The President as Character:
The West Wing’s Josiah Bartlet and
Commander in Chiefs Mackenzie Allen
Introduction
The 2005 fall television season brought two fictional presidencies into
American homes. The most well known was the second-term presidency of
Josiah “Jed” Bartlet on NBC’s The West Wing, which was in its seventh and
final year. The newcomer to the air was the accidental presidency of Mackenzie
Allen on ABC’s Commander in Chief. The show, according to creator Rod
Lurie, was an attempt to create a strong female voice in a political setting, but
the experiment was short-lived. Commander in Chief got off to a strong start,
drawing an average of 15.2 million viewers in its initial weeks (“ABC
Impeaches”). Still, despite the unusual premise, viewership dropped and the
show went on hiatus late in 2005. It resurfaced in mid-January, but continued to
lose viewers, went on a second hiatus and underwent several staffing changes.
By April 2006, viewership was averaging 7.5 million, leading ABC to pull the
plug on May 2, with talk of possibly doing a made-for-television movie to tie up
the show’s loose ends (“ABC Impeaches”).
The show’s centerpiece was Geena Davis, who played Mackenzie Allen, an
independent who apparently was added as the vice presidential candidate to the
ticket of Republican Teddy Bridges to help court women voters. As the premiere
episode opens, Allen—now the vice president—is in France trying to enlist
international support to save a Nigerian woman who is under a death sentence
for adultery. As she sits at a concert listening to a children’s choir, an aide
comes in to pull her outside, where she gets word that the president has suffered
a stroke and will be unable to resume his duties for at least a year. Melanie
Blackston, the U.S. Attorney general, tells Allen that the 25th Amendment to the
Constitution would kick in—Allen would become acting president. Allen,
despite her two years in the vice presidency, her tenure as a university
chancellor and her two terms in Congress, seems flummoxed by the notion, and
says, haltingly, “Okay, um, Melanie, um, what happens now? Do I take the oath
or what?”
This is a stark contrast to the first appearance of Jed Bartlet, played by
Martin Sheen, in the opening season of The West Wing in the fall of 1999. He is
an absent, but formidable presence through the first three-fourths of the pilot
episode. He is referred to only as POTUS for the first few minutes of the
program, and just before the opening credits roll, he is finally fully identified as
the President of the United States. When he makes his first appearance in the
program, which isn’t until the final act of the program, it is as a voice of
authority thundering from the doorway as he walks into a meeting between