The 9/11 Truth movement, which denies that terrorism was the cause of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, has always had deep roots in movies. In 2005, the first Loose Change movie, which marshalled so-called evidence for the theory, was released streaming online and in a limited DVD run: three editions have been released since. But now, the movement is leveling up with September Morn, a closer-to-Hollywood production that’s meant to act as a call for a new investigation into the attacks separate from the 9/11 Commission. Normally, I’d ignore this kind of thing for the silliness that it is. But as the Truther movement’s ambitions have expanded cinematically, it also seems to have captured some new adherents, including two that could give the project a worrisome credibility.

It’s particularly depressing that Woody Harrelson and Martin Sheen would lend their credibility to a project like this, and I almost can’t believe that it’s true. Other members of the announced cast either burned through their talent or their credibility long ago. Daniel Sunjata, who’s probably best known for his work in Rescue Me, is a noted, long-term truther. As much as I share Jay and Silent Bob’s enthusiasm for Judd Nelson, he is not exactly what you’d call a major movie star these days. But Harrelson is at a second, impressive crest in his career, and Sheen has both accumulated West Wing good will to burn with politically-oriented filmgoers and has stumped for Obama in the past. Without them, this would be a project with a no-name writer, a director who did Jack Nicholson’s stunts in As Good As It Gets (I would, I have to admit, love to know what that entailed), and a collection of actors who might attract small, passionate followings, but nothing else. Harrelson and Sheen have made this project news instead of another entry in the conspiracy trash heap.

That’s the danger of actors’ influence, and movies’ power to reach, even for the least of them, what are comparatively large audiences in the context of almost any other medium. September Morn won’t just disseminate bad ideas that ought to have been discredited long ago, that linger as a symptom of what seems to be a plague of our country’s conspiratorial thinking. It will help credit the idea that people who have an enormous amount of influence can use it for anything substantive or socially valuable. The casualties aren’t just the unsuspecting who pick up conspiracy theories: they’re informed, serious people who could make a difference but get lumped in with what 30 Rock’s protestors would call the Hollyweirdos.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in a recent speech about Burma’s democracy movement, noted that a leader in the struggle once told her that the country’s activists were educating themselves about the way democratic governments work by watching The West Wing:

All of which got me thinking: what lessons are the political shows we’re airing now teaching people about democracy, American or otherwise?

1. Yelling safeguards the health of the political culture (The Newsroom): America may be the greatest country in the world thanks to an intern Will McAvoy shouted down in the season premiere of Aaron Sorkin’s latest and hired in the finale. But stupid is universal, as is the need to speak truth to it. Hopefully other free journalists in newly-minted democracies will spend their time hollering at actual people in power instead of beauty queens.

2. Niceness and integrity can win the day if you work very, very hard, and your opponent is a transparent idiot (Parks and Recreation): If we want to export democracy, can we mail a lot of Parks and Rec DVDs overseas? Leslie Knope may handle sister city delegations poorly—Viva Mayor Walter Gunderson!—but if she can take down the Man From Sweetums (or Glee‘s Burt Hummel can beat Sue Sylvester’s dirty campaign), maybe upstanding candidates fighting against the tide in corrupted elections everywhere can have a chance.

3. If niceness fails, kitchen sink disposals handle human ears nicely (Boss): Mayor Tom Kane is a Chicago strongman, a reminder that elections can become formalities when you couple machines with a lack of term limits. He’s a useful warning that sometimes the strength of democracy is its inefficiency, and the desire the bulldoze through the process for the sake of getting things done can be an awfully dangerous compulsion, one you can’t indulge once and walk away from.

4. If you’re a sucker for demagoguery, sometimes you get the jerks you deserve (Homeland): William Walden (Jamey Sheridan), the vice president Nicholas Brody almost assassinated in the finale of the first season of Showtime’s Homeland is a blowhard, but an effective one. He’s very good at talking tough about the threat of terrorism, and he’s rising towards the presidency on the strength of his pedantic oratory. And he’s a warning about following the person who makes you feel best, rather than the person who has the best to offer you.

