I'll be brutally honest on this. I didn't expect myself to come back and write a lengthy review about any of the episodes of this show succeeding the third season's finale. I haven't loved many of the episodes that we got in the fourth and fifth seasons, and have definitely experienced a decline in quality for everything regarding "The West Wing." I knew that it would take time for John Wells to fully get into his own after Sorkin decided to leave the show, but it has taken a long time for those hopes to actually bear any fruit. This season has started to get its act together a little bit in the last few episodes, when they started to make it crystal clear that they're not afraid to focus on other characters and storylines than those we've grown accustomed to. They're currently in a very interesting primary subplot that involves a lot of characters that we haven't even really gotten to know yet, and they're clearly setting us up for the new "West Wing" going into the final few years of its run. The expectations aren't very high, so it wouldn't take much for them to actually manage to produce something surprising and gripping. And that's exactly what they did with their 13th episode in the fifth season "King Corn," which sheds the natural structure of the show away for a more intricate look at every major player involved with this primary, and an insight into a heated presidential race coming up very soon.
Instead of writing every episode himself, John Wells has utilized a more common writers' room in a move that already differentiated him from Sorkin who would write almost every episode himself. This is an episode that Wells himself wrote and he's finally starting to show why he was the perfect successor to Sorkin. He knows politics and he knows storytelling. The structural innovations of this episode was fruitful and it gave us a look at all the major players, but seeing how their days are basically the same, painting a picture that we might not be so different after all.
It's a very humanizing episode in itself, projecting to show all the people involved as that: people. They're not just war-mongering politicians, but people with an agenda. They have basic emotions and feelings like everyone else, and while it may be hard to crack the wall when you see them in public, they'll bleed dry behind the scenes. Wells has painted a humanizing picture of every candidate for president, laying precedent for each of them to possibly win and for us to like them. That's a quality that's frankly been sorely lacking from this show throughout its entire network run.
Wells also goes into a full-on political assault with this episode. He wastes no time getting into it, giving the audience a thorough investigation of political agendas. Every single line has a political motivation; every single scene has a political meaning. There's no way you can watch this episode and not feel like you've been hit by a truck, but that's good! That's what we want from a show that finally dared to talk about politics. This is the energy from the first few seasons that we're seeing coming back into the veins of the show, and not too soon.
This part will just be like an Alan Alda appreciation post, because he truly is a national treasure. Just seeing him on screen brings a smile to my face, and even though he was known for bringing comedic gold to the screen for years when he did "M*A*S*H," he's showing off his dramatic chops here, still sprinkling in that humor that we know and love from him. All actors in this episode provide good performances, but he clearly shows that he's on a completely different level, stealing the screen every time he decides to pop his head in.
"King Corn" is as much an episode about the politics of the world as it's a reinvention of an old structure on "The West Wing." It's the best they've been in years with Wells finally coming into his own and showing his agenda, which seems to be focused on these awesome stories rooted in politics.
