I'm not much of a TV guy. Sure, I’ll grab the remote and a seat on the couch for any live sports broadcast. But the last scripted series I watched was Derry Girls, and only because I had a pending work trip to Ireland and hoped it would prepare me for the brogues I’d encounter. (Not much. But, what a show!)
But I broke my fast to watch Zero Day, the prestige TV poli-sci-fi thriller starring Robert DeNiro and Angela Bassett. Nothing against the Oscar winners, but they weren’t what drew me. I was only there for the return of Dave McKenna. Or, rather, "Dave McKenna."
See, I’d been tipped by my buddy and hero Eli Attie that a character named McKenna would show up in episode four of the Netflix series. Eli would know: He wrote the script.
Eli had moved from D.C. to Los Angeles early into the new millennium to try show biz. Before relocating, he’d made a big name Inside the Beltway as a speechwriter for the Clinton/Gore administration; after the 2000 presidential election, for example, he's the guy who wrote both the concession speech Al Gore didn't give, and the one he gave. And Eli, a virtuoso guitarist in his spare time, was also in a really bad band with McKenna, er, me. He used his connections in the political and music worlds to do lots of nice things for me, like bringing me to White House events and getting me into the Gore campaign’s hotel suite in Nashville on the insane Election Night 2000, and got me audiences with cool rock stars including Alex Chilton and Jeff Buckley.
Aaron Sorkin wanted to beef up the writers room of his political drama, The West Wing, with actual executive branch veterans, and gave Eli his first Hollywood gig for the show's third season. And characters named "McKenna" started popping up on the show. Like when Brad Whitford’s Josh laments having to meet up with "Congressman McKenna," who he describes as a “two-bit jerk of a House member” always foiling President Jed Bartlet’s budget and trade deals. There’s also an episode where Josh and Dule Hill's Charlie are going over potential nominees for the vice presidential slot on President Bartlet's reelection campaign, and McKenna is deemed unfit for office.
Charlie: You crossed off McKenna?
Josh: For health.
Eli has appeared on West Wing Weekly, a podcast for devotees of the show co-hosted by former cast member Joshua Malina, to discuss his creative processes and otherwise explain why "West Wing episodes always seem to trash this friend of mine." It all started when he noticed Sorkin was using names of his own pals, and came to the realization that "real" names sounded realer than Hollywoodized names.
"I found over the years that if you name characters after actual people you know, the names usually come out a little better," he said. "Because somehow when you are choosing fictional names it is always like ‘Bill Bryson.’ I think Mad Men is the only show that, and a show I love, which got away with naming people these alliterative snappy names, because you believe they just made them up themselves when they started in advertising. But, I don’t know. Real names just tend to land a little better."
As for why namesake characters "never come off well," well, that’s just because it’s more fun.
"Another thing that’s great to do is to name characters after close friends of yours and then have them insulted a lot in the episode," he said on the podcast.
I got lots of giggles out of jerk McKenna and unhealthy McKenna. It was sorta like being in show biz, minus the money, celebrity, and substance abuse issues. West Wing went off the air in 2006 after a seven-year run. Luckily for McKenna, Eli went on to write for lots of big shows, and continued throwing "me" into scripts.
As with the West Wing, there usually ain’t actors attached to the McKennas. They’re just some off-camera nogoodniks. But sometimes Eli put a face to the scripted ass. A November 2007 episode of the Fox medical drama House had a character named McKenna, played by Matt DeCaro, who mistakenly thinks he’s dying of cancer. When Dr. Wilson breaks the news to McKenna that the tumors are benign and he’s going to live, McKenna whines that he’s already spent money on going-away celebrations. "You gave me happiness, then you took it away," says McKenna. Dr. House diagnoses McKenna as an ingrate who really just liked the attention he got when people thought he was dying. "He used to be boring and without you he’s going to be boring again!" Dr. House tells Dr. Wilson.
