Bartlet4America News Archive

‘The West Wing’: The Lovable Liberal Behind Bush’s Victory

By LAURA LIPPMAN
The New York Times

VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE has one man to blame for his loss to George W. Bush. I'm referring to a popular spoiler who claims to be committed to liberal positions on gun control, the environment and education; yet he handed the presidency to a Republican opposed to everything he holds dear.

The spoiler is, of course, President Josiah (Jed) Bartlet, now in his first term-second season on NBC's "West Wing." Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen, enjoys the kind of approval numbers (nine Emmys and a top-20 Nielsen rating) no other president can claim. "The West Wing" is wonderfully acted, well written and, contrary to what conservatives believe, more devastating to the Democrats than any right-wing conspiracy. For while "The West Wing" is reliably liberal on major issues, it makes a counterproductive pact with its almost 20 million viewers: stay home, surrender to this fantasy of a Democratic president who never abandons his principles and skip the real thing. "The West Wing" may even have cost Mr. Gore a key state that would have made the Florida mess moot, but more on that later.

"The West Wing's" primary conceit is that the country has finally elected a decent man. "I believe a good man can be president," the future chief of staff, Leo (John Spencer), tells his future deputy, Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford), in a flashback. Josh abandons a more cautious candidate and quickly develops a cult-like devotion so palpable that his friend Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) enlists in the cause solely on the basis of Josh's beatific expression.

The implication is that everyone else running for president, regardless of party or ideology, is bad. The show's creator, Aaron Sorkin, has been praised for his uplifting world view. Yet what could be more cynical than spoon-feeding this Pollyanna presidency to disenfranchised liberals?

Instead of raising standards for politicians, the show only increases our dissatisfaction with flesh-and- blood candidates. Mr. Gore can't compete with Bartlet, the literally scripted politician. Who could? He has Ronald Reagan's charisma, Woodrow Wilson's intellect and the libido of Socks, the Clintons' neutered cat.

Mr. Sorkin has risen sharply on the learning curve since he wrote the frequently silly script for the 1995 film "The American President." Give "The West Wing" due credit for dishing up easily digested nuggets about complicated topics: the census, the 25th Amendment, the constitutional right to privacy. But not unlike granola, which once enjoyed a reputation as health food, the show has a high-fat content. Every episode is larded with incredible plots and subplots. And, as its fan base grows, "The West Wing" seems to pander more.

Consider "Shibboleth," the Nov. 22 episode. Chinese refugees have been discovered in a container ship. Are they Christians fleeing persecution or opportunists hoping to cash in? How can the president help them without damaging American relations with China? Bartlet's solution is to tell the California governor to give the National Guard wink-wink nudge-nudge orders to look the other way as the emaciated Chinese sneak out of detention. To go where? And do what? That apparently falls under Mr. Sorkin's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. When the hour is up, the hour is up, allowing Bartlet to avoid real-life consequences for his Hardy Boy policy solutions.

Stranger still, "The West Wing" is the one office where no one plays office politics. Bartlet has assembled a crew of straight shooters who say what they think no reprisals and no hard feelings. At one episode's end, staffers raised their beer bottles with a heartfelt toast: God bless America. This moment would have been maudlin on "Touched by an Angel."

Critics call "The West Wing" a workplace drama, but it can also be seen as a family show "President Knows Best," in which a lovable, if remote, father figure solves the problems of his adolescent brood. Without the repeated exterior shots, we might not remember where we are; it's just some busy place where attractive people walk fast and talk faster. Mr. Sorkin does write great inverted-pyramid dialogue: short and snappy to shorter, snappier to shortest, snappiest. (Leo: "He's really very easy to like once you get to know him." Josh: "How many people get that far?" Leo: "Not many.")

All this is completely disingenuous. Everybody loves Jed, the politician who never lies and seldom compromises. Blunt candor is undeniably attractive, but if it were politically palatable, John McCain might be the president-elect.

Bartlet is so adorable that a telegenic Republican he tries to hire has a mind-boggling epiphany: people who disagree with you are not evil. When her conservative cronies refer to the White House staff as worthless, she lashes out. She doesn't change her views, but she, too, sees the light of Bartlet's goodness and decides to take the job. In real life, the woman would go straight to playing hardball and feast heartily on the frailties of her would- be employer.

Even guns cut Bartlet some slack. "The president's going to be fine; the bullet went out of its way not to hit anything," the press secretary, C. J. Cregg (the magnificent Allison Janney, heroine to tall girls everywhere), announces after a hate group's assassination attempt. The attack wasn't even aimed at Bartlet, but at the black aide dating his daughter. It is tempting to imagine the conspiracy's lone survivor breaking down in tears under questioning: "The last person I wanted to hurt was the president!"

The fictitious hate group that engineered this hit was named West Virginia West Pride, and the slight did not go ignored in West Virginia. A state senator encouraged an NBC boycott, and The Charlestown Gazette ran a rueful item in a Nov. 6 column the day before the election. West Virginia had gone Republican in the presidential race only three times before in the 20th century. This time, Mr. Bush easily won the state's five Electoral College votes. If Mr. Gore had carried West Virginia, he would have won the presidency. Could this have been the beginning of a Bartlet backlash?

O.K., that's wishful thinking.

President Bartlet could well serve as long as Franklin Delano Roosevelt did. To date, he has lost only one important vote. When "The West Wing" was collecting all those Emmy Awards on Sept. 10, Mr. Sheen was edged out in the best actor category by James Gandolfini of "The Sopranos," a show that, unlike "The West Wing," honestly confronts the ambiguities in a powerful man's life. As the president's disciples might say, lifting their microbrews to the Washington night sky: God bless America.

Laura Lippman is a mystery novelist and a political reporter for The Baltimore Sun.

Dule noted

by CLAIRE BICKLEY
Toronto Sun

Actor Hill is pleased by attention West Wing character is attracting

On the TV series The West Wing, Dule Hill's character was the catalyst for an assassination attempt.

The fact that black aide Charlie Young was dating the U.S. president's daughter Zoe so enraged a group of white supremacists, they opened fire on the president and his staff.

In real life, it was the initial absence of Hill or any other black cast members on the series that sparked anger.

The NAACP (National Association For The Advancement of Colored People) even threatened a viewer boycott of the networks after getting a look at the overwhelming pale complexion of the 1999-2000 fall schedule, West Wing included.

"I'm glad that the NAACP brought it to attention. It's kind of a shame when it happens," Hill, 25, said while in Toronto doing promotion for CTV, which simulcasts the NBC drama Wednesday nights at 9.

"I would hope that it'll just become second nature. You won't have to think so much about it: 'Oh, we've got to have a person of colour.' "

As for the interracial romance storyline, Hill's all for it.

"I think it's great to rattle some feathers," he said.

"You realize how backwards our society still is when you hear what people write ... Letters that say, you know, 'The brotherhood can't watch the show anymore because of whatever. We can't support this.' "

Hill — whose first name is pronounced 'due-lay' — grew up in New Jersey. Actually, his first name is Karim, but he dropped it because other kids kept calling him "Kareem Abdul-Jabaar." The middle name Dule had been chosen by an aunt, who invented it after a trip to France. He has never met anyone who shares it, but his Internet explorations have found Dule, Egypt, and a temple in China that bears the name.

Both of his parents are originally from Jamaica. His father moved first to Toronto in the 1960s and he has cousins living in Mississauga. Hill's mother is an education consultant, while his father became an investment banker.

By age three, Hill was tap-dancing. By nine, he was understudying Savion Glover on Broadway. By 10, after a year touring the U.S. as the star of The Tap Dance Kid, he'd had enough and quit the business. In his late teens, he eased back in, doing commercials, TV movies, then the Saturday morning show City Kids.

