Bartlet4America News Archive

Support for presidential dramas just doesn't add up

By Matthew Gilbert
Boston Globe

Look now, or you'll miss the fact that ''The West Wing" may be tumbling into the electronic dumpster.

Since NBC moved TV's most politically complex drama to Sunday nights at 8, its ratings have plummeted -- this despite a juicy White House leak plot with strong parallels to the Valerie Plame case. Now competing with ''Cold Case" and ''Extreme Makeover: Home Edition," the series has suffered a 30 percent decline in viewers from last season. Meanwhile, Geena Davis's ''Commander in Chief," ABC's simplistic ''West Wing" knockoff, has become an instant Nielsen Top 10 hit.

Go figure.

Not long ago, the crash of ''The West Wing" might have merited an indifferent shrug. So brilliantly charged in its early days, the drama underwent serious creative lows, both from creator Aaron Sorkin's excessive idealism and braininess and then from replacement producer John Wells's ill-advised character futzing. All the smarty-pants talk could be mind-numbing, despite the steadicam struts; and all the character nobility could be cringingly all-for-one-and-one-for-all. How about a few scoops of deep-seated cynicism on that pie in the sky?

But recently ''The West Wing" has reemerged creatively as a sharp epic about campaign chess gaming, with a fierce presidential contest between Alan Alda's liberal Republican and Jimmy Smits's unpolished Democrat. Now in its seventh season, the show is also profiling a two-term presidency as it awkwardly disbands. And it has cleverly enacted a timely plot about a White House leak to a now-jailed New York Times reporter.

Some longtime ''West Wing" watchers were disappointed that Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff) was responsible for the leak, and not someone more flagrantly villainous. But it was more interesting to see the grim but loyal face of ''The West Wing" exposed for all his arrogance. With an almost violent suddenness, Allison Janney's C.J. Cregg stops talking to him, he is sequestered by lawyers, and Martin Sheen's Jed Bartlet refuses to offer even a morsel of support. In a scene on Sunday that played like a funeral for the show's residual giddy idealism, Bartlet coldly refuses to acknowledge any of Toby's moral reasoning for leaking information. He also refuses to accept Toby's resignation, preferring to terminate him.

So far in its run, ''Commander in Chief" is showing us it will not pursue this kind of moral layering and character depth. This approach may change once the show's new producer, Steven Bochco (''NYPD Blue," ''Hill Street Blues"), gets to put his fingerprints on the series, but its first episodes have been painfully naive. It plays out with all the intricacy and depth of an unrevisionist Western shootout between the good guys (Davis's President Mackenzie Allen and her team) and the bad guys (Donald Sutherland's Speaker of the House Nathan Templeton and his old-boy network). Surely the battles in the presidential office aren't quite so black and white, and surely they don't always end with a heroic flourish.

Regardless of whether you feel Davis brings enough gravitas to her role, or whether you feel her straining to bring gravitas to her role, her President Allen is written as a one-dimensional character. She's all triumph and virtue, ultimately overcoming all the obstacles -- including the sort of sexism that last Tuesday found Sutherland saying, ''It's so easy to deal with women if you just remember they're not men." If she is a positive fantasy about what might or might not happen with a female president in office, she is almost too positive to seem human and possible. Dramatically, she's predictable.

In each episode of ''Commander in Chief," President Allen seems to solve some major global issue with a political savvy for which her limited experience in government probably wouldn't have prepared her. One week she manipulates a Latin American country into overthrowing an evil dictator and puts its president back into office; the next, she gets a Russian premier to agree to help jailed journalists before she dances with him at a state dinner. There's no extended anatomy of political problems, like the leak story on ''The West Wing," just crises of the week.

President Allen's almost preternatural ability to resolve world events and know rare information recalls the least appealing images of President Bartlet through the years. And giving Allen stale family problems doesn't counterbalance those superhuman qualities. In the most obvious domestic issue the ''Commander in Chief" writers could tackle, the first female president is finding it hard to juggle career and family. Recently, in an embarrassingly obvious scene, her preteen daughter wanders into the Oval Office, where the secretary turns her away because she doesn't have an appointment. And husband Rod (Kyle Secor) gets tripped up once too often in male ego twists as the first First Gentleman.

''Commander in Chief" may rise to the occasion of its largeviewership. Let's hope it finds the grit to be less blandly heroic before, as with this season's ''West Wing," it's too late.

The other Air Force One

TV's 'The West Wing' keeps its version close to the original
By Eugene Tong
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin

When fictional President Josiah "Jed" Bartlet flies Air Force One to political hot spots foreign and domestic on TV's "The West Wing," there's always a layover in Valencia.
While all eyes are on the Air Force One Pavilion officially opening Monday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley it features the Boeing 707 that served seven presidents another Oval Office in the Sky has sat among us for more than six years -- albeit a wingless fuselage that takes flight only on television.

"It's essentially nose-to-tail -- the front cabin with the presidential quarters all the way to the back kitchen," said Ken Hardy, production designer on the N drama, who has overseen the Air Force One set since "The West Wing" debuted in 1999.

Stored in a local Warner Bros. warehouse, some 30 miles northeast of the Reagan Library, the set is 168 feet long and more than 20 feet wide -- about three-quarters the size of the Boeing 747 in presidential service since 1990.

On a recent visit, it sat grounded as the crew focused on another corner of the massive stage, where Martin Sheen was performing a scene as the president in a lavish hall bedecked with fresh bouquets.

The 747 was covered in make-up -- it's an election year on the show, and the set has been doing triple duty as President Bartlet's jet and as campaign planes for presidential contenders played by Jimmy Smits and Alan Alda.

Posters touting Democratic nominee Rep. Matthew Santos (Smits) as "The Real Deal" shares press cabin wall space with political cartoons and other campaign memorabilia. But step behind a door embossed with the presidential seal, and the cloth seats and red-and-blue motifs of the rugged campaign plane give way to the rich wood paneling, broad leather loungers and roman blinds of Air Force One.

