Bartlet4America News Archive

Season finale of 'West Wing' will confirm the show's decline

by Bill Goodykoontz
The Arizona Republic

May. 19, 2004 12:00 AM

Will Donna survive the car bombing that wounded her last week on The West Wing?

Will the "surprise" complications telegraphed so blatantly in the endless promos for tonight's season finale do her in?

Does anybody really care anymore?

Hard to imagine they do, since The West Wing is a shell of its former self. Intelligent, witty banter has been replaced by bonehead moves like blowing stuff up - no great surprise, as creator Aaron Sorkin, drummed out of his own show, was replaced by ER's John Wells. "When in doubt, explode" could be ER's motto. It's sad to see it working its way into the Bartlet White House.

Not that The West Wing hasn't used death, or the threat thereof, as a plot device before. Mark Harmon's Secret Service agent was shot to death in an idiotic exit to a guest-star stint. Mrs. Landingham (Kathryn Joosten) was killed off more effectively, in a car accident.

And let's not forget that the first season's cliffhanger finale was an assassination attempt, which Martin Sheen's President Bartlet survived.

It's tempting to say that when Wells took over the show it declined so fast it needed a parachute to break its fall. Not true. The show had already begun to slip, mired in the missed opportunity of a dull re-election campaign dragged down further by a multiple-sclerosis subplot, then painting itself into the corner of a White House-sanctioned political assassination.

Its first big misstep was a noble failure, the post-Sept. 11 stand-alone episode. Preachy, arrogant and boring, it played to all of Sorkin's weaknesses, and the show never really regained its stride after that.

Which is not to say that there haven't been good episodes since. There have. But The West Wing has never enjoyed a run of good shows like it did its first couple of seasons when, at least once an episode, someone in the remarkable cast would delivery a civil-service soliloquy so moving you wanted to sign up for . . . whatever you sign up for that allows you to work at the White House.

Stunts this season such as "revealing" that C.J. (Allison Janney) once slept with the former vice president (Tim Matheson, in a great role), meanwhile, smack of ER's heavy hand. Policy-wonk poetry has become pedestrian. Now Donna (Janel Moloney) has been injured in a blast that killed three U.S. officials in Gaza, affording the show a chance to offer a primer on Middle East relations. Maybe Sorkin could have pulled this off. We'll never know.

Every year of its existence so far, The West Wing has won the Emmy for best drama. This implies that it's been the best drama on TV; it hasn't. Depending upon the season, HBO's The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and The Wire were better.

Still, for a couple of years, there was no question that The West Wing was the best drama on network television, a sort of weekly liberal wish-fulfillment hour. Sorkin broke, gleefully, one of the rules of TV: Politics can't be interesting. While he was at it, with witty, rapid-fire banter borrowed from Sports Night, his brilliant take on a Sportscenter-like show, he broke a second rule: Talking too much can't be interesting, either.

Those rules still apply, by the way. Unfortunately, they now apply to The West Wing.