"Then I did a teen movie called She's All That, which did pretty well, and then this. They were all steps, but this is the greatest one so far in terms of helping my career."

Helping Hill prepare for his West Wing role called for a trip to Washington, where he visited the White House and met Charlie Young's real-life counterpart, Chris Aenskov, who was President Bill Clinton's personal aide at the time.

"He said the job is a lot of fun. A lot of hours but a lot of fun," Hill said. "He was telling me some of the people he knows on a first-name basis. I mean he's talking about heads of countries that he knows, that he would say, 'Hey, how you doing, so and so?' And they'd say, 'Hey Chris, how you doing?' For anyone in their twenties, that must be a thrilling thing.

"I realized how important the job is also," Hill continued. "In a sense, how powerful it is because he has the ear of the president. He's around the president all the time, pretty much. He's one of the few people who could just call the White House and say, 'I want to speak to the president,' and can."

Hill also met Clinton's daughter Chelsea.

"She was really nice," he said. "And no, she's not dating Chris."

Writer’s Other Role Is Guild Chief — Can He Deliver?

By JAMES BATES and BRIAN LOWRY
L.A. Times

Labor: As contract talks with studios near, high-powered producer John Wells faces tough challenge.

Like his smash television shows that jump breathlessly between scenes, John Wells is caught in the middle of a real-life high-wire act.

In one scene, he's the powerful multimillionaire producer of "ER," "The West Wing" and "Third Watch." Cut to John Wells, working writer and militant union leader, bashing the very studios he's in business with for shortchanging his fellow scribes.

Amid the chaos, Wells is about to script the lead role in what may prove the biggest drama of his career. The 44-year-old president of the Writers Guild of America in Los Angeles will lead 8,300 TV and film writers next month into difficult contract negotiations with Hollywood studios over a host of financial and creative issues. As producers and writers prepare to face off, the person with the most influence over whether a strike takes place not only works in both camps, he's a superstar in each.

Never has such a formidable insider taken on Hollywood studios and TV networks in labor talks. Wells sits in the pantheon of television's elite "show runners," an exclusive club that includes David E. Kelley, Steven Bochco and Dick Wolf. They all have proven track records overseeing multiple hit shows, the kind needed by today's giant media conglomerates to feed TV networks, cable channels, foreign markets and fledgling Internet sites.

In Wells, the writers guild has a leader with an insider's knowledge of TV that, associates say, is unequaled by his peers.

"He's a very good student of the business," said NBC West Coast President Scott Sassa. "You're not going to put anything past him."

Despite his clout, Wells is inexperienced in leading a labor battle and knows he's up against global media giants growing more powerful with every merger. The studios' Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers, he concedes, "has always been a hard-nosed negotiating unit" adept at squeezing the union.

"We're pragmatic. We're prepared. Nobody's interested in taking a strike to try and prove we're tough or that it would be fun," Wells said.

Much is riding on whether a writers' strike, combined with a separate potential walkout by film and TV actors, happens next year.

A writers' strike would devastate the fall TV season in which Wells himself has so much at stake, while an actors' walkout would halt production. For Southern California, economists estimate that the one-two punch would cost the economy $250 million weekly. The writers contract expires May 1, with actors following two months later. Top Writers Involved in Guild, Due to Wells

Wells also gives writers a credibility they've never enjoyed before. In past strikes, the guild was led by people who hadn't worked in years and was vulnerable to criticism that its leaders were out of touch. Acting as a magnet, Wells reached out to other top writers to work on guild issues, from Kelley and Bochco to Oscar-winning screenwriter Ron Bass.

"Part of the problem in these negotiations in the past is they look across the table and oftentimes don't see anybody they really do business with," Wells said in an interview. "It makes it very difficult now to slough it off as 'They don't know what they're talking about.' "

Still, it's a fine line Wells walks. Because he's so successful producing, Wells knows a volatile strike leaves him an easy target: As a big-time producer, he's too close to the companies and his wealth insulates him from the pain of a strike.

"If we do end up in a strike, I'll definitely take some hits," he said.

Indeed, neither NBC, where Wells' shows make up 14% of the network's prime-time schedule, nor Warner Bros., where he produces, likes the idea that he is leading the charge for writers.

"The company I work for [Warner] feels I have a conflict of interest, and they're concerned I'm coming down on the side of the writers guild," Wells said. "Fortunately, I'm in a position where there's enough success on the shows that I'm doing that there's not much they can do about it."

Wells disputes suggestions that he may have a conflict. He argues that, under guild rules, he's technically not an employer because Warner Bros. hires and pays the people on his shows. Nonetheless, Wells leaves no doubts where he will stand if forced to choose sides.

"Any time somebody says to me, 'What do you do?' I always say, 'I'm a writer,' " Wells said. "I don't even hesitate about it."

The main issues for TV writers are a significant boost in payments when their work runs on cable TV and in foreign markets. Negotiations are complicated further by technology issues such as how writers will be paid when movies and shows are eventually distributed via the Internet. The guild also wants studios to resolve long-standing creative disputes, including giving writers more access to sets and limiting credits for directors.

Not all writers and producers agree with Wells' tactics or goals. Wolf, the producer of NBC's "Law & Order," sees only two legitimate issues: the cable and foreign residuals. Beyond that, he sees the "creative rights" issues as nebulous and counterproductive.

"My position is people should shut up, stop talking . . . and saber-rattling, get in a room and start negotiating. A measure of rationality has to be brought to this," Wolf said.

Wolf also worries that a potential strike would damage broadcasters and would ultimately be self-defeating for writers, inspiring networks to order more low-cost, unscripted programming such as game shows to offset financial losses. Former Roadie's Break Came on 'China Beach'

The son of an Episcopal priest and a schoolteacher, Wells grew up in Denver, starting his career in theater at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He once worked as a roadie for such acts as Elton John and The Eagles, moving to New York to work as a stagehand off Broadway before leaving for Los Angeles to attend USC's Film School. Wells spent time as a carpenter and produced plays while struggling to sell scripts. His early credits included the forgettable TV series "Shell Game," and helping produce the critically panned film "Nice Girls Don't Explode."

Wells' break came in 1988 as a writer for the Peabody Award-winning Vietnam drama "China Beach," working his way up from writer to an executive producer. In 1992, Wells developed for Warner Bros. a pilot called "Polish Hill" that brought stinging allegations from writer David Simon and director Barry Levinson that parts were lifted from a Simon book that later became the basis for NBC's "Homicide: Life on the Street." Warner Bros. insisted the claim was frivolous, but it agreed to minor revisions to settle.

Wells later teamed with author Michael Crichton and director Steven Spielberg in 1994 to launch the NBC emergency room drama "ER." The show remains television's most-watched program, on its way to capturing the top ratings spot for the fourth time in seven seasons. "ER" also made Wells rich. Forbes once estimated his annual income at $35 million.

Wells' most recent hit, "The West Wing," which he developed with writer Aaron Sorkin, has blossomed into a popular Emmy-winning hit for NBC. Even "Third Watch," a series about paramedics and firefighters that struggled initially, has solidified its status this season after undergoing a creative revamp. His only recent failure was the NBC show "Trinity" in 1998.

Guarded about his privacy, Wells and his wife, Marilyn, a psychotherapist, live in Los Feliz with their 3-year-old daughter, Rachel. His younger brother Llewellyn works as a producer on "The West Wing."

Wells, who sports a goatee as well as a stud in his left earlobe, is well liked by fellow writers. He's been known to shower those on his shows with extravagant presents such as trips to Paris.

"Like a lot of people who are confident in their abilities, John is not a screamer. He is smart, methodical, precise, organized and strong," said writer Gary Ross.