House always got boffo ratings. But some McKennas played to small crowds. Like the McKenna who showed up on Mind Games, an ABC series that aired in 2014, and only 2014. The dramedy starred Christian Slater and Steve Zahn as brothers who run a crisis management firm that caters to underdogs and solves problems "using the real science of human motivation and manipulation." In an episode called "Cauliflower Man," McKenna as played by (Paul’s brother and Bart’s son) Marcus Giamatti is an Ivy League-trained scientist who turns to the bros to help blow the whistle on a biotech outfit that, according to an Apple TV summary, had developed a "dangerous genetically modified cauliflower."
A good-dude McKenna? Oh hell naw! At various points in Eli’s script McKenna is described as a "loser nutjob drunk," a "crazy conspiracist drunk," a "hostile drunk," and "an out-of-control, angry drunk." I don’t remember how McKenna gets out of his pickle with the GMO creeps, but I sure as hell remember a scene with Slater, the guy from Heathers, pounding on a door yelling, "McKenna!" Nobody answers, so Slater and Zahn (whose career would later have him exposing his naughty bits in White Lotus!) break down the door and run inside, only to find McKenna passed out drunk. Slater berates the poor boozer. "Anything in the academic literature about curing the mother of all hangovers?" Slater says.
Alas, Slater and Zahn couldn’t motivate and manipulate enough viewers to watch the show. The very next day after the McKenna episode aired, ABC bosses yanked Mind Games off the prime time schedule and replaced it with Celebrity Wife Swap. (Those inclined can pay $2.99 to stream McKenna in Mind Games online, however.)
After the Mind Games cancellation, McKenna went on the longest drought of his show biz career. But my cockles were rewarmed a couple years ago when Eli alerted me that he’d written for a new show that would star Robert De Niro, and dusted off the McKenna bit.
So there I was last month back in front of a TV for Zero Day, awaiting the return. About nine minutes into Episode 4, Valerie, a former White House chief of staff (played by Coach Taylor’s wife, Connie Britton) who is now working alongside De Niro as the ex-president trying to save the country and world from internet cyberterrorists, is knocking on the door of a house in the Virginia suburbs. A dumpy middle-aged guy with a bad beard and bad hair answers. "Mr. McKenna?" she says as it opens. Yes! It’s McKenna! He’s back!
Turns out this McKenna is a scientist who worked on a top secret government project to develop some sorta supersonic weapon that, he tells Valerie, could "inflict a traumatic brain injury from a distance with surgical precision." Think Havana Syndrome, only real. But McKenna, hoping to distance himself from his days as an evil doer, makes it clear he’s not interested in cooperating with Valerie's world saving effort. Valerie leaves after only a brief conversation. SPOILER ALERT: unkempt McKenna makes zero additional appearances in Zero Day. Total screen time: one minute, 36 seconds. But now "Dave McKenna" shares an IMDb page with the guy from Taxi Driver. I'll take it!
McKenna is hardly the only friend of Eli who’s been immortalized and lightly pummeled in scripts. All the other guys in our D.C. band have also shown up as TV d-bags through the years. And I felt very warm inside while watching a scene in the McKenna episode of Zero Day when a man being tortured by the feds blurts that the shadowy fugitive known only to investigators by his online handle, Phenex, is actually “a guy named Mickey Grondahl." The real-world Mick Grøndahl was in a New York band with Eli called the Unbelievable Truth in the early ‘90s but is best remembered as Jeff Buckley's bassist. I met Grøndahl and Buckley after a D.C. show. (Buckley gave me a bottle of orange juice in the dressing room of the 9:30 Club during our Eli-engineered summit, then went on to become a mythical figure, so I try to tell everybody I meet that Jeff Buckley gave me a bottle of orange juice.)
President Biden threw a party this fall at the real White House celebrating the 25th anniversary of The West Wing. Eli got me an invite, and introduced me to some stars of the show and told them that I'm the guy who gave the two-bit jerk Congressman and rejected running mate in poor health and other characters their name. They seemed pleased to meet me, but they're great actors. Jill Biden recalled how, being an educator, her favorite episode was the one celebrating a teacher named "Mrs. Morello." Eli wrote that. His 10th grade social studies teacher was named Mrs. Morello.
Aaron Sorkin also spoke. "If you have a favorite moment from the show," Sorkin told the Rose Garden crowd, "chances are Eli had something to do with it."
Speaking for McKenna, boy, did those words ring true.
