Twenty-five years ago, Aaron Sorkin and a cast and writers room of true-believing Clinton-era Democrats set out to create a technocratic fairy tale in which progressive values win the day by sheer virtue of their irresistibility. What happened next is enough to defy belief. Despite themselves, they made a masterpiece.
Whatever its ratings success, there has been a critical reevaluation of The West Wing of late, especially on the Right. That’s because, for a certain kind of liberal, the Sorkin-created network drama, which premiered on a Wednesday night in September 1999, remains an eternal standard. What it has to teach about politics is truer, to them, than reality itself, which is why, in 2008, incoming Obama staffers could be found following procedures for presidential transitions that did exist in the show but had never existed in history. On the day after last month’s Democratic convention, the Atlantic’s Franklin Foer took up his pen to celebrate his party’s return to “institutionalism” after a flirtation with harsher gods. Titled “It’s Sorkin Again in America,” Foer’s essay explained that Democrats had turned away from “a darker, more Hobbesian view of politics” and were “bath[ing], once more, in the strings of the West Wing theme.” The article was not intended to mark the show’s anniversary. Foer was simply reaching for an allusion that lay close at hand.
Like the presidency of George W. Bush, Sorkin’s show had its roots in Clinton-era outrage fatigue. “The Lewinsky scandal was happening at the very time I was writing the pilot,” Sorkin told Empire Online in 2014, “and it was hard, at least for Americans, to look at the White House and think of anything but a punch line.” The screenwriter’s solution was to tell a story that married the 42nd president’s wonkish intellectualism to a moral probity for which civic-minded viewers still yearned. The result was every bit as ham-fisted, fantastical, and smug as that description suggests. It was also — indeed, it remains — one of the best programs ever to air on television.
If the reader is unused to such paradoxes in the context of network TV, that, too, is part of The West Wing’s story. When, in 1998, Sorkin agreed to terms with Warner Bros. to begin production, he did so as an elite scriptwriter (of, e.g., A Few Good Men) who could reasonably hope to attract movie-star talent to a 22-episodes-per-year NBC drama. To say merely that times have changed is to understate woefully over-the-air TV’s diminishment as a cultural force. The West Wing was not the last network drama that mattered — Lost and 24 had their moments — but it was the last to run for seven seasons with no obvious decline in quality. It was the last to win multiple best drama Emmy awards, four in all. And it was certainly the last that will ever, barring a complete reorganization of the media economy, attract the likes of 90s-era Martin Sheen and Rob Lowe as headliners. The West Wing did all of this, and it did so for a remarkable 154 episodes. For those keeping score at home, that is two Breaking Bads with nearly enough room left over for a Succession. At its best, Sorkin’s program was as good as either of those.
How did the show do it? For one thing, the writing is terrific, seasoning its creator’s famously snappy dialogue with exceptional respect for the viewer’s intelligence. Take, for instance, a minor quip with which President Josiah Bartlet (Sheen) characterizes his chief of staff (John Spencer) in the Season Three episode “Bartlet for America”: “Leo’s made out of leather. His face has a map of the world on it.” Can anyone doubt that, airing on network television today, those lines would read, “Leo is experienced, and we should really like him”?
Sadly, there is not room in this article to do full justice to Sorkin’s abilities behind a typewriter. If pressed, I might simply hand the reader the teleplay for another Season Three standout, “The Women of Qumar,” which spins stodgy geopolitical straw into conversational gold:
Josh: “The more countries who sign the treaty, the more effective it is.”
Amy: “The more toothless the treaty is, the more toothless it is.”
Josh: “That’s a permeating syllogism, to be sure.”
Please alert me when they start writing like that on Chicago Fire.