"We had to plain it down a little bit to make it more like a charter plane that a large presidential campaign would have," series producer Michael Hissrich said. The conversion took about two weeks.

"It's basically first-class or business-class seating (on Air Force One)," Hardy said. "For the campaign plane, it's more coach seating. There are not many overhead bins on Air Force One."

It wasn't always first class for this Hollywood player. Before the show's creators discovered the 747 interior alongside sets from "The American President" -- the 1995 Rob Reiner film was scripted by "West Wing" creator Aaron Sorkin -- it appeared in such plane-in-peril thrillers as 1997's "Turbulence," Hardy said.

"We noticed this 747 interior sort of flying around up there," he said. "That inspired us -- if we ever needed Air Force One, we can use that."

The set debuted in the first season episode "20 Hours in LA," when Sorkin took President Bartlet and his staff on a fund-raising swing through Los Angeles.

"We needed a set to get them out there," Hardy said. "We just built the press section and a couple of senior staff cabins. Over the years, we've added to it -- we have the president's private quarters, the conference room and the president's office."

Set designers rely on both public drawings and photos from former White House insiders for accuracy. Both Hissrich and Hardy have visited a real Air Force One.

"You have that eerie feeling that you've been here before," said Hissrich, recalling a trip onboard former President Bill Clinton's jet. "You have all the right parts. Some of it are just offset here and there."

Six set artists ensure the 747 is always camera-ready, right down to the presidential seals adorning the plane's intercoms.

"When it's fully dressed and fully working, there could be 150 to 170 in that space at any given time with the crew and the background artists," Hissrich said. "It gets a little worn, but the maintenance our set department does is amazing."

Hardy said there's more work ahead, now with an actual presidential jet just a half-hour drive away.

"I'm planning to take my crew up there for a field trip as soon as we have a spare moment -- to see what we can learn," he said.

"You can't do a show like this for as long as we have and not be oversensitive to any sort of presidential history and artifacts," Hissrich said. "To have such a significant piece of history and such a large piece of history so close -- it's great."

After the West Wing...

From military courtrooms to the White House, Aaron Sorkin's scripts excel at lifting the lid on pressure-cooker situations. Now he plans to reveal the secret world of television.

By Andrew Gumbel
The Independent

Published: 22 October 2005
Aaron Sorkin loves examining small, hermetically sealed worlds where voraciously ambitious people fight with each other for their ideas, their careers, and their dignity. That is the premise behind his most famous television show, the White House drama The West Wing, which is still going strong two years after Sorkin left the show.

It was the premise behind his first hit, the military courtroom film A Few Good Men. And it was also the premise behind his critically acclaimed but shortlived series Sports Night, where the hermetic world was the studio of a television sports programme.

So it comes as no surprise, perhaps, that his latest venture follows much the same model. Sorkin is among a handful of American television writers distinctive enough to be instantly recognisable in everything he does.

And what he does best is to remove the lid on a pressure-cooker situation - be it in politics, broadcasting, the law or any other field of endeavour - and explore the machinations and behind-the-scenes schemings that inform the smooth public façade of the endeavour.

The 44-year-old writer's attention is now turning to the cut-throat world of late-night television comedy. This week, NBC snapped up the rights to his new series, variously known as Studio 7 or Studio 7 on the Sunset Strip, which the network hopes to air towards the end of next year.

The premise sounds much like the long-running hit Saturday Night Live, with its parade of comics alternating between brilliance and nervous breakdown, its producers veering dangerously between the narcissistic satisfactions of their outsize egos and blank insecurity, and with the sense hanging over all of them that no matter what they do they are somehow selling out. Whatever it is, or turns out to be, America's television executives are wildly excited about it. After several years of flirtation with unscripted reality television, scripted drama is suddenly trendy again, witness the success of new shows as eclectic as the suburban melodrama Desperate Housewives, the plane crash survivor saga Lost, and the dirty, hard-drinking, foul-mouthed western series Deadwood. In that context, a new series from golden-boy Sorkin could not be more timely.

Entertainment press reports say the bidding on Studio 7 was intense, and the outcome was a promise by NBC to pay what may well be a record figure for an untested series. The network has committed to 13 episodes at almost $2m per episode, the kind of money usually laid out for established hits in their third or fourth year.

It is not clear whether NBC and its rivals loved the idea, or merely loved the idea of Sorkin working again. The West Wing has been a critical success, a cultural touchstone and a reliable money-spinner since its debut in the twilight of the Clinton administration in 1999. The show came under fire for being a liberal Democrats' wish-fulfillment fantasy, especially after the radical rightward turn taken by the United States in the wake of the 11 September attacks, but it has never lost its audience.

Instead, it has moved partly with the times, as the fictional Bartlet administration struggles through serious second-term blues. Currently, the show centres on an appropriately red-blooded Republican Party primary season in anticipation of a new presidential election.

If The West Wing has proved uncomfortable to conservatives, and to hard-bitten real-world Democrats, one wonders what television executives will make of Studio 7. A script of the pilot episode seen by the Los Angeles Times and Variety, shows that Sorkin appears to have fed off his experience of the executive suits at NBC and used it to shape characters with more than a few traits in common with real-life counterparts.

Just as West Wing was occasionally used as a vehicle for Sorkin to comment, at least obliquely, on the real political world, it seems Studio 7 contains more than a little criticism of the vulgarisation of small-screen entertainment.

In episode one, the comedy show's executive producer melts down on camera - a bit like Peter Finch's newsreader Howard Beale in the 1970s movie Network - and rants: "This show used to be cutting-edge political and social satire, but it's gotten lobotomised by a ... broadcast network hell-bent on doing nothing that might challenge their audience." The producer also lays into programmes that involve "eating worms for money", a clear reference to the NBC gross-out challenge Fear Factor.

