Speaking of "how could anyone think I would want to watch this," we are now subjected to actual Frontline-style documentary footage of the sort that makes poor little children despise history until they get old enough to find out about all the sex and violence and the parts where people hide inside big wooden animals. As I sit winding and unwinding a rubber band around my finger, we are subjected to endless old movies of old presidential press secretaries and a cursory, dull, uninformative history of the job. Fortunately, there will be no quiz later.

Convinced that contrary to all indications, I care, Famous Narrator Guy wonders aloud, "What about the private aspects of this office? Given the current media explosion, how is this important job changing?" Blah blah blah, does the press secretary define America's relationship with the White House, blah blah blah. I'm afraid FNG is going to wind up with egg on his face, in that the "media explosion" isn't exactly going to be "current" three years from now when this is allegedly airing. I mean, by then, that newfangled internet thingamabob is going to be pretty old hat, I fear, as will round-the-clock cable news. FNG says that Access (the faux-show, don'tcha know) spent a day with C.J. in an effort to answer his burning questions. And by "burning questions," I mean "questions that should have caused the script to combust spontaneously with its very banality." Anyway. C.J. is talking again. "I see my job as making sure the press and, through them, the public is well-informed," she says in a different interview. "I tell them the truth," she says. Then there is a long pause. Solar systems are born and die. "That's my goal," she finally adds. FNG says that, as it happened, the Access cameras captured a day that "was anything but ordinary." He goes on to exposit that the day the crew witnessed was very harrowing for the administration. I begin counting repetitions of the pattern on my couch.

Credits. I've never missed the actual show so much in all my life.