The West Wing

After years of just catching the odd rerun of The West Wing on Bravo here and there, a few weeks ago I decided to watch the whole series again, which was just beginning a new rerun cycle with the first episode. Like everyone else who lived or worked in D.C. when it was on, the show was a borderline obsession. I have nothing to back this up, but I'll bet that inside the Beltway, it did American Idol-type numbers. And even as the show gradually went from GREAT to Good to okay to almost unwatchable, I--like I'm sure everyone else around here--stuck with it in the hopes it would rebound, and when it did in the final season, it felt like vindication for not giving up even during its worst moments (i.e., Josh screaming at the Capitol).

A lot of criticisms I had while watching it, I still remembered from the first time I saw the show: Mandy was still useless, Isaac and Ishmael was still the worst, most self-indulgent piece of crap ever to air on TV, and Aaron Sorkin seemed to buy into his own hype as the series went on. But there's also a lot of stuff I think I can appreciate more now, being older and more knowledgeable about politics and current events.

Here are a few observations about the series the second time around:

-- There's always a thunderstorm outside when Bartlet's upset about something. Either Sorkin's writing lacks subtlety, or else Bartlet can affect the weather according to his mood.

-- All that lightning fast pedeconferencing that went on in the halls of the White House, that seemed so funny and charming at first? Now it's really kind of irritating to watch. Maybe it's because unlike when the show first came on the air, I have a job and now know how annoying it is when someone tries to have a conversation with you about work while walking really fast.

-- In real life, every character on the show probably would have been fired a few times over. But especially Donna. Donna was like a red shirt on Star Trek, but instead of getting killed on an alien planet, she was just the one the writers used whenever someone needed to do something inappropriate or illegal. It's a good thing Josh subconsciously wanted to jump her.

-- I'd forgotten about how much effort Sorkin put into making the Senate majority leader the big, bad Republican boogeyman that was going to take on Bartlet in the election. And then he just threw all that away, simply so he could relitigate Gore vs. Bush? Talk about a waste.

-- I like Joshua Malina as an actor, but I don't think I noticed originally what a poor substitute Will was for Sam. Rob Lowe may have been a narcissist who couldn't handle being part of an ensemble cast instead of the star, but he was great at reciting Sorkin's dialogue. In the alternate universe where Lowe didn't leave The West Wing for a string of failed TV shows, I'll bet the latter half of the series was a lot better.

-- One of the cooler parts of living around here ten years ago is that you would occasionally read online about where they'd be filming the show (I wish we'd had Twitter back then, it would have made West Wing stalking so much more efficient) or sometimes just run into the cast and crew.

I had just exited the Archives/Navy Memorial station once, and happened to pass Bradley Whitford and Mary Louise Parker walking around, discussing a scene. I did a double take, and Whitford gave me kind of a, "Hey, yeah, it's us," head nod as they passed. That was cool.

Another time, I'd heard where they'd be filming in advance and showed up for it. It was the scene in the inauguration episode where everyone throws snowballs at Donna's window. I think it was supposed to be Georgetown (because Hollywood has only ever heard of Georgetown), but it was actually filmed in Dupont, not far from the Metro station. If you watch it on TV, nothing in that scene is real. The snow? Fake. The fancy lamp posts? Fake. The trees? Fake. There was a small crowd of about twenty people at the end of the street, and the production assistants couldn't have been bigger douches, constantly warning everyone to be quiet even though no one was talking during the scene. Even douchier, at one point, someone who lived on the street opened his window and started taking photos in between takes (not using a flash or anything) and one of the PAs started screaming at him to stop. I'm not sure a PA has the right to tell you you can't take photos while standing inside your own home, and I was hoping for a fight. But unfortunately, he complied.

I've never gotten the appeal of getting autographs or having photos taken with celebrities, so I was content to just stand there and watch them filming the scene. But all the people around me were begging the PAs to bring over the stars during breaks in the filming. Dule Hill and Timothy Busfield were the only ones who did while I was there. Dule Hill gets an eternal thumbs up for me for ignoring the crew members who were trying to drag him back to the trailer, so he could sign autographs and take photos with everyone who wanted one.

-- Considering all the Law & Orders and CSIs, it's a shame NBC never tried a West Wing spin-off. The closest they got was a show called Mister Sterling that was produced by Lawrence O'Donnell, who was also a producer on The West Wing. He and NBC were sort of cagey about whether or not Mister Sterling existed in the same universe as The West Wing. Until it was quickly cancelled, at which point NBC declared that it hadn't. Granted, The West Wing wouldn't have been the easiest show in the world to make a spin-off from, but here are a couple of ways I think they could have gone:

Ainsley Hayes: Sort of Ally McBeal-set-in-D.C. Every episode could end with Ainsley learning a valuable lesson about why some conservative belief she'd always held was wrong, and that liberals were right.

Bruno: Before Sacha Baron Cohen made the name popular, Ron Silver's character was kicking ass on the campaign trail and trying to score with much younger women at parties. Who wouldn't watch that show? I'm not sure what it would focus on when it wasn't a campaign year, but it would have been fun to see just based on Silver's performance alone.

The Secret Service: The guest casting on West Wing was always good, but I especially dug the people who played Secret Service agents. Mark Harmon, Jorja Fox, Taye Diggs, Michael O'Neill, etc. I wouldn't want to watch a boring crime procedural about the Secret Service, but on The West Wing, it was all just goofy fun and games, except when white supremacists would open fire on them, or they were getting killed in convenience store robberies, or shot in the head that time Zoey got kidnapped. Okay, so maybe not all fun and games, but they mostly seemed to be having a good time.

-- CJ being promoted to chief of staff in the sixth season makes even less sense when you watch the earlier episodes, and notice that whenever Sorkin needed a character to ask, "Hey, why is this political thing the way it is?" to give Josh or Toby an excuse to provide exposition for the viewers, and Donna wasn't in the scene, he'd almost always use CJ.

-- Just this past week, after airing the fourth season finale that ends with John Goodman becoming president, Bravo skipped the fifth and sixth seasons entirely, and started with the first episode of the seventh season. If only NBC had done the same thing.