Watching West Wing

Author’s Note: As a couple bits of preface 1) This post does include minor spoilers about The West Wing television series and 2) this post does get at some implicit political biases on my part which I am not interested in debating at this time.

From 1999 to 2006, The West Wing aired on NBC. The show was largely a critical success. It won Emmys for Outstanding Drama Series and for a number of individual actors, and more to the point of this blog, won my attention for two years. My last two years of high school corresponded with the first two seasons of the show (not to mention the first national election I paid significant attention to), after which point I went off to college and didn’t find the time to keep up with the series. It was one of several shows from around that time that I had vague aspirations of going back to at some point, though in those days before it was routine for whole series to show up on DVD, let alone to stream by any means, it wasn’t clear that I would ever find my way back to President Bartlet and company.

Fast forward to 2018. I unexpectedly had the time--being responsible for three or four half hour-to-hour feedings of my infant son, while sweet, would become mind-numbing for me after a time, before I decided to multi-task and catch up on television I was curious about or had always meant to catch up on. So it was that I took a trip to Riverdale and spent some time with the Bluths of Arrested Development. And I found my way back to The West Wing.

Watching Aaron Sorkin’s signature show through the lens of being an adult and, all the more so through the lens of living in the era of a Donald Trump presidency, is different from my original viewing. There’s the lightning fast dialogue to marvel at, and the acting clinics from folks like Allison Janney and Bradley Whitford. There’s the sheer ambition and undeniable challenges of shaping an imaginary parallel universe that shares a common history with our own, but splits at least a year or so before the show starts, to render its own world which, to name just one difference, does not encompass September 11th. More than any of these artistic or creative elements, though, the show captures a unique combination of political minds shaping message—for lack of a better term, spinning—paired with an unironic sense of high ideals.

My understanding is that it’s the show’s idealism that drew the most criticism from those who didn’t love it, or loved it in spite of a significant flaw--for the idea that President Bartlet’s administration would relinquish credit for saving Social Security, or that Bartlet would so sincerely grapple with moral decisions and the responsibility of shaping international relations like brokering a peace deal between Israeli and Palestinian leaders while eschewing overwhelming pressure for a less measured, more military response at home. Could we believe in this president character, let alone the cast of genuinely good and thoughtful people he surrounded himself with? (Let alone the irresistible charm of wise old Leo McGarry, of the maddeningly realistically slow-burning romantic tension between Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman and his assistant Donna Moss—what can I say, against my writerly instincts I’m a shipper.)

There was something refreshing about viewing The West Wing nearly twenty years after it originally aired, if not as a believable rendering of life in the White House (though the show did consult with the right people, and receive a generally positive response from experts), then as an ideal worth striving toward. While a show like House of Cards might be understood as West Wing’s evil little sibling, a bit too sensationalized and dark for its own good, there’s something refreshing about looking to the most powerful political leaders of our country as a bit more like heroes, if not because we all agree with their policy positions, because they’re doing what they genuinely believe is right, often as not in guileless fashion.

A year removed from another presidential election, with the cycle already well heated up, and reflecting on this series, it’s nice to give myself over to the dream of a better system with better leaders doing better things. There are downright quaint elements to the show, too, all staged in an era before smartphones, and when Internet news catered to a niche audience and the news cycle, instead, catered to the papers. It’s a portrait of a time in America that can make a viewer around my age or older feel downright nostalgic for a simpler time, even as we accept that what we’re seeing on screen is fiction rather than history. Maybe this is the best version of what our history might have been, and it only feels like an ideal because we still haven’t attained the version of a presidency this show puts forth.

And if this scene doesn’t get your blood pumping, I don’t know what will: