Bartlet4America News Archive

West Wing now in the hands of a journeyman

Producer John Wells is good, but he's just not Aaron Sorkin

Scott Feschuk
National Post

Rob Lowe now says he departed The West Wing not because he wasn't shown the money but because he wasn't shown the love. "Why didn't [show creator Aaron Sorkin] know how much I loved him, how much I loved that show?" Lowe told TV Guide. "Why didn't he love me like I loved him? It's weird, considering it's another man, but that's as close as I can put it."

The actor's comments are rather startling. Like many of you, I've followed Lowe's career for years and have seen him perform in countless TV and film productions. And the whole time I had absolutely no idea that he's actually a teenage girl. One envisions him belly-down on his bed, scribbling furiously into his hot pink diary: "I HATE Aaron! I HATE him, I HATE him, I! HATE! HIM! Why won't he PAY ATTENTION to me???!" On more optimistic days, he'd be smiling contentedly on the set, repeatedly practising in elegant cursive writing: Mrs. Rob Sorkin Mrs. Rob Sorkin Mrs. Rob Sorkin ...

His love unrequited, Lowe stomped off The West Wing (Wednesdays, NBC/CTV) after almost four seasons and is now the featured attraction in his own show -- a show whose executive producer is deeply in love with Lowe (NBC's The Lyon's Den; executive producer: Rob Lowe). I notice there haven't been too many hugely upbeat reviews of The Lyon's Den, so in an effort to help out and supply NBC with a usable blurb, let me state for the record: The Lyon's Den is, without a doubt, one of the new shows of the television season!

Not long after Lowe took his hot pink ego and went home, Sorkin also exited The West Wing, plainly shoved out the door by Warner Bros., which produces the series and whose executives had by all accounts grown weary of Sorkin so routinely going over budget. The man is a marvel with words; with numbers, apparently not so much.

I just said it but, in tribute to Sorkin's favoured conversational style, it bears repeating: The man is a marvel with words. And although his inventive and often awe-inspiring way with dialogue never deserted him, his plot lines for The West Wing had become banal and, at times, even ludicrous. They exuded creative desperation. Sorkin started with the goal of elevating the quality of political discourse in the United States; at the end, he was interested only in elevating pulse rates, and cheaply at that.

No sensible person, therefore, would envy the position in which his successor, veteran producer John Wells, was placed -- taking over creative control of a series in which, through an improbable series of events involving an assassination, a resignation, a drugging, a kidnapping and far more thumping techno music than most folks in the 35-54 demographic would care to endure, the preceding season had concluded with the presidency of the United States of America being abruptly conferred on Roseanne's TV husband.

I can't guess with any confidence the look on Wells's face when he got the news. One suspects it resembled that of the luckless writer on Dallas who was one day informed: "OK, I'm turning the show over to you. Here's where we're at: Bobby, who died a year ago, just stepped out of the shower. Gotta go!"

Wells wrote the scripts for the two episodes that have aired this season. The first was lean, thrilling and memorable. It is no slight against Sorkin to say that Wells, who has authored several episodes of ER (among many other credits), is a more disciplined writer and better able to function as a plot wrangler. You often got the sense that Sorkin had fallen in love with his own words (no wonder he had no affection left in which to bathe Lowe) and had ignored the plausible or the pedestrian in favour of the poetic; Wells, by way of comparison, is clearly more interested in telling a story than having his characters tell stories. The first episode of the season was all business -- even Martin Sheen's loquacious Jed Bartlet was reduced to clipped sentences and plenty of staring off into the nothingness. Wells had the good sense to make him seem like an ordinary, distraught and maddeningly helpless parent. Sorkin would have had him loudly telling off God in Latin.

Last week's episode, in which Bartlet's daughter Zoey was safely recovered by an FBI assault team, was more disappointing, though perhaps only because Wells so quickly ended what was emerging as one of the most intriguing scenarios in the show's history: the enforced cohabitation of the West Wing of the White House by partisan rivals, a development that reduced Democratic staffers to jealously peeking in on and fretting about Republican strategy sessions taking place just down the hall. Refreshing, too, was Wells's depiction of John Goodman's presidential temp, Glenallen Walken. If nothing else alerted viewers to the departure of Sorkin, it was that a Republican character actually came off as something other than a child-eating acolyte of Satan and/or Bill O'Reilly.

I said "If nothing else ..." back there, but unfortunately there was something else. Sorkin's absence was felt last week in every sentence of the two speeches that were prepared for President Bartlet -- one for use in the event that Zoey was freed; the other for a less cheery outcome. These presidential speeches sounded exactly like presidential speeches, which is to say they sounded nothing like the speeches that Sorkin wrote for his President. Bartlet's words to the nation last week were clichéd and almost trite: "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away ... back in her mother's arms ... a second chance that will not slip through our hands."

Wells has said that characters on The West Wing will rarely be speaking the kinds of soliloquies that Sorkin wrote for his characters, and especially for the President. In part, that's a creative decision, he said. But Wells admitted it's also because those words, those soliloquies, are so difficult to write.

The West Wing may well prove to be a better show for Sorkin's departure. It may more reliably entertain and less frequently infuriate. But without its creator, it has surely lost its ability to amaze.