In addition to the three prime-time series, Wells is developing a fourth show for CBS and writes 10 episodic scripts a year--all while serving as guild president. Until recently, he worked quietly as a lucrative "script doctor" for movie directors. He also has numerous film projects in development.

"He gives new meaning to multi-tasking," said Warner Bros. Television President Peter Roth.

As a manager and writer, Wells has a keen sense of promoting his shows and fiercely protects them. He also is loath to divulge even the smallest bits of information about the future plots of his programs.

Wells has sparred with NBC's promotion department over divulging too much--as well as misleading viewers--in on-air ads created for the show. When former "ER" star George Clooney made a surprise return appearance on the show in May to reunite with the departing Julianna Margulies on her final episode, Wells kept the crew to a minimum and promised the crew substantial bonuses if Clooney's appearance didn't leak out. He kept the scene out of the script, then stored the footage in his refrigerator before inserting it into the episode the night before it aired.

Ironically, it was a Wells complaint about the guild that lured him into its leadership. Guild officials liked a letter he wrote during a 22-week strike in 1988 in which Wells argued that loose standards allowed the union to be dominated by nonworking writers. With Talks Looming, Studios United on 'No'

Wells heads into the talks in the wake of a rebellion two years ago by writers who believed that the guild has been too cozy with the studios. That set a more confrontational tone to the upcoming talks with studios that Wells readily concedes are "all united on 'no.' "

Nonetheless, Wells said he owed it to fellow writers in going toe-to-toe with studios over issues that simmered too long after the guild's painful 1988 strike.

"No one believes it's in the best interest of the industry to have a strike," Wells said. "The economic impact on the city as a whole and on the industry is something we take very seriously.

"That said, there are issues that really should have been addressed seven or eight years ago that now have been put off for 12."

Whitford loves just Joshin’

By FRAZIER MOORE
Associated Press

But ‘West Wing’ staffer prefers his president to that new guy

NEW YORK — It was a week ago - midmorning last Tuesday, to be exact — that Bradley Whitford bit into a chocolate cream-filled doughnut and savored his life.

Seated in a Rockefeller Center coffee shop, he was a few steps from the "Today" show, where he had just appeared with Katie Couric (who called him a hottie), plugging the next night's "The West Wing." An especially strong episode of the hit White House drama, it depicts Whitford's character, deputy chief of staff Josh Lyman, suffering an emotional meltdown many months after gunfire rained on President Bartlet and his senior staff.

Lucky Whitford! His character was the only one gravely injured in the ambush, which afforded him some gripping near-death scenes early this season. And in the new episode, titled "Noel," he would show his stuff again, as Josh goes toe to toe with a trauma counselor played by Adam Arkin.

It's a terrific hour, even featuring the virtuoso cellist Yo-Yo Ma in a Christmas performance.

But last Tuesday, Whitford might have been surprised to know that "Noel," which had brought him from Los Angeles for his whirlwind New York publicity swing, was destined to be bumped for real-life presidential drama and be broadcast tonight instead.

Or maybe he wouldn't have been surprised at all. If the current political season has taught people anything, it's that plans change.

In any case, Whitford was here to say that he is pleased, proud and grateful beyond words to have a berth on "The West Wing," whose splendid ensemble cast also includes Allison Janney, John Spencer, Rob Lowe, Richard Schiff, Dule Hill, Janel Moloney and, of course, Martin Sheen as President Bartlet. At 41, Whitford has paid his dues with supporting roles in such films as "Awakenings," "Presumed Innocent" and "A Perfect World." He has weathered two short-lived TV comedies, "Black Tie Affair" and "The Secret Lives of Men."

He starred on Broadway in "A Few Good Men," whose playwright, Aaron Sorkin, created "The West Wing" a decade later and cast Whitford in it.

He loves playing Josh - a wired, ascetic wag with more colors than the NBC peacock. "This guy gets to be funny and he gets to be passionate. He's smart, he's oversensitive, he's full of rage," said Whitford, who nails every nuance.

Most of all, he is happily married to actress Jane Kaczmarek, the mother of his two young children, who plays Lois, the don't-mess-with-me mom on Fox's hit comedy, "Malcolm in the Middle."

"You never doubt that she loves those kids," said Whitford, relishing Kaczmarek's ability as Lois to "read you the riot act and let you know she loves you, all at the same time."

"She is uniquely able to do this, and," he added puckishly, "I know - because I live it every day." From the next table, an elderly couple, apparently tourists, offered Whitford their greetings. "You look great!" they said. (What, did they think this was Josh Lyman, recovering nicely from his gunshot wounds?)

Then they inquired (Josh being, after all, a Washington insider) if he had any updates on the election mess. "We've been on a bus," they explained.

"I can't believe George Bush might be president," said Whitford, not looking so happy as he echoed the thoughts of maybe half the electorate.

He had campaigned for Al Gore in Minnesota, Oregon and New Mexico, and in October traveled to his native state, Wisconsin, to introduce Gore at the biggest rally of the campaign. "I'm not a politician, I just play one on TV — kind of like George Bush," Whitford would tell audiences. "This election ain't no stinkin' TV show."

Wasn't it?

"For me," he recalled, "one of the most surreal moments in this election was after the third debate, when I heard a talking head say, 'Well, clearly, Al Gore won on substance, on the issues. But you have to give the victory to Bush, because he seems presidential.' I - I almost spit my Pink Squirrel!"

He shook his head in disbelief. "SEEMS presidential? SEEMS presidential?! That's Martin Sheen's job, to SEEM presidential! When did SEEMING presidential. . .?" He sighed.

A few hours later, the race would be settled; 36 hours later, NBC's coverage of Gore conceding to Bush would pre-empt the "West Wing" episode Whitford was here to promote. On Election Day, it was that episode he had been shooting, he recalled, with cast and crew gravitating to TVs after each take to catch the latest returns.

One of the scenes they filmed that fateful Tuesday has Josh confronting press secretary C.J. Cregg (Janney):

JOSH: Why has there been no new information?

C.J.: 'Cause there's no new information.

JOSH (warily): OK.

C.J.: There isn't!

JOSH (wild-eyed): You accept that?

Whitford laughed. "I had worked hard on the campaign and I was very anxious," he said. "Thank God it's an episode where I'm supposed to be emotionally discombobulated."

How ‘The West Wing’ was won

By JOYCE SAENZ HARRIS
The Dallas Morning News

The secrets to TV show’s success may be found in a Texan’s life story

LOS ANGELES — The Oval Office is too cluttered. The Roosevelt Room is too noisy. So the boss takes a break to chat in the press secretary's office.

Welcome to the White House of executive producer-director Thomas Schlamme, a Houston native who recently won an Emmy (his second for directing) for the series pilot of The West Wing.

The NBC show's hit status has turned an unaccustomed spotlight on the soft-spoken, genial Mr. Schlamme (rhymes with "Tommy," which is what everyone calls him). At 50, the University of Texas graduate suddenly is one of Hollywood's most sought-after directorial talents and could have his pick of TV and film projects — if The West Wing didn't keep him busy 80 hours a week.

But although he speaks wistfully of wanting more time with his family, he's not complaining much.

"We are so committed to not falling into the mediocre," Mr. Schlamme says. "Every show, we try to do a better show." That goal demands the director's special gift for storytelling, a blend of comedy and pathos not unlike his own life.

For West Wing creator/writer Aaron Sorkin, Mr. Schlamme is a sort of professional soulmate. They first clicked when they met four years ago to create ABC's Sports Night. "Hooking up with Aaron was a culmination. He was a writer whose work I absolutely understood," Mr. Schlamme says.

Mr. Sorkin in turn lauds Mr. Schlamme's "leadership skills, which are not seen on the screen," for turning the show's cast into a successful acting ensemble. If two of the leads do not get along in real life, or if another star often neglects to memorize lines — well, Tommy Schlamme is the magician who makes this illusion work.