The script also contains a very direct reference to the former NBC executive Jamie Tarses, who helped develop such comedy hits as Friends and Mad About You before moving to ABC. (She is now an independent producer.) Sorkin has written an entertainment president character called Jamie McDeere (Tarses spent much of her time at NBC under the married name McDermott), who also happens to have had a guiding hand in Friends and Mad About You.

Sorkin has never made a secret of his distaste for network and studio executives. When he was based at ABC's Los Angeles offices during the making of Sports Night, he once joked that if an executive building being constructed next to his offices was completed during the lifetime of the show, he and his crew would have to move to New York.

In one of the latter episodes in the series, Sorkin had one of his presenter characters explode to the higher-ups: "Just because we didn't execute all the network's suggestions doesn't mean we weren't listening; it just means we didn't agree. You didn't expect me to substitute your judgement for mine, did you?"

It was perhaps no coincidence that Sorkin had a public falling-out with ABC over the network's decision to lay a laugh track on Sports Night. He told the New Yorker at the time he felt as if "I've put on an Armani tuxedo, tied my tie, snapped on my cuff links, and the last thing I do before I leave the house is spray Cheez Whiz all over myself".

Such feuding and snarky asides may be inevitable in television shows premised on behind-the scenes machinations and gossip. On the other hand, network suits are than likely to be fine with the jibes as long as the show itself is going well.

NBC has had its problems with Sorkin, but they have been much less about his outspoken views on politics and the media than they have been about his drug use. In 2001, a crack pipe he was carrying was picked up by an X-ray machine at a Los Angeles airport, along with cocaine and marijuana, and Sorkin ended up in rehab for the second time in six years. (The episode also ended his marriage.)

Sorkin has thrown considerable energy into staying clean since then, but he is also the first to admit that the drugs fit all too cosily into his distinctly manic personality. He is famous in the television industry for personally scripting just about every word of the shows he puts out. When he was responsible for West Wing and Sports Night, that meant an insane schedule of round-the-clock writing, seven days a week. Something was bound to give, sooner or later.

And Sorkin's experience, from the start of his career, has been that writing and drugs deliver similar sorts of highs. The danger has always been that when the writing stops, at the end of a project, say, drugs can kick in.

When Sorkin moved to Los Angeles in 1993, to write the script of the film The American President (the kernel from which The West Wing sprouted), he smoked crack regularly. "That is why it took me three years to write the script," he said later.

His girlfriend at the time, an entertainment lawyer called Julia Bingham, got him into rehab and cleaned him up. The couple married and had a daughter, before Sorkin's workaholic habits and relapse into drugs put them on the skids. They are now divorced.

The disasters of Sorkin's personal life have never interfered with the quality of his work, only - occasionally - with the timeliness of its delivery. Nobody, in fact, could accuse Sorkin of being anything other than slick and professional. The New York Times once wrote of The West Wing that the show was "a tour de force of Hollywood professionalism. Every piece of dialogue is spit-polished within an inch of its life".

That is a delicate way of phrasing the most common criticism heard of Sorkin's work, especially among actors, that while his dialogue is smart and snappy and rattles along at a cracking pace, it doesn't tend to vary an awful lot from character to character. Everyone in a Sorkin drama speaks in exactly the same way.

It helps to understand Sorkin's peculiarly obsessive personality. Before his marriage, and after it, he has not shown interest in having a house to call his own, preferring an anonymous - if well-appointed - room in the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills.

Since his divorce, he has said he looked at houses and known he could afford them, but he could not bring himself to escape the comfortable sameness of his surroundings at the Four Seasons. His idea of a break from the tension is to fly, by himself, to Las Vegas for a night and gamble on the $50 blackjack tables. This is a man who spends an awful lot of time in his own company.

There are, of course, no guarantees of Studio 7's success. There is already a backstory that could yet prove troublesome, a second, entirely unconnected NBC series about the behind-the-scenes life of a comedy show much like Saturday Night Live.

This was developed by the comedian Tina Fey, a Saturday Night Live regular, and backed by the show's legendary executive producer, Lorne Michaels. Mr Michaels, an NBC fixture for 30 years, has indicated his displeasure at the Studio 7 deal. Ms Fey has just had a baby, so is temporarily out of the picture.

This is, of course, the bruising, unpleasant, personality-driven, way the entertainment business has always operated. It sounds, not entirely coincidentally, like the premise for an episode of an Aaron Sorkin series.

Aaron Sorkin loves examining small, hermetically sealed worlds where voraciously ambitious people fight with each other for their ideas, their careers, and their dignity. That is the premise behind his most famous television show, the White House drama The West Wing, which is still going strong two years after Sorkin left the show.

It was the premise behind his first hit, the military courtroom film A Few Good Men. And it was also the premise behind his critically acclaimed but shortlived series Sports Night, where the hermetic world was the studio of a television sports programme.

So it comes as no surprise, perhaps, that his latest venture follows much the same model. Sorkin is among a handful of American television writers distinctive enough to be instantly recognisable in everything he does.

And what he does best is to remove the lid on a pressure-cooker situation - be it in politics, broadcasting, the law or any other field of endeavour - and explore the machinations and behind-the-scenes schemings that inform the smooth public façade of the endeavour.

The 44-year-old writer's attention is now turning to the cut-throat world of late-night television comedy. This week, NBC snapped up the rights to his new series, variously known as Studio 7 or Studio 7 on the Sunset Strip, which the network hopes to air towards the end of next year.

The premise sounds much like the long-running hit Saturday Night Live, with its parade of comics alternating between brilliance and nervous breakdown, its producers veering dangerously between the narcissistic satisfactions of their outsize egos and blank insecurity, and with the sense hanging over all of them that no matter what they do they are somehow selling out. Whatever it is, or turns out to be, America's television executives are wildly excited about it. After several years of flirtation with unscripted reality television, scripted drama is suddenly trendy again, witness the success of new shows as eclectic as the suburban melodrama Desperate Housewives, the plane crash survivor saga Lost, and the dirty, hard-drinking, foul-mouthed western series Deadwood. In that context, a new series from golden-boy Sorkin could not be more timely.