5. Even the lead of the free world can be a sentimental idiot (1600 Penn): This horrendously awful sitcom from Jon Lovett, who used to write speeches for President Obama, starts airing on NBC in January. On a meta level, it’s a reminder that the people behind democratically elected leaders aren’t always visionaries who are upholding the highest ideals of their political systems. And the show itself, about a President who can’t resist indulging his dumb, frat-boy son, is a cautionary tale against seeing the people who represent the people as avatars of the ideals we invest in them.

Yesterday, just hours after Kofi Annan resigned his post as the special peace envoy representing the United Nations and the Arab League in the efforts to resolve the widening civilw ar in Syria, NBC announced that it had picked up a drama focused on an interpreter at the United Nations, described as The West Wing with an international focus. This strikes me as smart move by NBC to recapture some of its past prestige. And more broadly, it’s a development that highlights one of the weaknesses of the way our pop culture approaches conflict.

Both movies and television constantly focuses on what happens after diplomacy fails. It makes sense for action stories to start at the point when the talking stops and the guns come out, but there’s a weird relish for those kinds of stories, one that paints diplomacy as naive or unworkable. If there was a soberness to that calculation, a sense that military action kicks in only when preferable diplomatic solutions fail, our pop culture might be less straightforwardly, gleefully militaristic. But that’s just not the case. We like watching soldiers and spies kick ass, maybe more than is particularly good for us.

The thing is, diplomacy is hard and it is interesting, even if it doesn’t involve punching people in the face or blowing them up with missiles. It might be hopeless to send in Annan to broker a deal between a dictator who has no intention of ceasing his campaign against dissident forces and democracy-protestors-turned-rebels. But it doesn’t mean Annan and the UN were wrong to try, and the backstory of how he prepped for those negotiations, how they went down, and what it was like to watch the proposal that would have stood down the conflict fall apart, would make for a fascinating multi-part story.

There are challenges to this kind of story-telling. You risk a lot of show-downs over meeting tables, which means you have to have excellent writing, and to find a way to dramatize the dilemmas of translators, who are making split-second decisions in their heads. We also don’t have the same cultural images of what makes a fantastic diplomat the way we immediately understand that what makes a man or woman an admirable combatant is the ability to take a lot of pain as well as dish it out. And we don’t have a set of established tropes about what diplomats do after hours, like we do with military bars or courtly spies, though Hillary Clinton’s rocking out overseas provides a potentially awesome template. This lack of established character and plot beats is definitely a challenge for attracting viewers who are looking for a new take on a familiar idea. But it’s also an opportunity to lay down a new template and to do what The West Wing did at its most effective: humanize people who ought to be heroes for the hard, unglamorous work they do.

A lot of the time, I write about the fact that it’s frustrating that, when pop culture tackles politics, it often reduces complex issues to matters of will and determination. I understand that these reductions are a means to of telling simplified stories, and that they feel good to tell. But it’s a convention that both reduces the actual drama of a story, and blurs the reality of our political system.

But as Jezebel’s Erin Gloria Ryan joked on Twitter this morning in response to the Supreme Court’s Affordable Care Act decision, “Roberts is the Severus Snape of the Supreme Court.” There are extremely rare moments where enormous political issues hinge on the will of single political actors. And while this is a mixed victory—the narrowing of the Commerce Clause may have wide-ranging consequences—this was, against popular expectation, one of those moments. Chief Justice John Roberts’ decision reaches into my life, and the lives of so many others, and truly made a difference. It’s a reminder that people who write television and movies aren’t wrong to believe that sometimes, the better angels of our nature can govern our nation. But that sometimes, they should save the speeches that turn the tide and the wrenching personal decisions for the good of the nation, recognizing them as the truly unusual things that they are, and understanding that they’re powerful precisely for being so rare.