Mr. Schlamme has perfected the art of the "walk-and-talk," the show's signature tracking shots of two or three characters as they hustle from one West Wing office to another. He choreographs scenes like a ballet master moving dancers through their steps.

"He's one of the greatest directors I've ever worked with," says Rob Lowe, who stars as White House aide Sam Seaborn. "He's got a great eye; he's very strong visually. This is a show that, had Tommy not stamped it in a way that has become its hallmark, could've been a very leaden, talking heads-type show. But it crackles with energy."

In The West Wing's alternate political universe, President Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen) is midway through his first term, and his constituents vote every Wednesday via the remote control. So far, his Nielsen polls require no recount, for "Jed" Bartlet is far more popular than any real-life politician.

The show has not only become a critical and popular success — it has become required viewing for a key audience. "Everyone at the White House rushes to the TV on Wednesday night and watches it ... and sits around next day to talk about it," says political consultant Paul Begala. The Texas Democrat, who now co-hosts MSNBC's Equal Time, is both a West Wing insider and a major West Wing fan.

"What's real about it is the characters. They make it," Mr. Begala says. "They get the Oval Office right. ...What you see in the show is that everybody working there has a million plates spinning ... and the one plate that drops is going to be on the front page."

Tommy was born in 1950, the younger of Otto and Steffi Schlamme's two children. "I've been forbidden to talk about when he was a wussy little kid," claims his only sibling, Susan Schlamme Massin of Houston. All joking aside, though, Ms. Massin acknowledges being "super-close" to her brother, who is less than two years her junior: "We were like buddies, really."

Otto Schlamme, who fled Nazi Germany as a teenager and has lived in Houston since 1938, recalls his young son as "not precocious, just an all-around boy." Tommy was naturally athletic, but "he had a lot of insecurity that doesn't exist anymore," says actor Brent Spiner, his best friend since boyhood. "He wasn't sure what his contribution would be to the world, to his family or himself."

Brent was a nerd, and "high school is treacherous for nerds." But Tommy was "good-spirited and protective; I felt safe in his presence." (Mr. Spiner notes that he played his most famous character, the lovable android Data of Star Trek: The Next Generation, as "the ultimate nerd.")

At Bellaire High, Tommy and Brent discovered theater under the guidance of drama teacher Cecil Pickett. "He was very much a mentor. ... It really did turn me around in my life," Mr. Schlamme says. "That's absolutely clear in my head. I was so mesmerized by the way he saw the world."

Mr. Pickett, who died three years ago, also inspired other Bellaire students, including brothers Randy and Dennis Quaid, the late character actor Trey Wilson, and the teacher's own daughter, actress Cindy Pickett. "They all adored that man," Otto Schlamme says.

"Those of us who came into contact with Cecil had a life-changing experience," Mr. Spiner says. "Suddenly, the world was about more than just having fun. It took Tommy a little longer, because he didn't trust what he was meant to do."

Otto hoped that Tommy, as the only son, would carry on with the family's successful office-supply business. But early on at the University of Texas, Tommy realized that what he really wanted to do was make films.

"I had dreams of being Robert Altman," he says. "Breaking down something and understanding the human and emotional element." He told Brent about his decision while the two boys were driving to the Cottonwood Inn, a steakhouse in Columbus, Texas.

Brent, who had known he wanted to be an actor since he was 13, understood perfectly. "Things have a way of working out the way they're supposed to," Mr. Spiner observes.

Tommy was still studying film at UT ("staying stoned and making movies") when his mother, Steffi Becker Schlamme, died of cancer. "She was one of the sweetest women who ever lived, a dear human being," Mr. Spiner remembers. "I think the early death of Tommy's mother informed a lot of the rest of his life ... [and] created a need to prove something to Otto, or the world, or himself."

In fact, his mother still influences his life. "I can talk about my father's professionalism and Cecil's perception of the truth in things," Mr. Schlamme says. "But the patience and the sense of trying to make people feel like a family was completely driven by my mother when I was a kid." Her generosity of spirit "was an incredible gift," he says. And he still believes that "If you give that, you get that in return."

When Tommy graduated from UT, he "left there with a diploma and a head full of dreams. I had not a clue how to pursue that." So he backpacked in Europe, bounced back to Houston and worked as "the resident freak with incredibly long hair" at the Bozell & Jacobs advertising agency — until his boss urged him to move on with his life.

Tommy was 23. He stashed $1,000 in his boot, went to New York and stayed at the Chelsea Hotel with Kinky Friedman; the iconoclastic Texas musician ("loonier than a bird but brilliant") was a friend from Echo Hill Ranch, the Jewish summer camp in Kerrville. Tommy survived by driving a cab while struggling to get jobs making commercials for Broadway shows. That led to music videos, including one for Bette Midler, which led to regular work for HBO and other TV and cable work.

He had loved New York since a visit at the age of 10. "I kind of went 'Wow! Look what these people are doing!' It wasn't a quest to get out of Texas," he says. "It was the idea that there was a world beyond the world I knew."

It is common knowledge in Hollywood that the worst experience of Mr. Schlamme's professional life was directing Mike Myers in So I Married an Axe Murderer.

The 1993 film was supposed to be a comedy, but there was nothing remotely funny about the instant, bitter dislike the star took to his director. A recently Vanity Fair profile of Mr. Myers claimed that he reduced Mr. Schlamme to tears on one occasion, but the director says that never happened.

"Tommy said, 'I have yet to cry over my mother's death,'" recalls Mr. Spiner. "'So believe me, Mike Myers is not going to make me cry.'"

The Axe Murderer shoot nonetheless was unpleasant to the point of emotional trauma, and Mr. Schlamme later acknowledged that he probably should have used Directors Guild clout to rein in his surly star. Mr. Myers' attitude toward Mr. Schlamme was "a total mystery to me," says the actress who undoubtedly knows the director best.

That would be Christine Lahti, the respected film and TV star. "Tommy has a natural gift with actors," she says. "Actors always come up to me and say he's their favorite director — and I'm envious." She has worked with Mr. Schlamme on several projects, most notably the 1991 film Crazy from the Heart. But if she isn't directed by Mr. Schlamme as much as she might like, it's not for lack of access to him.

Ms. Lahti and Mr. Schlamme have been married for 17 years and live in Santa Monica with their three children: Wilson, 12, and twins Sam and Emma, 8. Mr. Schlamme is "a great dad," Ms. Lahti says, despite his heavy work schedule that keeps him away far more than he would like. He makes it a point to block out hours on his schedule to attend movies and museums, go on hikes, take field trips to Knott's Berry Farm.

What usually gets sacrificed, she notes, is his rest: "He doesn't sleep very much."

Mr. Schlamme made his name directing comedians and satirists such as Tracey Ullmann, John Leguizamo, Martin Lawrence and Spalding Gray in HBO specials and concert films. But he never meant to be pigeonholed as a "comedy director." And though he has a sharp, subversive sense of humor, the laughter often is bittersweet, with unshed tears just beneath the surface.

"The rap that used to be on me was, I'd make a drama and they'd say, 'Be careful, he'll make it too funny.' And I'd do a comedy, and they'd say, 'He'll make it too serious,'" he says. "The truth of it is, both those were somewhat valid.

"I don't wake up in the morning and go, 'Today's a good comedy day! I'm going to be funny all day!' Or, 'It's a tragic day.' They sort of exist together."

There is a story he tells about his father, Otto Schlamme, the sturdy survivor. This is, remember, a man who escaped the Holocaust that claimed many of his relatives. He also has been widowed three times, losing his wives to cancer, a brain disease and a heart attack, in that order.