Entertainment press reports say the bidding on Studio 7 was intense, and the outcome was a promise by NBC to pay what may well be a record figure for an untested series. The network has committed to 13 episodes at almost $2m per episode, the kind of money usually laid out for established hits in their third or fourth year.

It is not clear whether NBC and its rivals loved the idea, or merely loved the idea of Sorkin working again. The West Wing has been a critical success, a cultural touchstone and a reliable money-spinner since its debut in the twilight of the Clinton administration in 1999. The show came under fire for being a liberal Democrats' wish-fulfillment fantasy, especially after the radical rightward turn taken by the United States in the wake of the 11 September attacks, but it has never lost its audience.

Instead, it has moved partly with the times, as the fictional Bartlet administration struggles through serious second-term blues. Currently, the show centres on an appropriately red-blooded Republican Party primary season in anticipation of a new presidential election.

If The West Wing has proved uncomfortable to conservatives, and to hard-bitten real-world Democrats, one wonders what television executives will make of Studio 7. A script of the pilot episode seen by the Los Angeles Times and Variety, shows that Sorkin appears to have fed off his experience of the executive suits at NBC and used it to shape characters with more than a few traits in common with real-life counterparts.

Just as West Wing was occasionally used as a vehicle for Sorkin to comment, at least obliquely, on the real political world, it seems Studio 7 contains more than a little criticism of the vulgarisation of small-screen entertainment.

In episode one, the comedy show's executive producer melts down on camera - a bit like Peter Finch's newsreader Howard Beale in the 1970s movie Network - and rants: "This show used to be cutting-edge political and social satire, but it's gotten lobotomised by a ... broadcast network hell-bent on doing nothing that might challenge their audience." The producer also lays into programmes that involve "eating worms for money", a clear reference to the NBC gross-out challenge Fear Factor.

The script also contains a very direct reference to the former NBC executive Jamie Tarses, who helped develop such comedy hits as Friends and Mad About You before moving to ABC. (She is now an independent producer.) Sorkin has written an entertainment president character called Jamie McDeere (Tarses spent much of her time at NBC under the married name McDermott), who also happens to have had a guiding hand in Friends and Mad About You.

Sorkin has never made a secret of his distaste for network and studio executives. When he was based at ABC's Los Angeles offices during the making of Sports Night, he once joked that if an executive building being constructed next to his offices was completed during the lifetime of the show, he and his crew would have to move to New York.
In one of the latter episodes in the series, Sorkin had one of his presenter characters explode to the higher-ups: "Just because we didn't execute all the network's suggestions doesn't mean we weren't listening; it just means we didn't agree. You didn't expect me to substitute your judgement for mine, did you?"

It was perhaps no coincidence that Sorkin had a public falling-out with ABC over the network's decision to lay a laugh track on Sports Night. He told the New Yorker at the time he felt as if "I've put on an Armani tuxedo, tied my tie, snapped on my cuff links, and the last thing I do before I leave the house is spray Cheez Whiz all over myself".

Such feuding and snarky asides may be inevitable in television shows premised on behind-the scenes machinations and gossip. On the other hand, network suits are than likely to be fine with the jibes as long as the show itself is going well.

NBC has had its problems with Sorkin, but they have been much less about his outspoken views on politics and the media than they have been about his drug use. In 2001, a crack pipe he was carrying was picked up by an X-ray machine at a Los Angeles airport, along with cocaine and marijuana, and Sorkin ended up in rehab for the second time in six years. (The episode also ended his marriage.)

Sorkin has thrown considerable energy into staying clean since then, but he is also the first to admit that the drugs fit all too cosily into his distinctly manic personality. He is famous in the television industry for personally scripting just about every word of the shows he puts out. When he was responsible for West Wing and Sports Night, that meant an insane schedule of round-the-clock writing, seven days a week. Something was bound to give, sooner or later.

And Sorkin's experience, from the start of his career, has been that writing and drugs deliver similar sorts of highs. The danger has always been that when the writing stops, at the end of a project, say, drugs can kick in.

When Sorkin moved to Los Angeles in 1993, to write the script of the film The American President (the kernel from which The West Wing sprouted), he smoked crack regularly. "That is why it took me three years to write the script," he said later.

His girlfriend at the time, an entertainment lawyer called Julia Bingham, got him into rehab and cleaned him up. The couple married and had a daughter, before Sorkin's workaholic habits and relapse into drugs put them on the skids. They are now divorced.

The disasters of Sorkin's personal life have never interfered with the quality of his work, only - occasionally - with the timeliness of its delivery. Nobody, in fact, could accuse Sorkin of being anything other than slick and professional. The New York Times once wrote of The West Wing that the show was "a tour de force of Hollywood professionalism. Every piece of dialogue is spit-polished within an inch of its life".

That is a delicate way of phrasing the most common criticism heard of Sorkin's work, especially among actors, that while his dialogue is smart and snappy and rattles along at a cracking pace, it doesn't tend to vary an awful lot from character to character. Everyone in a Sorkin drama speaks in exactly the same way.

It helps to understand Sorkin's peculiarly obsessive personality. Before his marriage, and after it, he has not shown interest in having a house to call his own, preferring an anonymous - if well-appointed - room in the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills.

Since his divorce, he has said he looked at houses and known he could afford them, but he could not bring himself to escape the comfortable sameness of his surroundings at the Four Seasons. His idea of a break from the tension is to fly, by himself, to Las Vegas for a night and gamble on the $50 blackjack tables. This is a man who spends an awful lot of time in his own company.

There are, of course, no guarantees of Studio 7's success. There is already a backstory that could yet prove troublesome, a second, entirely unconnected NBC series about the behind-the-scenes life of a comedy show much like Saturday Night Live.

