(My review of Season One can be found here)
The most immediately noticeable example of this is the conspicuous and unexplained departure of Mandy Hampton. The absence of Mandy, who - as I mentioned in my Season One review - was an extraneous character at the best of times, is initially jarring but ultimately does nothing to diminish the quality of Season Two. If anything, it strengthens the show, allowing the writers' focus to remain on the characters who form the show's core.
That core is essentially the same as it was in Season One - the characters of Toby, Sam, Josh and CJ, with Leo and President Bartlet serving as father figures and Charlie there to humanise the whole endeavour - but with one notable addition; Donna Moss (played by Janel Moloney), assistant to Bradley Whitford's Josh Lyman. Donna, a supporting player in Season One, is elevated to Regular status in Season Two and the show is all the more enjoyable for it. Donna's place within the ensemble is similar to Charlie's, in that she strengthens the show by humanising it. But while Charlie is there to play the Son to President Bartlet's father, Donna is there in a more playful role; it seems as if the writers and producers realised that the antagonistic and slightly sexual chemistry they were trying to build between Josh and Mandy was already there in a much more organic way between Josh and Donna, and shifted their focus accordingly.
Throughout Season Two, Sorkin and his writing staff display a complete mastery of the television form and the many devices it utilises. The opening episodes, In the Shadow of Two Gunmen parts I and II, the story of the main characters first coming together to get Bartlet elected is told in a series of flashbacks. Each flashback is vital to the story, and whilst important information is delivered in each, none feel purely expository. The flashbacks each have their own full story arcs, with a beginning, middle and end, and each move the story forward in a compelling way.
Season Two also displays some of the best cold openings that television has seen (the cold opening is the scene broadcast before the credits, usually setting up the main conflict or serving as a prologue to the episode proper). The majority of cold openings in Season Two - and this continues throughout the show's seven year run, but peaked in Season Two - are mini masterpieces, going beyond the usual few beats of set up to serve as satisfying stories in and of themselves, and often earning bigger laughs than anything else in the episode (Episode eleven, The Leadership Breakfast, which begins with Sam and Josh attempting to light the fireplace is perhaps the most pure and entertaining example of everything this show does right).
There are numerous other episodes from Season Two that deserve special mention; among these are The Stackhouse Filibuster, Galileo and Noel. While each of these episodes is especially powerful if the viewer is familiar with everything that came before them, they're probably the best examples of strong individual episodes if you're a casual viewer looking to sample the show.
Over the course of Season Two's twenty-two episodes, a subtle shift occurs as the show moves from done-in-one episodes to a more serialized type of storytelling. The story of President Bartlet's multiple sclerosis is moved from slow-boiling sublot to become the show's main focus, and the results are some of the show's best episodes. Episode 18, 17 People - which deals with Toby's reaction to finding out about the President's illness - does a tremendous job of making the audience aware of the stakes involved, and contains some of the show's strongest performances. Richard Schiff in particular deserves every accolade that comes his way for making Toby's arc in this episode utterly believable, shading the performance with surprise, sadness, rage and betrayal and ultimately making Toby more human than he's ever been before.
What stops this season short of perfection is that, by the end of its' run, the shows' flaws begin to make themselves known. These mostly deal with the (perhaps inevitable) repetitive nature of writing 22 episodes in one location with one group of characters a year, as some of the writers' favourite devices begin to feel familiar. Josh explaining a political issue to Donna as a means for the writers to explain it to the audience is one of these; an act of violence requiring a military response occurring just as characters are facing a personal crisis is another. These scenes involving the military are often the show's weakest points, as they involve characters being told things rather than characters doing things. Casting the likable John Amos as Percy Fitzwallace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, goes some way towards making these scenes enjoyable, but there's only so far that charisma can get you when you're delivering exposition for an entire scene.
All of this is forgiven and forgotten, however, when Season Two reaches its final episode, Two Cathedrals. The episode is practically a textbook on TV episode construction and is the perfect conclusion to a batch of episode as good as this one was. It's a tall order to live up to the promise displayed by the beginning and middle of Season Two; Two Cathedrals exceeds it, and its worth watching the first two seasons solely to get to this episode.
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