Bartlet4America News Archive

Why does The West Wing stray from the West Wing?

By John Doyle
globeandmail.com

I can't tell you everything that happens on The West Wing (NBC, CTV, 9 p.m.) tonight, but I can give you the official summary from NBC: "A situation in a thoroughly unimportant country on the other side of the world has the president and his staff rewriting his inauguration address on the eve of his swearing-in as tensions between the White House and the Pentagon mount."

Now there's a plot summary to make you feverishly excited. Not.

I'm sure it will be engaging. I'm certain that President Bartlet will make the right decision. In fact, I'd say that the fictional president's triumph over adversity is as certain as you and me finding out that a real Canadian provincial premier who advocates discipline and belt-tightening is actually a self-indulgent piss artist.

Mind you, I'm not sure that rewriting a speech is a grab-me dramatic device. Rewriting is less than stellar entertainment, containing little in the way of romance, humour or confrontation with the forces of evil. I'm obliged to rewrite almost daily and, I'm telling you, if you were to watch, you'd be less than galvanized by it. It often involves a lot of staring off into space and rereading my horoscope for advice and encouragement.

Anyway, The West Wing has been annoying viewers for a while. Recent episodes set far from the White House have made many constant viewers irritable in the extreme. A few weeks ago, C. J. moseyed off to Dayton, Ohio, to speak at her high-school reunion. She had an encounter with a shifty fella played by Matthew Modine, and came to the realization that her father is deteriorating from Alzheimer's disease.

That just iced it for some fans. According to one on-line comment, "It made her look terrible, weak, stupid and unworthy of the position she holds in the White House." The consensus to be found in the many on-line forums is that the show suffers when it strays from the White House.

However, it's clear that creator and main writer Aaron Sorkin is trying to give the show more dramatic oomph. Ratings for The West Wing have been down, thanks to competition from The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. As we know, those shows tend to be free of passionate arguments about American foreign policy. Dabbling in the personal lives of his characters is an attempt to expand the show's reach.

Fanatics may complain that they want more policy debates from the backrooms of the White House, but those fanatics are never going to give up on the show and watch The Bachelorette instead. Far from suffering from too much information about the home and family lives of the main characters, The West Wing has become tediously insular for the general audience.

What Sorkin is trying to do is humanize the characters. In this endeavour, I suspect he's also hoping to hang on to the major West Wing audience of media types. The flaunting of the personal is something that fascinates that audience. People who are well paid to make big decisions, ruin lives or further careers always think their home life is terrifically dramatic and a sort of template for society. If a big-shot writer, editor, news anchor or media exec has a parent with a disease or a child with a learning problem, suddenly that issue is the most important thing on the media agenda. Aaron Sorkin is just doing the same darn thing, adding the personal to the political.

When I was in L.A. recently, Sorkin turned up at the NBC party and talked to a few of us for a while. He was playing the humility card. The West Wing is now in its fourth season, and NBC had just announced that it had guaranteed to keep the show on the air thorough the 2004-5 TV season. Still, the show has been losing viewers, and Sorkin wasn't going to act cocky.

"In spite of my best efforts, this show is still on the air," he said, getting all self-deprecating. "Right now I can't think about keeping this show on the air for, like, an eighth season. My priority is to keep the show on the air through February. If it comes to it, I'll turn this show into 24 to keep it on the air."

Sorkin also said that he has no intention of bringing echoes of the looming war with Iraq onto The West Wing. "We don't want to take the risk of turning the show into a movie-of-the-week. Newspaper headlines and newspaper writers can cover today's news much better than we can."

That's a shrewdly flattering comment to a bunch of newspaper writers. I'd say that Sorkin believes he knows what he's doing.

I don't think tonight's episode will focus entirely on the inauguration speech and some crisis in a "thoroughly unimportant country." I think there will be some drama in the personal lives of the main characters. No bed hopping and no competition for the hand of some giggling floozy, but less policy and more private-life dilemmas and doubts.