Veep, HBO’s half-hour comedy about a flailing Vice President starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, has been on the air for three weeks, but it’s only the beginning of what promises to be a glut of Washington-based and politically-themed television shows. Shonda Rhimes’ Scandal, about a DC PR fixer based on Judy Smith, seems likely to be back for a second season. USA has a stacked cast behind its show Political Animals, in which Sigourney Weaver will play a former First Lady who’s now Secretary of State. And NBC just picked up 1600 Penn, a family comedy in which father had better know best because the fate of the free world depends on it. Despite being set in Washington, it’s not clear how much these shows actually have to say about contemporary American politics—I tend to agree with critics who say that Veep is more an office comedy where the employees happen to work for the Vice President than an examination of the specific and hilarious cravenness of our current political system. If you want to get at that, though, you might have to move beyond the White House and the Old Executive Office Building. Here are five Washington locations that would be perfect settings for television shows that would actually get at what it’s like to work—and fight for what you believe—in the Nation’s Capitol.

1. Congressional Offices: Most of the time, Hollywood loves to portray Congressmen as minor figures who get in the way of the President’s agenda, and who can be dismissed or shamed with a single big speech. It would be much more interesting to flip the script and focus on a Senator or Representative who often serves as a swing vote. You could have legislative fights that come down to the wire in a realistic way, told from the perspective of people who are getting lobbied rather than doing the lobbying, and decisions that are either genuinely heroic or transparently self-interested. And if it’s a Representative, you get a big reelection subplot every two years.

2. Agencies: Pop culture forgets almost all the time that the executive branch isn’t limited to the White House, though it makes an exception for the FBI and national security agencies. You could set an awesome drama in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights, or Treasury’s Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes division, or a hilarious Parks and Recreation-like comedy at a minor agency like the Office of Personnel Management, whose preternaturally cheery director John Berry is essentially a real-life Leslie Knope.

3. Political Publications: The hell with the noble, Watergate journalistic tradition of the Washington Post, or the kind of supposed truth-telling Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom will try to celebrate. If you want a sense of how stories blow up in Washington and minor gaffes become huge stories only to be forgotten again, set a show at a political tabloid like Politico or a website like Huffington Post. Young reporters party hard, scrap hard for stories, and have hilarious stories from the campaign trail. And it’s a setting that lets a show tackle everything from elections, to sex scandals, to legislative fights.

4. Advocacy Groups and Trade associations: Has no one learned the lessons of Thank You For Smoking? If, God forbid, Parks and Recreation comes to an end, someone really should snap Rob Lowe up, make use of his surprisingly excellent comic timing, and write a show where his character is the head of some hilarious or malevolent advocacy group or trade association. Want to know why Washington is messed up? It’s not because of a lack of rhetorical force by the president. It’s about money and distractions, some of them provided by
these kinds of organizations.

5. Think Tanks: Friend of the Blog Chris Marcil actually got me thinking about this list when he tweeted “Has anyone pitched a Washington show set at a think tank? They seem like places where people do nothing but have B-stories and go on NPR.” Some of that’s true, but if you want episodes about where political ideas come from, you could do worse than think tanks. Plus, there’s the hilarity of think tank softball.

After one of the most memorably ridiculous weeks in politics, whether it’s the state senator who declared that ladies just don’t care about money that much in comparison to gentlemen, or the Fox outlet that referred to a group of Florida neo-Nazis as “a civil rights group,” I was perfectly primed for this observation from Carina Chocano’s exceedingly fun profile of Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who is playing Vice President Selina Meyer in HBO’s upcoming political comedy Veep:

Every decade gets the political show it deserves, or thinks it deserves, though some decades are pretty disingenuous. “The West Wing” gave us an idealized account of the Clinton era, with a saintly president and high-minded pols. In the ’00s, “24” offered an ultraparanoid version of the Bush era that legitimized torture as the primary means of dealing with a world in a constant state of crisis.

“Veep,” by contrast, comes not to justify Caesar but to goose him. It captures our post-Reagan, post-Clinton, post-Bush, 24-hour tabloid news and Internet-haterade dystopia, and reflects our collective queasy ambivalence toward a political system that we fear simply reflects our own shallowness back at us. If “The West Wing” was a fantasy of hyper-competence, “Veep” is its opposite: a black-humor vision of politics at its bleakest, in which both sides have been co-opted by money and special interests and are reduced to posturing, subterfuge, grandstanding and photo ops. Naturally, it’s hilarious.

