Saying Goodbye To "Inside Washington" After A Quarter Century

It was January 1992, when I was in eighth grade, when I first stumbled into "Inside Washington" during the Saturday evening dinnertime hour on PBS.  I was obsessed with the Democratic primary drama unfolding in what, at the time, seemed like a kamikaze race against popular "war President" George H.W. Bush.  I had taken a passing interest in politics in the weeks leading up to elections in prior years, but it was the 1992 primaries that was my first foray into politics at the obsessive level I've operated at since then.  And despite my frustration with the minimal conversation about my preferred candidate that year, Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, "Inside Washington" was a guiding light to mainstream media sentiment about the state of the race that I wasn't getting from conversations with my dad on the issue. 

I deviated from "Inside Washington" quite a bit throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, catching it only semiregularly except during the heat of election season.  But in late 2002 or early 2003 during the march to war in Iraq I settled into a weekly pattern of watching the show and have followed it loyally in the decade since as it's been bounced around the PBS schedule from Friday nights to Sunday mornings back to Friday nights.  And having consumed many hours of "round table"-style political shows over the years, I can say without hesitation that "Inside Washington" was my favorite.  It wasn't as tabloidy and gimmicky as cable news, not as exhausting and confrontational as "The McLaughlin Group", not as technocratic as "Washington Week", and featured a much more stable and reliable cast of characters than do the revolving door "round tables" on Sunday morning shows like "Meet the Press".  It hit the sweet spot with an engaging and intelligent discussion of political events with a "comfort food" panel of old reliables.

The pundit panel was really made "Inside Washington" stand out.  Moderated by Washington broadcaster Gordon Peterson, journalists such as Charles Krauthammer, Evan Thomas and Nina Totenberg were mainstays on the series going back to my first viewings of the series nearly 22 years ago.  A couple of other old Washington hats like Jack Germond and Carl Rowan have come and gone as series regulars, but in 2006 the series found its missing puzzle piece with the incomparable left-leaning political old hat Mark Shields, a PBS mainstay who brought his sense of humor and encyclopedic knowledge of politics to the set and added even more chemistry amongst the regulars.  With the addition of Shields as a more aggressive counterbalance to the right-wing Krauthammer, I thought the last several years of "Inside Washington" were its best.  Shields also helped offset one of the show's biggest drawbacks...the elitism of its insulated political journalists who seemed detached from the human toll of public policy.  Shields seemed to speak to the plight of the average joe in a way the others did not.

I've always been someone who holds on tight to institutions that I have a history with.  In a world that constantly changes, I've been forced to let go of a lot of pastimes that for whatever reason haven't stood the test of time.  But one of the few rocks of my upbringing that has always been around and that I never even considered would go away was "Inside Washington".  After this evening's broadcast, another one bites the dust.  And I don't expect to find another political talk show as engaging to replace it either.