Of course, it helps to have the right actors. Josh, in the exchange just quoted, is Josh Lyman, the White House deputy chief of staff played so brilliantly by Bradley Whitford that he basically forced Lowe off the series. (More on this to follow.) Amy is Amy Gardner (Mary-Louise Parker), a feminist activist and one of the show’s dozen or so perfectly cast guest roles. Other breakout performances included Richard Schiff as communications director Toby Ziegler and Allison Janney as press secretary C.J. Cregg. These were not established television stars. Yet the show’s supporting ensemble (Whitford, Schiff, Janney, and Spencer) won seven Emmys between them, with Stockard Channing snagging another as prickly first lady Abigail Bartlet. Sheen was very good as the president, and Lowe was never less than serviceable as deputy communications director Sam Seaborn. Nevertheless, the series belonged to the core four, the selection of whom rivals the plucking of Mad Men’s Jon Hamm from obscurity in the annals of casting success.
Like the best TV, The West Wing knew how to balance realism and melodrama, cranking out detailed legislative subplots even as marriages strained and assassins’ bullets flew. Importantly, the show declined to tangle its leads romantically, adjudging that a fling between, say, Toby and C.J. would destroy the group dynamic. Friends this wasn’t. The one exception to the rule was Whitford’s Josh, whose love interests included not only Amy Gardner but senior assistant Donna Moss (Janel Moloney) and pollster Joey Lucas (a superb Marlee Matlin). Then again, Josh always got the cleverest story arcs. That Sorkin recognized what he had in Whitford and adjusted accordingly was a stroke of showrunning genius, even if it meant alienating ostensible “lead” Lowe, who left the production after four seasons of steady role diminishment.
The West Wing deserves all of this praise and more. Still, the show was not perfect and erred in ways that seem even more ridiculous in retrospect. Consider, as an example, a famous scene in the Season Two finale in which President Bartlet argues with God, in English and Latin, in the chancel of the National Cathedral. Bereft by the sudden death of his secretary, Sheen’s President Bartlet trots out his administration’s record as if it merited divine favor:
“3.8 million new jobs. That wasn’t good? Bailed out Mexico. Increased foreign trade. Thirty million new acres of land for conservation. Put [new Supreme Court Justice] Mendoza on the bench. We’re not fighting a war.”
Though I appreciate what Sorkin thought he was trying to do by making the fictional ideal Democratic president a Roman Catholic, it is an accidental but revealing self-caricature of technocratic progressive self-regard to imagine that God judges man by makin’ a list of liberal policy accomplishments and checkin’ it twice.
Nor is Christianity the only subject with which The West Wing struggled. American militarism, too, gave the show fits, especially during the post-9/11 era in which the last several seasons unfolded. When the series premiered in 1999, the United States was still an unchallenged superpower, enjoying its temporary vacation from history. It is a fascinating marker of how quickly politics and culture change that the Bartlet administration’s most moralizing and progressive staffer, Toby, says of his endgame for conflict between America and the Muslim world that “they’ll like us when we win.” The attitudes of the entire Bartlet staff would be roundly condemned as Islamophobic by the staff of the Biden administration. More substantively, 2 1/2 years in, the show ran an arc in which Bartlet orders the CIA assassination of a (Muslim) foreign official-turned-jihadi financier. Two and a half years after that, the series “solved” the Israeli-Palestinian crisis by placing American troops on the ground, permanently, as a buffer between the two sides. The episodes comprising that particular boondoggle aired in October 2004, well after the war on terror had proved to be a disaster. Nevertheless, the show framed both decisions as hard but heroic. Bartlet the dove had become Bartlet the interventionist with nary an explanation.
And yet, The West Wing is wonderful: funny, charming, sophisticated, and almost endlessly rewatchable despite the changing times. Indeed, it is precisely those alterations that give the show its considerable poignancy. The politics it renders, well-meaning, rational, and optimistic to a fault, will not recur in our lifetimes, nor is an American president likely to receive, or deserve, the personal respect and admiration the series affords Jed Bartlet. Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush have seen to that.
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Graham Hillard is an editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.