i love bradley whitford and i think he is fantastic but the only complaint i have is that sometimes he was a little too "josh lyman". thats not really a complaint on the show because normal viewers wouldn't even notice, just from a fan of whitford and i guess sorkin too. but probably more whitford and the directors. bradley plays everything wonderfully but often his comedic timing and delivery was a carbon copy of josh lyman from west wing.
pbrc.net
Probably because everything about the show was pretty close ot the West Wing. He shoud try something incredibly different next time.
however, if you look at some of Brad's work pre-WW too, you'll see the way he walks, talks, runs, puts inflections on certain words in sentences etc is similar anyway. See the episode of X files he was in - Firewalker...the way he holds himself immediately makes me think of JOsh.
And Josh Lyman was a seminal role....I think like anyone who has done something so successful it is almost imspossible not to compare and contrast.
...everything happens eventually...
I like to watch SS60 as a kind of sequel to TWW, with Whitford's character as the connecting link. In TWW, as the series progresses it increasingly seems to be Josh who's the main protagonist; all the other characters seem to diminish one way or another toward the end, but Josh evolves from a clever but somewhat bumptious and arrogant young man into a true Sorkinian hero: honorable, intelligent, loyal and patriotic. And this process seems to be carried further in Studio Sixty; the flashbacks to the time when Matt and Danny quit their jobs five years earlier, which I think are beautifully done (especially Danny's conversation with Harriet right before he quits) are the final culmination of the process. It's worth noting that Danny's line -- "They're going to start shooting at him, and I'm going to be standing next to him when they do" -- is almost identical to Toby's line to Sam in "The California 47th" episode; an expression of absolute loyalty to a friend as well as to an idea.
And there are many other themes the two series share -- above all their portrayal of the "culture wars" which have dominated American politics since Nixon. (More accurately, since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, under Johnson, which split the country down the middle and at least to some extent gave Nixon and the Republican right wing their victory in 1968.) It was this divide that was exploited by Rove in the Bush elections. In 2008, there are signs that it is finally diminishing, especially among younger Republicans; Sarah Palin and the RNC tried to take advantage of it, but as we saw were unsuccessful. We now have a President (Elect) uncannily similar in many ways to Matt Santos. There is hope for the country yet!
How did it come to this?