This was developed by the comedian Tina Fey, a Saturday Night Live regular, and backed by the show's legendary executive producer, Lorne Michaels. Mr Michaels, an NBC fixture for 30 years, has indicated his displeasure at the Studio 7 deal. Ms Fey has just had a baby, so is temporarily out of the picture.

This is, of course, the bruising, unpleasant, personality-driven, way the entertainment business has always operated. It sounds, not entirely coincidentally, like the premise for an episode of an Aaron Sorkin series.

West Wing creator pens drama series hailed as the new Lost

by Sam Matthews
http://www.brandrepublic.com

LONDON – 'West Wing' creator Aaron Sorkin is back with a new comedy drama series that takes a satirical look at cocaine abuse in Los Angeles and is being tipped as "the next big US drama" to knock 'Lost' from its pedestal.

Costing over $2m (£1.1m) per hour-long episode, 'Studio 7 on the Sunset Strip' is a Warner Brothers production taking a behind the scenes look at a fictional LA talkshow 'Studio 7', which is similar to the real-life 'saturday Night Live' show.

One of the key storylines is the executive producer of the network who has a serious cocaine problem. He breaks down in front of fictional celebrity host ' Desperate Houswives' actress Felicity Huffman.

The series mirrors Sorkin's own life, which has been troubled by drug use. In 2001 he was arrested for carrying cocaine and marijuana.

The drama also takes a satirical look at conflicts between cast and crew and the larger corporate culture of the network.

US Network NBC has snapped up the rights to the 13-part show and plans to screen it in peaktime from next year. The network's contract for the show will see it run into five or six series.

A UK buyer has yet to be lined up, but Channel 4, which screens 'The West Wing' starring Martin Sheen as president Bartlet, and Sky are likely bidders.

As well as the critically acclaimed Sorkin, who penned hit US drama 'Sports Night' and 'West Wing', 'Studio 7' is being directed by Tommy Schlamme who directed the 'West Wing' and 'ER'.

Kevin Reilly, president of entertainment at NBC, said: "Sorkin's work is truly in a class of its own, and Tommy Schlamme, time and gain has delivered exceptional television. This project is a noisy compelling combination of bold drama and laugh-out loud comedy."

NBC is expecting big ratings for the show to outperform hit ABC Network drama 'Lost', which has been a huge hit both sides of the Atlantic.

Channel 4 debuted 'Lost' with a peak of 6.4m viewers in August, the highest to date for a US import.

The second series recently shows on the ABC network in the US with 23.4m viewers, the biggest audience for the show so far.

According to figures from Nielsen Media Research, the second series debut of 'Lost' topped the first series finale, which pulled in 20.7m in May.

Television drama, Oval-style

by ANDRÉS MARTINEZ:
Los Angeles Times

ESCAPIST TELEVISION is back, in a big way, fueled by last season's success of "Lost," probably the best TV drama ever. Now prime time is populated by aliens, ghosts and even a female president.

Remarkably, there are two White House dramas on the air these days, and both of them — NBC's "The West Wing" and ABC's "Commander in Chief" — were launched as flights of fancy. In its early days (it debuted in late 1999) "The West Wing" was liberal Hollywood's alternative universe to the Clinton presidency. President Josiah Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen, was a brilliant liberal president who didn't engage in cynical triangulations at the expense of principle to position himself as a centrist.

But "The West Wing" has come a long way, and in the George Bush era, President Bartlet/Sheen became far more willing to make compromises. Just having a Democratic president was fantasy enough for Hollywood; he needn't be a saintly one anymore.

Most TV shows have a hard time realistically depicting workplaces, but "The West Wing" captures the crushing pressure, frenzied pace and intensity of a stressful office. The president's supporting cast constantly juggles five crises simultaneously. Their smart, clipped dialogue is the legacy of "West Wing" creator Aaron Sorkin, and the show deserves credit for the wonkish perplexity of issues it takes on. (My mother once called me to teasingly ask if I had had anything to do with one episode that took up farm subsidies and media ownership rules, subjects I'd often editorialized about.)

"The West Wing" also captures the fatigue of a second-term presidency, and not every character has been comfortable with the compromises President Bartlet has made. Toby Ziegler, Richard Schiff's character, has been in a deep funk, and it now turns out he was responsible for a leak that has led to an investigation and to the jailing of a New York Times reporter. Did I mention the show can be timely?

Over on ABC, "Commander in Chief" is all about the fantasy of a female president, played by Geena Davis. Her character is as independent-minded (in fact she is formally an independent, belonging to neither party) and principled as Bartlet was at the outset of his presidency. But the show's episodes seem languid and uncluttered compared with "The West Wing" — as if the White House has the luxury of taking up only one weighty issue at a time. Also, to appeal to the folks who don't dig farm subsidy debates, President Mackenzie Allen's teenage kids seem to be acting out an episode of Fox's "The O.C." in the White House.

"Commander in Chief" stresses the domestic quandaries facing a president some characters call "mom." Rebellious daughter would rather make out with boyfriend than attend mom's first state dinner for the Russian leader? "Follow your conscience," President Allen counsels. And as she steps out to greet the Russian head of state, her husband, the first gentleman of the White House, cheesily tells her: "Right now, you become this country. You are the United States of America."

The relative success of these dramas is not fueled by a widespread craving for political programming. It has more to do with our fascination with the trappings of power and the human-interest story inherent in investing so much fleeting power in one individual.

Rod Lurie, the creator of "Commander in Chief" (who has since left the show), directed the 2000 political thriller "The Contender." The movie's best scene had the president, played by Jeff Bridges, calling the White House kitchen to order kung pao chicken, "but with walnuts instead of peanuts" to show off to a visitor that he could get anything he wanted. Those are the kinds of tidbits that will make people want to watch a show about the White House.