When Tommy's most recent stepmother died, he accompanied his father to the funeral home in Houston — the same Jewish mortuary that had handled the two previous wives' funerals. A solemn occasion, to be sure. But what does Tommy Schlamme do?

He grabs a business card from the reception desk, draws eight little squares on it, then uses a hole-puncher on three of the squares. Then he hands it to his father, "letting him know that only five more wives and he gets a funeral for free!"

Otto is startled at first, but then he gets the joke and laughs irrepressibly. And he carries the card all day, showing it to his friends, just the ones who would understand, and they laugh, too.

And then they mourn. And then they laugh some more.

NBC: Forget Bush and Gore, We Wanted Bartlet!

E! Online

NBC would've been content with Martin Sheen as its president Wednesday night.

Instead, the Peacock had to settle for two guys and some speech about "reconciliation," as it joined the major networks in preempting normal schedules for Al Gore's concession speech and George W. Bush's victory dance. According to metered-market household numbers, Gore's soliloquy at 9 p.m. ET scored a combined 32.3 rating and 45 share on ABC, CBS and NBC, while Bush's speech at 10 p.m. ET grabbed a 28.5 rating and 40 share.

The timing couldn't have been worse for NBC, which was forced to postpone a Very Special Christmas Episode of its Emmy-winning political drama, The West Wing, as well as its Wednesday-night hit Law & Order, until next week. Both shows are crucial to the network's standings in the weekly ratings race, so NBC probably would've preferred to see Bush and Gore making nice during, say, The Rosie O'Donnell Show.

But hey, you get lemons, make lemonade, right? NBC scored the highest ratings for both speeches--a 13.2/18 for Gore versus ABC's 12.8/18 and CBS' 6.3/9, and a 12.8/18 for Bush, versus ABC's 9.8/14 and CBS' 5.9/8. While the West Wing/Law & Order shuffle freed up NBC for more news coverage, ABC had switched back and forth from its regular comedy lineup, and CBS had Gore and Bush on instead of an airing of The Odd Couple II. (Irony noted.)

So, who really ended up the big winner Wednesday night? Try the Dubya-B.

With viewers surrounded by politics, the more disinterested folks (who think "chad" is that new guy on Friends) turned their attention to the cliffhanger finale of Felicity. Thanks to competing news coverage, the WB series scored a 4.5 rating and 6 share in metered-market households, its strongest showing since October 11, the night of a presidential debate.

The series, starring curly-locked Keri Russell, is taking a long winter break to make room for new episodes of Jack & Jill starting in January. New episodes of Felicity are expected to show up next spring.

As for George? He'll be here in January. And Gore probably will be hanging out with Keri, growing his hair out and waiting for 2004.

How Could They Bump ‘West Wing’ for Two Talking Politicians?

by LISA DE MORAES
Washington Post

Here at The TV Column in our nation's capital we are incensed that an anticlimactic event like Al Gore's concession speech followed by George W. Bush's "Victory Lap 2" speech could be allowed to take precedence over NBC's broadcast of "The West Wing"—our preferred, fictional presidency.

NBC decided to preempt last night's episode after Gore's people announced he would address the nation at 9 p.m., when we should've been settling into our big crunchy chairs watching "The West Wing."

And not just any episode, but the Very Special Christmas Episode of "The West Wing." We still get chills thinking about last year's Very Special Christmas Episode, in which a haunted Toby learned more about a forgotten Korean War hero who died alone on a cold D.C. street while wearing a coat that Toby once donated to charity.

Last night, we were supposed to see adorable, sad-eyed Josh being ordered by President Bartlet to consult a doctor who specializes in analyzing trauma victims. Josh hasn't yet fully recovered from his life-threatening injuries in the presidential assassination attempt of last May's action-packed season finale.

But we didn't get to see that. Instead, we got the wrapping up of the Real Presidential Election. After five weeks, we're pretty tired of the Real Presidential Election. And we got to see NBC News On-Air Talent navel-gazing about what Gore and Bush had just said. NBC capped the whole sorry night with a rerun of "Will & Grace."

Was this fair? Did NBC have to decide to carry more political coverage last night than ABC or CBS? Why did it have to choose now to have a crisis of conscience over its decision not to air the first presidential debate live in favor of baseball and not to interrupt its telecast of "Titanic" in order to carry live the Florida election vote certification and Dubya's "Victory Lap 1" speech?

You'd hardly notice last night's schedule change on CBS, since all it did was sub Gore and Bush for "Odd Couple II." Between the two speeches, CBS entertained viewers with a rerun of "Everybody Loves Raymond."

ABC followed Gore with "Drew Carey," followed by Bush, followed by "Spin City," which makes for lousy TV but a good headline: Gore Drew Bush Spin.

Only Fox stuck with its original programming, carrying Gore's speech at 9 and then joining "The $treet" in progress, which was sure to anger nobody since this show has been canceled because no one is watching.

It promised to be a good night, however, for WB; the cliffhanger "midseason" finale of "Felicity" was sure to draw a bigger number than it would have otherwise, as viewers heartily sick of Gore and Bush looked for something, anything, else to watch. WB had always planned that "Felicity" would have the Wednesday 9 p.m. time slot for the start of the season and that "Jack & Jill" would move in in January.

NBC did throw us a bone—a very small bone. It preempted "Ed" at 8 to show a rerun of "The West Wing." And it promises to run the Very Special Christmas Episode of "The West Wing" next Wednesday.

You Can Go Home Again

By RICH SANDS
TV Guide

The West Wing's Richard Schiff proves just that when he returns to his college as a big man on campus.

Hurtling up Manhattan's West Side Highway in a yellow cab, Richard Schiff can barely finish a sentence. He's too excited pointing out the basketball courts and football fields where he played as a kid on the Upper West Side.

The nostalgia level peaks when the actor, who plays White House communications director Toby Ziegler on the NBC drama The West Wing, arrives at his alma mater, the City College of New York in Harlem. Schiff has been invited back to receive an alumni association award for outstanding postgraduate achievement. With an enthusiasm that's in stark contrast to the sullen demeanor of his Emmy-winning West Wing role, the 45-year-old actor could pass for a campus tour guide.

The tour ends at Shepard Hall, where Schiff meets former classmate Eugene Nesmith, now a CCNY professor. The two friends spent much of their college years in the building, where they acted in several plays together.

"Richard was always a fun guy," Nesmith recalls, but "he was a very serious student of the theater." Schiff, however, is the first to admit that theater was the only part of his academic life he took seriously. The middle of three sons (parents Edward, a real estate lawyer, and Charlotte, a cable TV and publishing executive, divorced when he was 12), Schiff was a high-school dropout armed with an equivalency diploma when he first attended CCNY in 1973. But he "wasn't into it," he says. "I didn't show up for finals... I didn't see the point." After a year, he left for Colorado, where he cut firewood ("for like $10 a day") and lived in "a hippie house."

Schiff returned to New York in 1975 and, at a roommate's suggestion, started taking acting classes at CCNY. Eventually, he auditioned and was accepted by the school's nascent theater program, where he steered toward directing. "I hated acting," he says, but loved the camaraderie. "It was a very rich, diverse environment."

After graduation, Schiff directed several off-Broadway plays, including "Antigone," starring Angela Bassett, just out of Yale School of Drama, in 1983. Soon after, Schiff returned to acting, which, he says, required overcoming "a mountain of fear." During this time, he was briefly married to Sheryl Noethe, a poet. "Really wonderful lady," he says. "We just weren't meant to be together. I decided after that I didn't want to get married — at least not up until Sheila."

Sheila is Sheila Kelley, whom Schiff met during auditions for his "Antigone." "She's a stunning creature," he says. "I kept her 8-by-10 [head shot]." Both were in relationships, but they reconnected in L.A. in the late '80s. Best known for her roles on L.A. Law and Sisters, Kelley just produced the movie "Dancing at the Blue Iguana," a docudrama about L.A. strippers in which she costars with Daryl Hannah. She and Schiff wed in 1996 and have two children, Gus, 6, and Ruby, 4 months.

