The First Five of "The West Wing"

Well, I haven't done one of these in a while.

I've been meaning to take the plunge with "The West Wing" for years. I was a big fan of Aaron Sorkin's "Sports Night" while it was airing, and I've mostly enjoyed his subsequent forays into film. "The West Wing," however, is by far his most popular and influential piece of work. I still constantly hear it referenced in discussions about great drama television, and a lot of acting careers were launched by the show. Also, I make no effort to hide that I'm a staunch progressive, and "The West Wing" has been a favorite among left-leaning public servants since it premiered - and has since been treated as comfort viewing during the more trying periods of the Trump Administration.

The show has aged significantly, however. It premiered in 1999 and ran until 2006. The first thing I noticed about the pilot was the chintzy soundtrack, peppered with the kind of cutesy orchestral cues that nobody uses anymore. The title sequence that debuts with the second episode looks downright prehistoric. Also, post-Trump, post-"House of Cards," and post-"Veep," the show's incredibly articulate, forthright, intelligent, principled, and witty cast of White House staffers feel like they're from another planet. I completely understand why the show has been described as "competency porn" by some observers. There's something very comforting about watching the show's President of the United States, Jed Bartlett (Michael Sheen), his Chief of Staff Leo McGarry (John Spencer), and all their underlings tackling crisis after crisis, big and small, with so much grace and efficiency. However, the relative lack of bureaucratic fumblings and flat-footedness also make it come across as a fantasy of Sorkin's sentimental wishful thinking.

And there's so much Aaron Sorkin all over this show. It has all of the earmarks of his writing, bad and good. The monologues and rapid-fire conversations come so fast and furious that Sorkin and director Thomas Schlamme had to invent the walk-and-talk in order to accommodate them. There are some good female characters, most notably press secretary C.J. Cregg (Allison Janney) and media consultant Mandy Hampton (Moira Kelly), but the vast majority of the screen time goes to loose cannon idealist Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford), the Deputy Chief of Staff, and his uber-competent colleagues Director of Communications Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff) and Toby's Deputy, Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe), responsible for writing many of the president's speeches. Anything involving gender relations tends to come across a little tone deaf and patronizing toward the women, and Sorkin literally recycles a call girl subplot from "Sports Night." There's also a single African American character, Charlie Young (Dulé Hill), who is hired on as the President's personal aide, but not without Josh worrying over the optics of an African-American holding the President's bags first. The show's politics are, of course, also very left wing, and many of the characters are prone to myopic speechifying. Occasionally it comes back bite them on the ass, but not as much as it probably should.

Still, the performances are uniformly great, and the show is a marvel of beautifully choreographed chaos. It's a lot funnier than I expected, with the staffers constantly bringing their personal problems into the White House, and a lot of humor being mined from events like the publication of the administration's annual financial disclosure report, revealing everybody's embarrassing gifts and stock trades. I find the portrayal of many issues incredibly glib, but at the same time I'm constantly impressed by the thoughtfulness and the balance that Sorkin tries to bring to the table. Not everything works or comes off well, but there's a lot of more nuance here than I was expecting. Jed Bartlett isn't perfect and needs help and counsel constantly. The staffers are capable of superhuman things, but they also make stupid human mistakes. Easily the most appealing part of the show isn't the peek behind the curtain at the inner workings of the White House, but the camaraderie of everyone who keeps Bartlett's administration going.

I don't know how much of "The West Wing" I'm going to end up watching. It's one of the longest shows I've tackled in a while, and I've heard mixed things about some of the later seasons. I suspect I may compromise and stop after the fourth season, when Aaron Sorkin famously quit the show. "West Wing" episodes are also going to take a back seat to currently airing series, which means it's going to take a long while to work through the eighty-odd episodes. But I'm glad that I've started the trip.

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