In their politics, however, both dramas depict Hollywood's slanted take on the American landscape. Anyone tuning in who knew nothing about the real world would assume the United States is a one-party state because Republicans are too evil to be taken seriously. Donald Sutherland's House speaker on "Commander in Chief" makes Tom DeLay seem cuddly.

"The West Wing," for its part, is in the midst of an engaging election campaign pitting Jimmy Smits against Alan Alda, and the two will face each other in an unscripted live debate in an upcoming episode. The Alda character is an appealing John McCain-like independent Republican. He is the only kind of Republican Hollywood seems to be able to treat positively — one at odds with most of the party's core positions. If Alda wins this TV election, it will be indicative of how much Hollywood has compromised its fantasies — from liberal Democrat to centrist Democrat to liberal Republican. But don't count on him winning; that would require the show to hire a whole new cast of Republican staffers.

Sad, sad demise for NBC's 'West Wing'

Once-great show is down 30 percent this year
By Kevin Downey
Media Life

Another weekend has passed, and with it comes yet more evidence that NBC’s once-powerful “West Wing” is dying a pathetic death.

This is not the sort of end one would have imagined for a series that in its prime won four consecutive Emmys for best drama series while attracting the most affluent viewership and the most desirable advertisers.

Yet the series, which this season moved to Sunday from its longtime Wednesday berth, has seen a 30 percent plunge in its ratings and now consistently finishes in fourth place among adults 18-49 in its 8 p.m. timeslot.

Some media buyers were hoping the Sunday move would invigorate the series, reversing a decline in ratings over the past several years. It's had the opposite effect, and now the sense is that the move will prove the show's final indignity. As one media buyer opined in a recent Media Life survey about the networks’ fall programs: “NBC killed a great show!”

"Wing" is now down to a 2.3 among adults 18-49, from its 3.3 average rating last season, and this past Sunday it ranked a distant No. 4 behind “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” on ABC, “60 Minutes” on CBS and baseball on Fox. It did slightly better than “Charmed” on the WB.

The show's slide has been precipitous. “Wing” peaked in 2001-02, its third season, generating an average 6.2 rating in the demographic and attracting more than 17 million viewers. On Sunday, its rating was barely one-third of that while its total audience was down to 8.1 million people.

The show has even failed to improve its timeslot rating over last year's canceled “American Dreams.” That show averaged a 2.5, while "Wing" is pulling a 2.3.

NBC earlier this year cut in half the licensing fee it had been paying to Warner Bros. TV for the show. The price per episode was slashed from $6 million to $3 million, with several well-paid series regulars being demoted to recurring roles.

One could argue whether the Sunday move was the right decision. Clearly, NBC needed to make space for Martha Stewart's "Apprentice," which explains why "Wing" was shifted from the 9 p.m. Wednesday slot. But while the Sunday move pitted it against ABC’s powerful lineup, it would have perhaps faced a worse humiliation against ABC's "Lost" had it stayed.

In truth, though, there's little to debate. “West Wing’s” problems date back to 2003, if not before. In 2001, creator Aaron Sorkin was busted on drug charges, and in 2003 he left the show, as did original lead actor Rob Lowe. The show never recovered creatively.

By the 2003-04 season, “Wing” had already begun to fade, with its 18-49 rating tumbling to a 3.7 from a 4.5 a year earlier and a 6.2 at its peak.

“West Wing” has long attracted an affluent audience, which, while falling in sheer numbers, remains attractive to advertisers. The show this season so far still ranks No. 1 among all series in the percentage of 18-49 viewers who have a household income of more than $75,000.

'West Wing' Creator Sorkin Goes Backstage at NBC

zap2it.com

LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) Two years after leaving "The West Wing" over creative and production issues, writer Aaron Sorkin is returning to NBC.
The network has ordered a pilot from Sorkin and fellow "West Wing" alum Thomas Schlamme about the backstage dealings on a network sketch-comedy show not unlike NBC's own "Saturday Night Live." The show, called "Studio 7 on the Sunset Strip," will deal with the conflicts between cast and crew and the larger corporate culture of the network, which is part of a larger conglomerate.

"Aaron Sorkin's work is truly in a class all its own, and Tommy Schlamme, time and again, has delivered exceptional television," NBC Entertainment chief Kevin Reilly says in a statement. "This project is a noisy, compelling combination of bold drama and laugh-out-loud comedy. We're thrilled to again partner with this team on their next great NBC show."


According to several news reports, NBC outbid CBS for the project, which will be produced by Warner Bros. TV, by agreeing to a big license fee for the pilot and virtually guaranteeing the show a spot on the 2006-07 schedule. Should NBC decide not to go forward with the series, it would have to pay Warner Bros. a hefty kill fee.
"Studio 7" will be set at a network called UBS -- the name of the broadcaster in the Oscar-winning movie "Network." The pilot opens with a producer of the show-in-the-show blowing up on camera and railing against the state of TV.

Sorkin has mined the off-camera politics of television before with his ABC series "Sports Night," and of course straight-up politics with "The West Wing," which won four consecutive Emmys for best drama series under Sorkin and Schlamme.

"Studio 7" is similar to another project NBC is developing with "SNL" head writer Tina Fey. That show is a comedy, but it's also about the goings-on at an "SNL"-like comedy show.

Sorkin and Schlamme left "The West Wing" in the spring of 2003 amid reports of creative differences with NBC over the direction of the show and tussles with Warner Bros. about late production. Sorkin wrote or co-wrote nearly all the show's scripts during his tenure, and the show was known for falling behind its production schedule.

"West Wing" character is Santa Paula's favorite son

By Kathleen Wilson
Ventura County Star

Hollywood has caved in to Santa Paula.

Eight months after city officials started campaigning to get Santa Paula named as the hometown of Alan Alda’s character on "The West Wing," writers of the Emmy-winning show granted their wish.

Santa Paula Chamber of Commerce Manager Ken Brooks spotted the mention on the NBC show’s Web site Friday afternoon and sent off an e-mail to a delighted City Manager Wally Bobkiewicz.

