The West Wing
Kathie and I are both big Aaron Sorkin fans, and I think we have seen everything he’s ever made. Some time around Christmas, one of the networks ran a “West Wing Marathon” and showed maybe all of the episodes, back-to-back. We recorded them on our Spectrum DVR and have been watching them, one or two per day, ever since.
It’s an amazing show. And we’re wondering when it was on, originally. We were both aware of it, but we were busy watching something else on that day and time, I guess. We completely missed it. We heard any number of friends and family raving about how great show it was, but we were busy that night watching Who’s Got An Elbow? or something and just missed out on it. The same thing happened with The Big Bang Theory—we were elsewhere for the first three or four seasons and only discovered the show and how great it was when it entered into syndication.
The show appeared in the fall of 1999 and ran through the spring of 2006 and this is a key point: It has all aged incredibly well. There’s a famous scene in the movie Wall Street where Gordon Gekko is trying to tell Budd how great it is to be liquid. He’s walking along the beach with one of those giant walkie-talkie cell phones from the middle-late 1980s. That scene really takes you out of the show. This doesn’t happen to the same degree in The West Wing. Everyone has a cell phone, but they’re all flip-phones. We even have a few pagers. The presidential limo looks like a funerary coach from any local funeral establishment—it’s not the giant in use today that they call The Beast, made from a truck but styled to almost-but-not-quite look like a Cadillac limousine. There aren’t any weird haircuts or fashions. For the most part, every episode could have been made last month.
The West Wing is about a fictional Washington DC and the presidency of Josiah Bartlet, his family and his staff. Tons of great actors appear in recurring roles and singly as various politicians, media people, and others and the stories weave everyone together and keep it all interesting. Featured in every episode are the famous Sorkin “Walk-‘N-Talks” where characters move from one set to another and hand people pages of documents, nod and acknowledge and inspire and cajole one another and move the story along with the kind of exposition that doesn’t get tiresome.
Here’s the thing. We pulled down something like a hundred episodes of this show, nearly filling our DVR for a while. Now, this weekend, we’re down to our last dozen or so. And it’s not entirely clear to us if we’ve gotten the whole show or if there’s another season or so that wasn’t shared with us. We’re reminded the whole thing is available via HBO and… well, we may have to take them up on that.
This is Good TV.
I had a pretty good idea of what it was like in the White House, I thought, from interviews with staffers from back in the JFK days all of the way through to Biden’s people a few weeks ago. This show takes it all to another level, though. We need to get this story out. This is our story. We’re not concerned with that story or the people who are pushing it in their own agenda. We want to talk about this one. What’s that saying about god laughing when we make plans? We have ten or twelve folks and each one has their own idea of what should be happening—plus there are all of the rivalries with Congress and The Supreme Court and the various Political Action Committees and everything else. We have protestors and supporters and assassination attempts and folks leaving and joining the crew and medical emergencies and everything else. And always, the walk-n-talks.
I come away from a hundred episodes wishing, hoping, that the people in the real jobs in the real White House are as conscientious about doing a good job as the folks on the TV series. It too often seems like they’re more interested in advancing their own politics or humping their own book deal. But man, I wish things there ran as well in real life as they do in Sorkin’s world.
