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The harshest critique: "West Wing" is just a TV show

By Gail Pennington
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

02/17/2004

The cast of NBC's "The West Wing."

These are dark days for "The West Wing," in just about every sense of the word.

Our heroes are chronically cranky; rarely does anyone crack a smile, let alone a joke; and somebody seems to have turned out the lights.

It's possible to argue both pro and con for the Emmy-winning NBC drama in its first season since creator Aaron Sorkin was forced out. TV critics did a lot of that while mingling last month in Los Angeles, with some asserting that the show's transition into the hands of executive producer John Wells had been seamless. Others contended that the product had actually improved post-Sorkin. Not so preachy, they said. Easier to follow.

On the other side are those who loved "The West Wing" best in earlier seasons and find it almost a parody of its old self this year. Count me in the group feeling a real sense of loss that something once sublime is now simply a TV show.

Yes, it always was, but what poured from Sorkin's pen was often closer to poetry. An unabashed idealist who could make us laugh and cry, sometimes simultaneously, in every episode, Sorkin also was a sorcerer, capable of turning government minutiae into improbably involving stories.

This season, although plots have offered plenty of high-stakes action, including last week's detonation of a mysterious nuclear device, the fictional White House has not been a pleasant place to visit.

Characters who once felt like family now squabble and snipe at one another. Banter is rare; quips are clunky. Instead of the brisk ballet choreographed by Tommy Schlamme, who set the show's style but departed with Sorkin, cameras thrash around frantically and often pointlessly. And while Schlamme used lighting in painterly fashion, scenes now are just too dark.

NBC, hearing critics' grumblings about the show, brought Wells and every available cast member to Hollywood last month to talk about how they thought the new season was going.

With NBC Entertainment president Jeff Zucker in the back of the room, most said something that boiled down to, "Fine, thanks."

"It feels very much continued from where we've been," said Janel Moloney, who plays aide Donna Moss. "I feel like the integrity and the voice is strikingly close."

The cast felt "a tremendous sense of relief" on realizing that the show would go on, said Bradley Whitford, who plays Donna's boss, Josh Lyman.

"I can only speak for myself, but it was a hugely emotional and difficult thing to see Aaron and Tommy go away," he said. "It was bewildering and disorienting . . . and I think all of us really wondered, does the idea hold? (That it does is really) a testament to Tommy and Aaron's vision, which was very strong and audacious."

Asked whether his character, chief of staff Leo McGarry, was behaving like himself this season, coming down so hard on staffers, John Spencer said he'd been told recently, "Leo's gotten so mean."

"Mean and nice and all that is in the eye of the beholder," Spencer said.

The Leo of today "is closer to the Leo of the first half of the first season, when Tommy and Aaron said (he) was like if Casey Stengel was the chief of staff of the White House," he said. "Yeah, it's a big responsibility, and he's gruff."

Coming closest to acknowledging that the show had changed was Richard Schiff, who plays communications director Toby Ziegler - and he pointed to Sorkin himself as the root of the change.

"Aaron Sorkin is a wonderful writer with a certain style, a kind of romantic lyricism," Schiff said. "He created a very romantic world with 'The West Wing.' And time is running out on that kind of romantic honeymoon . . . in very much the same way that the real White House runs out on their honeymoon."

Sorkin himself set up the end of the "West Wing" honeymoon with the story line involving the kidnapping of the president's daughter Zoey, Schiff said.

"The White House, as fictionally we know it, was in a hundred million little pieces . . . and you have to move on from there and evolve," Schiff said.

As a result of that evolution, "The West Wing" "is no longer a romantic entity," Schiff said, calling it more of "a reality-driven drama now.

"This is why Leo isn't as attractive a character as he might have been last year, and why Josh and Toby get into these fights and so on," he said.

The honeymoon is over for "The West Wing" in the Nielsen ratings as well, and reality has set in. Once a Top 10 staple, the show ranks 31st for the season to date, and last week it finished second in its 8 p.m. Wednesday time slot, trailing CBS' "King of Queens" by more than a half-million viewers.

And what about Sorkin?

"We have lunch once a month, and he gets all the scripts, as does Tommy," Wells said. "And they both watch all the cuts, and we hear from them. They're both involved."

Staying involved "is harder for Aaron just because it was such an emotional sort of individual activity," Wells said. "But he talks generally about the show and was very helpful," including sitting down with the writing staff and talking shop.

Those who have seen him lately insist that these are not dark days for Sorkin, who previously wrote the play and movie "A Few Good Men" and the ABC comedy "Sports Night." In fact, he recently finished a script for a movie, Whitford said.

In addition, Sorkin wrote an extended foreword and chose the content for the newly released book "The West Wing Seasons 3 and 4: The Shooting Scripts" (Newmarket Press, $29.95 hardcover or $19.95 paperback).

It's a good read, and a great way to relive the days when "The West Wing" wasn't just a TV show.