Schiff's career began to build in the early '90s with small roles on TV (NYPD Blue) and in films ("Malcolm X"). A guest spot on the 1996 police drama High Incident caught the eye of producer Steven Spielberg, who cast Schiff in "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" as the operations specialist who gets done in by a dinosaur.

Only slightly less intimidating than taking on a T. rex is Schiff's current role as the moral compass of an extremely idealistic White House staff. "There are parts about Toby that are fun to act," he says. "But when it crosses into my private life, it can be very dangerous. I can't act [dark and impatient] around my wife — she'll bite my head off."

Last season, viewers saw a lighter side of Toby during a pickup basketball scene. But what caught the eye of City College staff and students was his CCNY sweatshirt, and the episode began circulating. "This is my first character I decided went to City," he says. "I imagine Toby started in New York politics."

The actor was invited back to campus last spring to speak at the honors students' graduation ceremony. Says Don Jordan, executive vice president of CCNY's alumni group, "I'm thrilled he wants to keep his ties with [us]. He's a wonderful role model." Schiff is just as thrilled to give back. "It saved my life, this institution," he says.

When he accepts his award at the alumni dinner, Schiff joins a list of honorees that includes Zero Mostel and Oscar-winning screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky ("Network"). As he tells the crowd, "The [CCNY] experience was so powerful and enriching, I would rather spend five minutes in Shepard Hall cafeteria than 10 years in Los Angeles."

Showbiz Today Star of Tomorrow: Dule Hill of The West Wing

CNN.com

Dule Hill began as a low-level job applicant at the White House, but now he's the personal aide to the president. President Bartlet of "The West Wing," that is.

Hill's role as Charlie Young on the hit NBC drama is his debut on a regular TV series, but he's no stranger to the limelight.

Hill began tap dancing at age 3, and while still in grade school, he starred in the title role of the Tony-Award winning Broadway show, "The Tap Dance Kid," during its national tour. Other musical roles followed and Hill eventually starred in another Broadway hit, "Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk." He's made numerous TV appearances and had roles in "She's All That" (1999) and "Men of Honor" (2000) with Robert De Niro and Cuba Gooding Jr.

As for his first experience on a hit TV show: "It's a wonderful experience being a young actor, being a black actor, and being able to get good writing, good scripts to enact, it's a lovely thing," Hill says.

Hill says he learned a lot about the true nature of his character's job after meeting with the real personal aide to President Clinton.

"When I met him, I realized how important the job was, and how powerful it is," he says. "I mean, he's one of the few people that can actually call and say, 'I need to speak to the president' and they'll put him through."

While his acting career is taking off, Hill says he'll never give up on his first love.

"I'll always be dancing — tap dancing — always," he says. "There's nothing like the dance, there's nothing like tap dancing. It's a gift that's given. You just have it: You can make music with your feet."

See the original article for Audio and Video clips.

Our Remote-Control President

By MICHAEL WOLFF
New York Magazine

Forget David Boies, dimpled chads, and desperate litigation — the country has already elected a new president. Just look at The West Wing's Nielsen ratings. He's a fire-breathing orator, a Nobel laureate in economics — and he's almost as inspiring as FDR. Too bad Martin Sheen is only in office an hour a week.

My 16-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, has recently given up Dawson's Creek for The West Wing. While you may not think this is of get-clean-for-Gene magnitude, that could be because you did not live through the grip of Dawson's Creek last year.

When we stood together the other evening at the Kennedy Center, where President Bartlet had gone to hear the Icelandic Symphony (he had, in his sharp and straightforward way, insulted the Icelandic ambassador and was now making amends), my studious but glamour-inclined daughter compared the moment, with only slightly conscious irony, to when Bill Clinton came to Washington and met John Kennedy.

Watching all of elite Washington turn out for the Kennedy Center event — the men with trench coats over black tie, the women in gray gowns, the various Secret Service details and swarms of D.C. motorcycle cops, along with Sam Seaborn, the president's deputy director of communications, outside on a cell phone, and C. J. Cregg, the White House press secretary, checking her makeup — I was startled to suddenly remember the time my own father had brought me to Washington. I remembered the feeling, the message: This was it; you could get no higher, do no better, achieve no more.

"Everyone have their mark?" screamed an assistant director to elite Washington, which, having exited the Kennedy Center regally once, backed up and exited regally again.

"This," I said gesturing to the actors, "reflects that" — I indicated Washington — "which comes to reflect this again," I said to Elizabeth by way of explaining postmodernism.

"Well, I don't care," said Elizabeth unambiguously. "This is so much better than that. A president should be like President Bartlet. People who work in the White House should be like Sam Seaborn. That's so obvious."

The intuitive thing for an age in which political entropy is so extreme that we cannot express a presidential preference would be some really evil-ish satire, a torment aimed at the bland, self-interested pasty boys who run the big show. Something MacBird-like. But, perhaps not unforeseeably, the counterintuitive prevails. The West Wing presents politics as the last (and certainly the most) honorable profession. You could not, even satirically, create a portrait more at odds with reality than The West Wing is at odds with the current political world. The daily news is a demented piece of ridicule; The West Wing is the wholesome commonweal.

Indeed, it probably doesn't matter much who — if anyone — becomes president in January because the real president will be Josiah Bartlet. All actions, therefore, taken in the actual White House will be confounded by the problem: How will what we do here compare to what's happening on the show, and will we come off worse? You can, with not too much difficulty, imagine The West Wing replacing national politics or offering some preferable parallel world, like a sort of benign Manchurian candidate. And there's nothing much real politicians will be able to do about it.

The other radically unintuitive thing is the idea that a show about politics could even make it onto the air — suggesting a deepening complexity in the Hollywood-Washington relationship and, no doubt, a further dissociative condition on the part of most Americans (we've arrived at the point where we can have fantasies about politics because we've lost all pretense of being engaged in the reality).

Hollywood, of course, likes politics. Or at least it likes Democrats. Or at least it likes Bill Clinton. Hollywood and Washington may be the last enclaves to still be interested in politics. It is even a status thing in the movie business to have worked in politics. Harvard to Washington to Hollywood is a good career trajectory. But politics, as everyone in the media business knows, has not, in long memory, worked as entertainment (at least outside of the thriller category). Politics is virtually the antithesis of entertainment. Indeed, politics works less and less even as news — at best it's a specialized interest for an older, less desirable demographic.

The idea of a television show about the White House in an hour-long drama format, which, given the vast attendant costs, needs the broadest possible audience that exists in any medium today, is, at best, unbusinesslike. That it actually got into production and on a network schedule initially seemed like some serious Hollywood-DNC-Time Warner- support-the-cause logrolling.

Or worse: This was Hollywood vulgarity. If the pinnacle of a Hollywood career was to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom, then, by God, Hollywood would create a better, bigger Lincoln Bedroom.

No question, The West Wing's set designers produced not only an exact White House, but a substantially better one. Larger, cleaner, sharper — in some sense realer (with better technology too; they don't hand out wafer-thin laptops in the real White House).

A cavalcade of big media, big political types, plus Chelsea Clinton, toured the set this summer during the Democratic convention, with everyone marveling at the infinitely better proportions and appointments in the Burbank White House.

Jackie Kennedy and Sister Parish had nothing on these White House designers.

So: a television show inspired by the Clinton White House, which then recruits people from the Clinton White House to work on the show, which then produces a version of life as it might have been if you could have remade not only the nature of politics but the nature of Bill Clinton, and which now has official Washington in paroxysms of self-congratulation.

