chief is because I want to get a sense I'm peeking into a world I've never seen before -- a real world, full of life and death decisions. That's why I watch Grey's Anatomy and Over There. But if they're just going to make it up ... what's the point?

UPDATE: And, hah! This just in. Steve Bochco is going to run the show. Rod Lurie gets to keep his credit, but he's not in charge of the show any more. This tells me that Geena Davis has too expensive a deal to just kill the show. They have to keep it going somehow. So, bring in the biggest hired gun you can find...

UPDATE AGAIN: Jeff points out below: "The show's the highest rated new series of the season..." Which goes to show you: I don't know what the audience wants to see; I have opinions about how to tell stories. It may be that seeing a soft-hearted tough-minded Geena Davis as President is what people want to watch, and they're not that worried about whether it's realistic or not. After all, West Wing was always about too-good-to-be-true Democrats struggling against too-good-to-be-true Republicans, not the real nasty mess Washington really is. C-in-C doesn't float my boat, but then, I'm not a Desperate Housewives fan, either. Jeff is, along with millions of other people.

These are the sorts of things that make network execs sometimes seem thickheaded, when really they are almost always very smart people dealing with problems and data that you, the writer, will never have to deal with directly.