This is true—I’ve seen the pilot for Veep—and it’s uproarious. But it’s not the only show that gets this, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

Last night’s Scandal ended with an uproarious parody of the idea that if we got lawmakers of both parties in the room and talked things over sensibly, that Reason Would Prevail and everything would be all right. Faced with a Supreme Court nominee who was facing a prostitution scandal (the hooker he’s patronized turned out to be his wife), gladiator-in-a-suit crisis fixer Olivia Pope combed a DC madam’s records, figured out which Senators had also been her clients, had her minions seek out said men and drop the code words for the sex acts they’d been ordering up all those years, and blackmailed them into keeping their traps shut. It’s an utterly nonsensical scenario, but not actually more nonsensical than the idea that our politicians are people of good will we can just pull together and everything will be all right.

It remains to be seen if USA’s Political Animals, about a First Lady-turned-Secretary of State and her dysfunctional family, and NBC’s 1600 Penn, which will be out this fall, take the same tack. And it’s true that we don’t lack a serious show in the vein of 24, though Homeland‘s paranoia’s aimed more at the national security bureaucracy than at proving we should have all means at our disposal to wring information out of terrorists. But is interesting that a truly idealistic show hasn’t thrived in the age of Obama. Maybe it’s the the ridiculousness of our politics has consequences bigger than the President’s sex life this time around, and idealism would actually be kind of a downer.

The bridge is yours.

-Are cable companies about to start dropping Current?

-A sci-fi and fantasy guide for the libertarians in the audience.

-The folks behind The Secret Life of Walter Mitty remake seem determined to make me not hate it.

-Electronic Arts calls the letters it’s been getting from anti-gay groups “political harassment.”

-Funny or Die filmed a West Wing reunion.

Before he became an MSNBC host, Lawrence O’Donnell spent seven years as a writer and, eventually, executive producer on the West Wing. So it’s surprising that one of the key writers behind a show that’s liberal canon agrees that President Bartlet isn’t a progressive hero. As O’Donnell told ThinkProgress in a phone interview yesterday, “It used to drive me nuts when people would simply and offhandedly refer to him as a liberal president. … It would just be ‘oh he told off the religious right.’ Who gives a fuck? Tell me, what was the bill? What was the law?”

Indeed, O’Donnell was pessimistic about liberalism’s prospects throughout the conversation. He always “kinda assumed” the West Wing’s writers “knew this guy was not a liberal” because he said the show was committed to painting a realistic portrait of what is possible in American politics, and “there was no known equation in which a liberal becomes President of the United States.”

As evidence of this point, that only Democrats tainted by a streak of conservatism can become president, O’Donnell cited presidential candidate Bill Clinton’s decision to fly home to Arkansas to personally oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a death row inmate who self-lobotomized himself in a failed suicide attempt that left him unable to even understand what it meant to be executed. When prison guards arrived to escort him to the death chamber, Rector told them that he was saving the pecan pie from his last meal “for later.”

President Bartlet came from a very different state than President Clinton. As the former governor of New Hampshire, Bartlet would have presided over a state where the death penalty was technically legal, but has not actually been carried out since 1939. As such, the first time Bartlet had to decide whether to offer a last minute reprieve to a condemned man came in the Oval Office, and it ends with Bartlet confessing to his priest that he lacked the political courage to do so:

O’Donnell’s pessimism was at its apex when he discussed his process behind writing this scene. “When I proposed a death penalty episode…the backstory that I wrote in my head for this president is that he pandered on the death penalty, just like every Democrat who doesn’t believe in it, in order to get elected president. And he was from a state where he never had to use the death penalty anyway.”