To be sure, The West Wing does not in the least rise above the limitations of its genre. It's a television set piece, something entirely formulaic, earnest, goody-goody, proud of itself, overproduced. And exactly for these reasons, it may be on its way to being the most important political document of the age.

Like a lawyer show or cop show or doctor show, it begins to create an entertainment distortion field that not only changes the way we view reality (people now regularly show up in emergency rooms instructing nurses and doctors on how they ought to be doing things), but changes the behavior, affect, and self-image of the people who work in these jobs. We will soon be looking for West Wing traits in real candidates — Sam Seaborn is the face of can-do.

Because it has appeared at just the moment when politics as we know it is in the act of some weird Velvet Revolution type of self-destruction, The West Wing could well earn a historic place in the reinvention of political culture — even though it is, quite clearly, not about politics at all.

Politics is about impersonal stuff — it's about the needs and the annoyances of large numbers of people (Medicare, Social Security, prescription drugs — by all appearances, politics is increasingly about large numbers of annoying old people). Even the personal (abortion, health, morality) becomes impersonal when it becomes political.

And in the media age, the face of politics has become ever more distant, practiced, phony. No one has to be told that it's all P.R.

Politics has become — perhaps it has always been — about behaving properly in public. It's ritualistic behavior. It's about maintaining an illusion that is less and less consequential to anyone but politicians (this was the root of the great impeachment schism).

The world changed — social relationships, behavior, interpersonal sophistication, emotional self-awareness, the general vibe, what people talk about with each other changed. But politics stayed the same — disconnected, uptight, repressed. Part of the present mess results, no doubt, from the desperately unfortunate circumstance of having two candidates who are both at the extremes of the impersonal, each man with a phony family and religion and personal history, each stunted in his ability to make plausible eye contact.

The West Wing, on the other hand, is about what television is about: quickly formed relationships, hurried intimacy, sharp language, everyday dysfunctions, tense, emotional negotiating, juicy human failings and foibles (virtually everybody on The West Wing has personal issues that would exclude them from a career in politics) — everything they teach in screenwriting class.

In effect, The West Wing offers a new version of the smoke-filled backroom: characters far from their real and boring lives (of course, most of The West Wing's characters don't have a life outside the office, including the president, whose wife is always away), in a hothouse setting, with the blooming of all variety of soap-opera loves and hates. This not only works as compressed drama and supplies any number of simultaneous narratives, it is what large numbers of Americans experience — or wish they'd experience — in their own office situations. We all work in hermetic environments, filled with fraught relationships, far from our so-called real lives. This is family.

When I speak to Aaron Sorkin, the 39-year-old screenwriter from Scarsdale who created The West Wing — his first major hit — he certainly doesn't want to engage in a political discussion. He admits to not being qualified — nor does he seem all that interested.

The West Wing isn't a political drama, he notes; in screenwriter, Hollywood-television-meeting talk, it's a workplace drama. Indeed, it is a sly and effective change of emphasis from his initial, more modest foray into politics, the movie The American President, which is a romantic comedy.

This is how it happened: After his series Sports Night became a critical if not a ratings success, Sorkin was lucky enough to get a lunch with John Wells, the ER producer, whom you had to be very lucky to get a lunch with. So Sorkin pitched Wells, as anyone obviously would, an ER-type show: a drama about senior staffers in the White House. Now, whereas most people would think b-o-r-i-n-g — like, Why not do a show about the thing that is the most irritating and the least interesting to the greatest number of Americans? — Wells saw the thing he was most looking for, a possible new sort of emergency room.

Crisis. Proximity. High purpose. Personal angst. Beguiling young people. Nothing, in other words, that has anything to do with politics.

Indeed, few of The West Wing's various producers want to talk about politics. This is part of the reality mix-up: Like the ER people called upon to talk about health care, they protest that they really don't know anything about politics. On the other hand, if you start to think about it, if you really were staging a new kind of coup, a media coup, a kind of reverse Wag the Dog, not the government creating a fake film, but the film community creating a fake government, you probably wouldn't want to talk about it either.

Sorkin tries to deflect my question about the present mess and the relationship of The West Wing to the mess's potential outcome (what if it's a Republican administration?) with some screenwriter blah-blah about Aristotle's Poetics (screenwriters talk this way). He does, though, allow that the general political climate has certainly been good for the show — that the time "is just ripe for the cavalry to come riding in."

But then he can't resist. He rewrites the present mess, removing all the chaos, the bloated language, and the media mirroring and reduces it to pure story: It's Fail Safe. The first act has to do with the infallibility of the networks and the existing polling system. Then, in the second act, after the world and all our assumptions about it come undone, Katherine Harris, the villain, will, against all truth to the contrary, certify the inconclusive, premature vote — giving Bush the presidency. But, because evil never wholly subverts the will of good people, the counting goes on, spontaneously, rebelliously, into the night. By the morning, Gore comes into the lead. He's now leading in the electoral as well as the popular vote. At which point the decision falls to the Electoral College, and a few good men with the courage . . . etc.

It is not just for drama's sake that in Sorkin's version Gore is winning, and emerging heroically. In addition to being a Hollywood version of reality, The West Wing is a Hollywood Democrat's version of reality.

The West Wing is, with no apologies, liberal, relativist, left-leaning (although Peggy Noonan and Marlin Fitzwater are consultants, as are Dee Dee Myers and Pat Caddell). An issue recently was whether Mao ought to be quoted by President Bartlet. If real politics is necessarily always tethered to small town-ish Babbittry, this is the flip side: a White House of Eastern, liberal Jews (and a New England Catholic president), where the president's daughter dates (has sex with) the president's black aide. The West Wing defines the cultural difference between the Democratic blue states and the Republican red states — between a desirable media demographic and an undesirable one ("This guy sells dental supplies in the Twin Cities — how enlightened do you think he'll be?" asks Sam Seaborn — nailing the Democratic idea of the Republican half of the nation).

The fact that the viewing audience doesn't seem bothered by the bias might suggest what most of pop culture suggests: People are a lot more liberal than they vote.

Or, following the Reagan historical model, wherein the character issue is so much better handled by actors than by politicians, of course even Republican voters would have no problem with Martin Sheen as their president. The West Wing extends the Reagan model — not just an actor changing careers and becoming president, but an actor who just plays the president becoming as potent a symbol as the actual president.

Sheen has been preparing for this role longer than most politicians prepare for the presidency. In The American President, the Sorkin-written precursor, Sheen played the chief of staff to Michael Douglas's president. Then, too, he's played both Kennedy brothers (connoisseurs of Kennedy mini-series debate whether Sheen was a better John or Bobby), not to mention playing John Dean in Blind Ambition. (Many West Wing actors have former political roles — C. J., or Allison Janney, played the teacher who was the Clinton-Travolta-Jack Stanton opening quickie in Primary Colors.)

In real life, Sheen is, eccentrically, not a limousine-liberal Hollywood Democrat. He is a radical Catholic. He was an apostate who returned to the Church, with Daniel Berrigan, the oft-imprisoned priest, as his role model. He gave the $200,000 he earned for his role in Gandhi to Mother Teresa. He himself is regularly arrested in the service of righteous causes. For his opening line on The West Wing, he walks into a dispute with the religious right and quotes the First Commandment: I am the Lord, your God, thou shalt worship no other gods before me . . .

He is, forcefully, not Clinton.

Possibly he is a version of Bobby Kennedy — some imagined, older Bobby. He is Roosevelt-like too. Or the twinkling eyes are. What's more, his President Bartlet suffers from multiple sclerosis, which the country, to be distinguished from the audience, does not know about. Like Roosevelt's polio.