"I’m just tickled," Bobkiewicz said.

Santa Paula officials have previously promoted the town they complain doesn’t get its due respect. But they went to new lengths to tie the city to Sen. Arnold Vinick, the show’s fictional Republican candidate for president.

They began writing letters and sending gift packages of oranges to Alda and others after Vinick said in a January episode he was from a citrus-producing area. They opened a campaign headquarters for Vinick, calling him Santa Paula’s favorite son.

The chamber sold Vinick T-shirts and campaign buttons, attracting hundreds of orders from around the country.

And just about every week, Bobkiewicz sent a note to story editor Lauren Schmidt. By last month, he had decided maybe he should let up.

"Honestly, I thought I was making a fool of myself," he said.

Then, for the first time Friday, the show’s Web site portrayed Vinick as a Santa Paula boy who labored in the orange groves after his family moved from Brooklyn.

"He volunteered at the public library, entrenching himself in the history of his home state," according to the site. "In these formative years, Arnold gained an appreciation for family and community, which he carries with him to this day."

Vinick returned home from college to practice law and was elected to the City Council in the town’s first write-in victory, according to the site.

"He served one term on the City Council, overseeing numerous community projects, including the refurbishment of the California Oil Museum, where he’d spent many afternoons as a teenager," the site says.

Schmidt was in a story conference and could not be reached for comment Friday afternoon.

Bobkiewicz, though, said he expects a Santa Paula storyline to be appearing soon.

'West Wing' Candidates To Face Off in Live Debate

By Lisa De Moraes
Washington Post

Saturday, October 15, 2005; Page C01

This time around, the Republican will win the presidential debate, but the Democrat will win the election.

NBC will air a live debate during the November ratings race between faux candidates Jimmy Smits and Alan Alda on its struggling political drama series "The West Wing," which since moving to Sunday this season has seen its audience plunge from more than 11 million viewers to fewer than 8 million.

The silver-tongued vs. the tongue-tied? Alan Alda as Arnold Vinick and Jimmy Smits as Matt Santos.


Executive Producer John Wells says that they'll have a "general sense of where they're going," are "definitely rehearsing a script" and are giving the two actors "substantial briefing materials" for the episode, noting that these days real presidential candidates are usually well rehearsed and almost never surprised by a question.

But there will be improvisation and spontaneity -- more than in the real thing, Wells said -- and they plan to solicit some questions over the Internet from viewers.

"To even call our current presidential debates 'debates' is stretching the term," he said, noting that virtually all elements, including the types of questions and the format, are "so pre-negotiated."

"In many ways what they've done is created a world for real presidential debates in which the candidates have an opportunity, to a larger audience, not to engage each other, but to give another version of their stump speech," Wells said.

"The whole idea about doing a [live 'West Wing'] debate was to try to do a debate in which the characters actually debated. . . . We will try to set up a world in which the candidates can have a real exchange," he said, adding that his goal is to get viewers to question why they don't get that in real life.

If yesterday's unscripted, spontaneous phone news conference is any indication, Alda will win the debate hands down -- though it's widely presumed that NBC has Smits in mind to play the next president of the United States if "West Wing" goes to another season -- if only because, at 69, Alda has nearly 20 years on Smits and is even further out of the 18-49 age bracket NBC chases than current "West Wing" faux president Martin Sheen, who's 65.

Alda is a very good public speaker. His early training, he notes, was in improv, whereas, Smits explained, "Jimmy is not a good talker," and his character is "much more verbal than Jimmy is or could ever be." Yes, it appears Smits sometimes talks about himself in the third person. Why is that so creepy?

Consider their answers to a simple question: "Is it important to you guys . . . that your character wins the debate or . . . the election?"

"What's important to me," Smits replied, "is that we do good storytelling. I think we've been doing that and keep the audience on their toes, keep it topical. And, just to reinforce what Alan said before, is that both points of view are strong and I think since last season we've been doing that and will continue doing that."

Alda also began with the same evasive blah, blah, blah, but then recovered with a great save: "But specifically, to answer your question . . . I have to tell you that it's hard to play any character and not want that character to get what he wants. I wanted to destroy Howard Hughes when I was in 'The Aviator' and I saw every good reason to do it, so that I could be the guy convincingly.

"Of course I want to win the debate, some part of me does, anyway, but . . . you do have to go along with what the story is. If the story doesn't actually have Richard III winning the battle, no matter how much he wants to win, he doesn't win. But you still have to want it. In a debate like this, where . . . you're the one live on camera, if you don't win, it's like something's wrong with you. So it gets even more personal. Some part of me of course wants to win. Even in our imagination I would love to rule the world."

To which Smits added: "Alan wants to cream me out there."

See what we mean?

Even Smits acknowledged he's no Alan Alda when one critic asked if he was worried about the live debate, given that "Alda is slick of tongue" and has been "talking for decades" -- which somehow sounded like it was meant to be an insult.

"Jimmy is not a good talker," Smits said, adding bravely that will force him to "prepare doubly hard."

'Commander' rates; 'West Wing' wanes

By David Bauder
Boston Globe

If the early polls are an indication, Mackenzie Allen has replaced Jed Bartlet as TV viewers' favorite fictional president.

ABC's ''Commander in Chief," in which Geena Davis portrays Allen, landed in Nielsen Media Research's top 10 last week with just fewer than 17 million viewers. It was the only new series to increase its audience between the first and second weeks this season.

Meanwhile, NBC's ''The West Wing," in which Martin Sheen's Bartlet is winding down his term in office, is fading in its seventh season after shifting to a new Sunday time slot.

While it's a strong start for ''Commander," last week's pre-emption of time slot competitor ''House" for Major League Baseball may have freed up more viewers than would usually be available. More important, last weekend's unexpected departure of show creator Rod Lurie (with Steven Bochco filling in) speaks to behind-the-scenes turmoil that could affect what's on the screen -- and the show's staying power.

