"The West Wing," Year Four

Spoilers ahead. 

This is the last season of "The West Wing" I'm going to watch for a couple of reasons.  First, it took me far too much effort to get through the back half of this season.  Second, along with the departure of Aaron Sorkin, this year saw a major round of departures from the cast.  Rob Lowe's Sam Seaborn bowed out, making way for Joshua Malina's Will Bailey. Lily Tomlin joined up as Bartlett's new secretary, Mrs. Fiderer.  Also, late in the year, it was made official that Ainsley Hayes had left the White House, to be replaced by new Deputy Counsel Joe Quincy, played by Matthew Perry.

And I like all the new characters, more or less, but they're not put to the best use.  You can tell that Sorkin was struggling to get through this year.  He lingers on some storylines week after week, like the assassination of the Qumari Minister of Defense, without it ever really paying off.  Sam's hopeless campaign for Congress is more or less abandoned, despite Toby getting involved.  Just getting through the President's censure and reelection is agonizing, and often overly glum and serious.  It feels like the Bartlett administration has gone from everything coming too easy to everything being in constant crisis.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in the finale, where we have a scandal bringing down the  Vice President, the birth of Toby's twins, Danny Concannon (welcome back Timothy Busfield) uncovering the assassination plot, the kidnapping of Zoey Bartlett (welcome back Elizabeth Moss), and the resulting invocation of the 25th Amendment all within the span of three episodes.    

The year certainly has its highlights.  The debate episodes were fun.  I liked the premiere, where Toby, Josh, and Donna get stuck in the farmlands of Indiana and have to "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles" their way back to the White House.  It's probably Donna's finest hour, and made me briefly wish for a version of "The West Wing" that was more like "Mad Men," where the ascension of women to power was a more consistent theme.  I hate to harp on this again, but the more I watched this year, the more it stuck in my craw.  Women are the assistants and the support players in this show to an overwhelming degree, and I'm sure Sorkin knew it, as he kept trying to give the female cast more to do.  He devoted a full episode to CJ dealing with her father's advancing Alzheimer's, and put Amy Gardner in the role of the First Lady's chief of staff.  

However, he's never quite able to get it right.  Andy Wyatt (Kathleen York) briefly ends up in the middle of a scandal as an unwed, pregnant Congresswoman, but the storyline is all about Toby and his insecurities.  Amy and Abby Bartlett are great together, but we don't see nearly enough of them.  And don't get me started on Will's pack of female interns, who are mostly named Lauren.  I liked Josh Malina in "Sports Night," but here, where he's playing Sorkin's most obvious stand-in, he's pretty insufferable.  Then again, I liked Toby better this season as he's finally forced to confront his personal history of emotional ineptitude.  Josh and his ego get less of the spotlight this year.  Charlie - well, more Charlie's always good, even if his storyline amounts to trying to win back Zoey from a foofy French fop.

I went ahead and watched the first two episodes of the fifth season just to see the cliffhanger resolved, and then read some of the spoilers for the last three seasons of "The West Wing." There are a handful of episodes that I'd like to check out individually.  CJ as the new Chief of Staff sounds amazing.  However, continuing on through another sixty-four episodes does not appeal to me in the least.  Maybe it's that my attention span has shrunk.  Maybe it's knowing that I could spend that time and catch up on the entirety of "Better Call Saul."  Maybe I'm just ready to change gears.

In any case, this is a good place to stop.  I'll have a Top Ten list for the Sorkin-era episodes of "The West Wing" posted in a couple of days.

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