Sheen converts all of the usual pitfalls, the sentiment, the sanctimony, the earnestness, even the overly windy dialogue of political dramas, all of which are present here, into some effective and compelling and pure type of liberal social realism. This is a picture of politics as how it should be. Here is a president as decent, as human, as robust, as any farmer or steelworker in the thirties.

Certainly, it has been many years since a president has been played as anything other than a falling-down loon or a craven maniac, much less as a father, husband, professor, Nobel Prize winner (in economics), larger-than-life philosopher-king, as well as, occasionally, angry man ("I am going to blow them off of the face of the earth with the fury of God's own thunder," he says about some terrorist group that has downed a plane carrying his personal physician).

What we have is the complete absence of irony and cynicism. President Bartlet is fully idealized. And yet it is an oddly, or beguilingly, credible portrait. We seem to want it to be, anyway.

While President Bartlet is the opposite of Clinton, he probably could not have existed without Clinton. Through Clinton we got the first glimpse in the modern age of the real White House, with recognizable and identifiable people working there — in addition to having unseemly office romances there. Imagine trying to idealize the already overly idealized Reagan years — propagandizing the propaganda. You needed a real White House to build your fantasy on. You needed a flawed man to redeem. You needed an act to clean up.

Next to Clinton, it is the spirit of George Stephanopoulos that hovers here. Stephanopoulos created the archetype of a senior staffer with top-flight mass-media appeal. Before Stephanopoulos, political operatives were specialized figures, at best character actors — too regional, too rarefied, too rough, too cynical. Peggy Noonan, Marlin Fitzwater, Lyn Nofziger, Sidney Blumenthal, James Carville, and Dick Morris are too much their own caricatures (the one over-the-top killer political-op character in the show, Mandy, based loosely on Mandy Grunwald, was dropped after the first season). In Stephanopoulos, you had a young, upwardly mobile everyman in the White House.

When Sorkin went to the White House to do his research for The American President, he spent fifteen minutes talking to Stephanopoulos "in this small office where he's eating food off a tray," and found that they're the same age and, to his surprise, that they have friends in common — the writers David Handelman and Eric Alterman, whom Sorkin knows from Scarsdale High. "We're talking there just like we might be talking in my college dorm room."

There you have it. It's a yuppie thing, which is the necessary background for all workplace dramas — upward mobility and professional achievement provide the underlying tension. It's yuppie social realism, zooming in on, and resolving, the quintessential yuppie (as well as American) conflict: How do we get what we want, when we want it, while still seeing ourselves as the last best hope for man?

These are attractive young people. Young (Sam Seaborn is only eight years out of law school — Dewey Ballantine to the White House). Well educated (casual in their snobbery about their educations). Hip. Funny. Jeans and old sweaters in the White House. Fast on their feet. As well as virtuous (independent men with more than self-interest at heart, taking control of the government).

For the first time in several generations, politics becomes aspirational.

Plus, they banter. The art of banter, which is both a workplace and television writer's art, the true insider's patois (there's a special rhythm to the banter in the show, a staccato syllabification), may be at the heart of The West Wing's success. For a generation now, the coolest banter was movie banter. But the thing with banter is it's probably not the place so much, or the job, but the talk itself, the lingo, that is compelling.

That's the idea: Give politics a hip language.

It signifies the most powerful thing in America today: This is a cool place to work. The White House is a cool place to work.

But then the show goes a step further: This workplace is not just cool, but redeeming.

The White House, at a right-angle camera shot, under the blue sky and bright sun, then lit against a black velvet background, with Bonanza-like opening music, has never looked so good. (I have a friend who maintains that the Hay-Adams across the street has raised its rates for White House view rooms since the launch of The West Wing.)

The iconography — under the portico, at the president's desk, in the private quarters — is not just Kennedy, but David Douglas Duncan, the Kennedy photographer. The show has perfect pitch when it comes to image.

Not only is the White House a place you want to be, but the various West Wingers, including President Bartlet, are always throwing people out of it.

That's the message: If you're inside, you'll feel good about yourself. "The president's asking you to serve, and everything else is crap," says the former pill-popping, alcoholic chief of staff.

If you do one of those unnatural consecutive-viewing sessions, watching, more or less, all 30 episodes shown so far, from beginning to end, you see the nature of the show change. No doubt this is the result of more comfortable writing and getting the ensemble thing going and having a firmer sense of what plays. But you also see a success thing at work. A sense of what might be able to be accomplished. It is as well the kind of thing that happens when a political movement or candidacy gets traction — now that you've scored with your base, how do you open it up? How do you go big?

At the end of last season, you had a classic big-TV cliff-hanger. Shots ring out. This season opened with blood, emergency rooms, terrorists (a.k.a. Hollywood violence). And since then, to my mind, the sentiment has gotten broader, the cutting quicker but more precise (for a while last year, the cutting seemed to have an Altman-esque confusion), the characters more vulnerable, the issues more ripped from the headlines (the show has had a notable prescience in this regard, dealing with osha carpal-tunnel regulations 72 hours before this became a front-page Times story, and, many months before Gore had his "You don't have to be snippy" exchange with Bush, having President Bartlet's secretary accusing him of being snippy: "You were snippy." "I wasn't snippy."

This is all about seizing an opportunity to go for a No. 1 show — which may be where the real power in America lies. For Sorkin and Wells and company, one would suppose the power that concerns them is in the TV business.

Still, the political power must cross their minds.

If the show runs eight years and goes into syndication in a big way, muses one of the show's writers, then you would have a huge segment of voters who'd have been watching The West Wing for almost all of their voting lives . . .

It is among my daughter's political aspirations to meet Rob Lowe (that is, Lowe as the president's adviser). As we wait to meet him, I refrain from telling Elizabeth about his famous scandal and instead find myself talking about various politicians and what it is like to meet them. At the same time, there is no mistaking Lowe for a politician.

We see him at the Kennedy Center, on a cell phone, emerging from a black car, in tux, Armani overcoat, and, Elizabeth notes, Prada shoes. These are the fashion touches with which one makes politics cool.

His makeup gives him a kind of vampirish cast, which is oddly reminiscent of the Al Gore debate look, which, Elizabeth rightly surmises, means that Gore's makeup was not as wrong as people thought, but that he was lit badly. What Gore needed was the phalanx of technicians that has converged to film President Bartlet and Sam Seaborn at the Kennedy Center.

When we all sit down together, Elizabeth, holding her breath slightly, tells Lowe she's given up Dawson's Creek for The West Wing. He clearly understands the magnitude of that. We talk about the surprise and the vastness of The West Wing's success.

"And especially here — we've been embraced by Washington. The cast is treated like rock stars," he says with some awe. (In order to be given the highest accord an entertainer can be given, in Washington, he has to play a politician.)

Politicians, when you talk to them, almost invariably have a distracted, I'm-listening-to-many-conversations-at-once look (except if you challenge them), whereas actors zero in on you, the eyes and smile entirely directed. So it's easy to begin to think of someone like Rob Lowe as not so much an actor as an unusually effective politician.

"Chelsea told me people are always asking her if the White House is like The West Wing. People tour the White House and they want to know where Sam's office is," he says — proud of himself, it seems, proud of his position.

But at this point, he tries to draw a line. He doesn't think people should mix up the show with reality any more than this. Politics is politics. Entertainment is entertainment.

And yet, you can perhaps see something else here, a shift, an undercurrent not unknown in Hollywood. Here is Lowe, the actor off-screen, picking up the bad dialogue of politicians. "I had a fifth-grade teacher stop me in a Starbucks in my hometown and say, 'Thank you, thank you for what you've done. You've changed my life as a teacher of government . . .' "

This reflects that which reflects this which reflects that . . .

Rob asks Elizabeth where she wants to go to college. He says his character went to Princeton.

Elizabeth asks Sam if he can write her a recommendation.