In its first three episodes this season, ''The West Wing" has seen viewership tumble by 37 percent from last year, even more among young viewers, Nielsen said.

''The West Wing" was seen by just fewer than 8 million people last week; competitors ''Cold Case" on CBS and ''Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" on ABC each drew nearly double the audience.

NBC said ''The West Wing" probably would have been hurt if it stayed on Wednesdays, with competition from ABC's ''Lost" and Fox's ''American Idol."

Among a handful of season or series premieres last week, ABC's ''George Lopez" fared best, with a one-hour special that beat CBS's Wednesday comedies.

NBC plans live debate episode on 'West Wing'

By Steve Gorman
Reuters

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Hoping to boost interest in a celebrated television series that has slipped in the ratings, NBC will air a rare live episode of "The West Wing" featuring a debate between the show's two nominees for president.

Former "NYPD Blue" star Jimmy Smits, who plays Democratic candidate Matt Santos, will square off against "M*A*S*H" veteran Alan Alda, the Republican contender Arnold Vinick, in the special "West Wing" telecast scheduled for November 6, NBC said on Thursday.

The episode will be produced live twice in the same night, once for the Eastern and Central time zones, and again for the Mountain and Pacific regions.

The Emmy-winning "West Wing" began its seventh season last month with a story line pitting former Texas congressman Santos against California Senator Vinick in an election battle to succeed the current U.S. president, played by Martin Sheen.

But producers have kept viewers guessing as to how the campaign will play out, leaving open the possibility that Sheen's character, liberal Democrat Josiah "Jed" Bartlet, might be replaced by a Republican administration.

Some observers have noted that recent episodes has tended to focus more on the Santos campaign, which is being run by Bartlet loyalist Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford), than on Vinick's camp.

At this point, it remains to be seen how far into the current season the climactic fictional election will take place and whether the series will even return next fall.

The latter question hinges in large part on whether "West Wing" can overcome its current slump in the Nielsen ratings.

The first two episodes of the new season posted all-time ratings low for the series, with just 7.6 million viewers tuning in to see the show on its new Sunday 8 p.m. berth.

That's well below the show's 11 million-viewer average from last season, when it was airing on Wednesdays at the more heavily watched hour of 9 o'clock.

NBC's new occupants of the show's old time slot, Pentagon-based drama "E-Ring" and "The Apprentice: Martha Stewart," have not done much better than "West Wing" this year. But they also are facing much stiffer competition from ABC's smash hit castaway thriller "Lost," which was moved from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Wednesdays this year.

Live drama, a staple of early television in the 1950s, is relatively rare nowadays. NBC launched its fourth season of the hospital series "ER in 1997 with a live performance. The live-premiere treatment also was given to the hit comedy "Will & Grace" this season.

Reuters/VNU

NBC plans live episode of 'The West Wing'

NBC plans live episode of 'The West Wing'
Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — NBC will air a live episode of The West Wing featuring a debate between presidential candidates Matt Santos and Arnold Vinick on Nov. 6.

Airing scripted TV shows live is a rarity these days, although NBC tried the attention-getting device earlier last week with the Will & Grace season premiere.

The West Wing, which has lagged in the ratings with its move to Sunday nights this season, is in the midst of the campaign to replace Martin Sheen's character, President Bartlet. Jimmy Smits plays Democratic candidate Santos and Alan Alda the Republican Vinick.

The cast will run through two separate live versions, one for the East Coast and one of the West. The series' executive producer, John Wells, has experience with this: He was at the helm when ER opened its fourth season in 1997 with a live episode.

TV Notes: "The West Wing,'' "Sex, Love and Secrets,'' Red Sox-Yankees and Martha Stewart

by Charlie McCollum
San Jose Mercury-News

TV notes from the weekend:

Did you happen to notice who wasn't in the opening credits of Sunday's "The West Wing''? Dule Hill (Charlie Young), Joshua Malina (Will Bailey) and, most interestingly, Janel Moloney (Donna Moss) were all missing, suggesting that they've been downgraded to recurring status. (Stockard Channing never appears in the credits unless she's in the episode as the First Lady.) And if Richard Schiff (Toby Ziegler) was right when he said he expects to be in only three episodes this season, next week could be his exit. The old Bartlet gang is definitely breaking up, even if folks like Bradley Whitford as Josh Lyman (right) are still around.

Anyway, the episode itself -- particularly that montage at the beginning to Steve Miller's "Jetliner'' -- was another example of how much "West Wing'' has separated itself from its early days and Aaron Sorkin's crackling dialogue. I'm not saying that makes it a bad show (it's still a solid drama) but the glory days are over.

Which could explain why it continues to slide in the ratings. Sunday's viewership fell to the levels of last season's "American Dreams'' -- which led to the cancellation of "Dreams.''

UPN has stopped production on "Sex, Loves and Secrets,'' its soapy Tuesday drama, before I even got a chance to tell you just how bad it is. That isn't quite outright cancellation (the networks says it will air the eight episodes it has) but it's justthisclose. My guess: UPN doesn't have anything in the pipeline to fill in for "Sex'' so it figures it might as well burn off the episodes.

The happiest people in TV this weekend: the executives at Fox who watched the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees get into the baseball playoffs (at the expense of the Cleveland Indians) with the chance the two teams could meet in the American League championship. Red Sox and Yankees equal big ratings.

And NBC is already starting to shuffle its beleaguered lineup. First move: "The Apprentice: Martha Stewart'' will swap time slots on Wednesday with "E-Ring.'' Martha will now air at 9 p.m. with "E-Ring'' taking the 8 p.m. slot. Although network suits say differently, it looks a lot like NBC is essentially writing off the viewership-impaired "Apprentice'' spinoff against "Lost'' and "Criminal Minds'' while giving the Pentagon drama a better chance to find viewers in a less-challenging time period.