If anything, however, O’Donnell describes a West Wing writers’ room that was even more pessimistic than the facts on the ground required. We asked why Bartlet did not at least fight to enact a prescription drug plan for seniors or major immigration reform, both of which were realistic enough goals that they were attempted (in the first case, successfully) by President Bush. O’Donnell questioned whether Bush’s rare flirtations with progressivism were really grounds for optimism — Bush’s Medicare expansion, O’Donnell emphasized, was poorly designed. This is certainly true, but if a conservative like President Bush was willing to fight for a Medicare expansion that was not paid for, surely it would not have pushed the bounds of realism for President Bartlet to at least try to enact a similar expansion and also pay for it.

Ultimately, O’Donnell agreed that the West Wing writers’ room was a little too pessimistic about our politics’ potential to reach above the moment and achieve something transformative. When asked if Barack Obama — who actually did fight (and occasionally, win) major battles on health care, immigration, economic policy and the environment — is a better president than Josiah Bartlet, O’Donnell was unequivocal. “Of course. Incomparable. Of course.” And then he went further: “The West Wing writers room would not have come up with the idea of running a presidential campaign in which an African-American gets elected. Because the realism view would have said that’s not possible. And I say that with no disrespect for the creative process, but rather with a greater respect and awe for the real world. … We are lucky enough to live in a country in which our politics in 2008 soared above the creative imagination of its fiction writers.”

Note from Alyssa: With a glut of shows set in Washington—and more specifically, in the halls of power—set to hit television screens this year, comparisons to The West Wing are inevitable. But while that show set a high-water mark for political programming, does that mean that its characters were actually good at politics or at running the country? My colleague Ian takes a look at the man who occupied the Oval Office.

For seven seasons, the West Wing was therapy for thousands of Bush-weary progressives who fantasized about being governed by a Nobel Prize winning scholar who didn’t believe that high-income tax cuts were a panacea. Now that America actually is governed by a Nobel Prize winning scholar with a real domestic policy agenda, however, it’s time to be honest about President Bartlet’s legacy. While the ability to rhetorically shame conservatives made him an appealing fantasy, the substance of Bartlet’s policies ranged from uninspired on issues like health care to downright destructive on Social Security and education. Bartlet had a lackluster economic record. He gave away a seat on the Supreme Court to the far right, and he consistently favored symbolic cultural victories over real opportunities to make life better for American families.

If you set aside the budget-busting Bush tax cuts, George W. Bush was actually a better president on domestic policy than President Bartlet. So Bartlet expanded Medicare to cover mammograms and cancer clinical trials? President Bush actually signed a prescription drug plan for seniors. And while George W. Bush at least had the decency to allow his plan to turn Social Security over to Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers die a politically embarrassing death, Bartlet worked with Republicans to pass a massive Social Security reform at a time when Republicans’ were single-mindedly focused on privatization. If the Bartlet Social Security plan had actually been in effect when the market bottomed out in 2008, millions of American seniors would have been left with no safety net to fall back on.

Besides trashing Social Security, the Bartlet Administration had few bold ideas. What was the Bartlet plan to ensure universal access to health care? Or the Bartlet plan to combat global warming? What did President Bartlet do to close the education gap between poor and rich children? Or to ensure that every child who does succeed in high school will be able to pay for college? If anything, his education policy was as much a betrayal as his Social Security debacle. Although the first term Bartlet White House had ambitious plans for education reform, the second term Bartlet wound up supporting school vouchers.

After nearly an entire term in the White House, Bartlet’s economic record was so dismal that it is a miracle he was reelected. Consider his attempt to literally defend this record before God (who he also calls a “feckless thug”): “3.8 million new jobs, that wasn’t good? Bailed out Mexico. Increased foreign trade. 30 million new acres of land for conservation. Put Mendoza on the bench. We’re not fighting a war.”

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The bridge is yours.

-Reading Rainbow is coming back for iPad!

-The Sail Barge industry just got a big boost from science.

-Richard Schiff will boss around Kristen Bell and Don Cheadle. And I will subscribe to Showtime so I can watch him do it.

-I don’t really feel compelled to smell like Tim Allen.

-Breaking down the Nielsen ratings — with puppets!