Bartlet4America News Archive

Mr. Speaker, my fellow Americans: The state of the series is sound - despite what you may have heard.

People have been piling on The West Wing lately, claiming that the NBC White House drama (9 p.m. Wednesdays) is losing viewers because the quality is slipping. Well, the ratings are down (an alarming 23 percent from a year ago), but it's not because the show has lost its mojo.

The West Wing, winner of three consecutive Emmys as TV's best drama, remains the most intelligent and engaging series in prime time. This ain't no lame duck, folks. But the reasons offered for Wing's stumble are canards. Let's examine them:

People are turned off by the show's liberal slant.

Bushwa. Yes, the program depicts the inner workings of a Democratic presidency. But from the first episode, Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen) has been anything but a radical ideologue. This son of New Hampshire is a cranky individualist in the Harry Truman vein.

You could make a case that his advisers - Josh Lyman (Brad Whitford), Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff), and Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) - are left-leaning. But West Wing's creator and principal voice, the prolific Aaron Sorkin, is punctilious about presenting the other side of the argument.

All issues - from farm supports to ecology - are debated ad infinitum. Both sides get their at-bats. And Sorkin's conservative proxies are more articulate than Rush Limbaugh.

As Bartlet runs for a second term, his opponent is presented in a favorable light. Robert Ritchie, the Republican governor of Florida (played by James Brolin), may not be as bristlingly intelligent as the show's Latin-spouting incumbent, but he is cagey and charismatic. When they debate in tonight's episode, you can bet that Ritchie will leave a few lumps on the president's pointy cranium.

The show is running out of steam.

Balderdash. The writing on Wing is unparalleled - witty, bright, passionate and patriotic. Ask the cast members (with the possible exception of Lily Tomlin who plays the silly, pot-smoking, alpaca-farming job candidate Deborah Fiderer), and they'll tell you the scripts are an actor's dream. (On the other hand, there's nothing like an election year to make people sick of politics.)

The plotlines have been overshadowed by actual events.

Stuff and nonsense. Did people stop watching medical shows after the AIDS epidemic erupted? Repeat after me: There is absolutely no correlation between television and reality - unless you're Emeril Lagasse.

This isn't to say Wing is perfect. Presented with a golden opportunity, the show choked - big time. Last year, after the 9/11 attacks, NBC postponed the third-season opener because Sorkin, we were told, was working around the clock on a timely episode about terrorism. More than 25 million people tuned in, the biggest audience the series has ever had.

Unfortunately, Sorkin delivered a pretentious and didactic script (West Wing haters maintain he does that every week), in which the president and his staff delivered stuffy sermons on civil liberties to a group of schoolkids in the White House cafeteria. That crinkling noise you heard was the sound of America's eyes glazing over.

Another mistake is the attempt to put each member of the ensemble cast in the spotlight. Usually, this involves giving the characters some tedious semblance of a home life.

This strategy has reached its nadir with Toby trying to renew his marriage with congresswoman Andy Wyatt (Kathleen York). Trust us, Aaron: Nobody is interested in this curmudgeon's personal life.

The West Wing needs to adopt a Rose Garden strategy: Barricade everyone inside the confines of the White House and stay there.

These cavils aside, the series remains a uniquely compelling program. So why is viewership down? There are several factors:

It's endemic.

Most seasoned NBC series - Frasier and the recently canceled Providence, among them - are losing eyeballs. Only Friends remains frisky.

Competition.

Bartlet and his brainy crew are being filibustered by The Bachelor, Birds of Prey, and The Amazing Race.

Going over people's heads.

It's not for everyone. I love the show, and there are weeks I don't tune because I'm not up to the challenge of Sorkin's logorrhea.

But just because we're too lazy to properly appreciate this jewel doesn't mean the sparkle is gone. You want to knock a show for being off its game? How about The Sopranos? This season the Jersey boys have been staler than two-week-old bruschetta.

Posted by MorganG at 05:50 PM

Disloyalty oaths

Viewers are griping about two of TV's biggest hits this season

Tim Goodman
San Francisco Chronicle

These are tough times for two of television's best, most popular and critically acclaimed series.

Entering their fourth seasons, "The Sopranos" and "The West Wing" are coming under the kind of fan fire neither is accustomed to. In the case of "The West Wing," that is resulting in a loss of viewers.

But the issues for both go far deeper. As two of the brightest lights in TV -- surrounded by a plethora of creatively weak, stylistically simple competitors -- it's almost insulting for them to be questioned, to be doubted. After all, in the realm of smart, sophisticated television, there's not much else out there.

Still, anecdotal evidence such as fan sites and water cooler chit-chat bear out the truth: Fans of those shows are disappointed this season.

It's harder to draw a correlation between people tuning out and people complaining. This season has seen many established series lose viewers. There are also more and better dramas this year, and the audience shift that occurs during so-called "good" TV seasons is taking place. "The West Wing" is on a tough night (so too is "The Sopranos"), and the political drama, despite its popularity, has less of a die-hard audience than the mob diary.

Loyalty to "The Sopranos" borders on insane. Besides, if you're paying for it (and a lot of people are paying for HBO precisely because of "The Sopranos"), you're going to watch it.

Audience approval is a widely varying thing -- even in its most acclaimed years, people have been open and vocal about their "Sopranos" disappointment. And the inability to make everybody happy has to be factored in. But the question remains: These people currently carping about down years on both shows -- are they right?

Here's a nice dodge -- it's too early. Many series often suffer creative lulls, then roar back. It's a long season. Let's not pass too much judgment yet.

Nevertheless, critically, there's certainly merit to "The West Wing" gripes, while "The Sopranos" is clearly a victim of impossibly high expectations and some people who either don't understand or can't dismiss creator David Chase's storytelling eccentricities.

While Aaron Sorkin has done a stupendous job making a hit out of a series nobody -- at any network -- thought would work, "The West Wing" has always been an implausible high-wire act. First off, politics divides. Unless you're really great at the writing -- which Sorkin has been on most occasions -- somebody is going to feel their nose is being tweaked.

This season it's been abundantly clear that President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) is battling a Bush-like Republican for re-election. That story line is bothersome to Republican viewers who have already given Sorkin a pass on this show about a liberal Democrat president who's three sex scandals away from being Bill Clinton.

And in addition to bucking the odds with a politicized show, Sorkin has for years tempted fate with another TV no-no: being too smart. It's true. The American audience does not like to feel stupid, doesn't like to be talked down to or lectured or made to feel in any way inadequate. When viewers want smarts, they go to PBS. On network television, they demand first to be entertained. If you can do that intelligently, great. But going Ivy League only annoys people. Sorkin is at his worst when he takes his characters -- already cut considerable critical slack for all talking the same way -- and puts them on soap boxes.

Is "The West Wing" still exceptionally fine TV? Of course it is. It remains smart and appealing. Once Sorkin gets back in a groove, improving the writing and storytelling, the show will return to form. That doesn't mean viewers will return, however. There's a sell-by date for every series and even if "The West Wing" isn't there yet, the downside of being politically polarizing is already apparent and is unlikely to be turned back.

"The Sopranos" is an entirely different animal. The easiest explanation for its perceived downturn is ridiculously heightened expectations. But that's a case that can be made every season, every episode, for this show. Just as critics give Sorkin a free pass for the repetitive speaking tone of his characters, so too does Chase get a lighter reprimand for his odd, disjointed story arcs.

Yes, plot lines come and go. Chase has proven, however, that most are not forgotten and eventually resume. By now everyone should know that he tells stories at his leisure, with no definitive clock for the viewers to watch. It's often unclear how much time has elapsed between episodes, much less seasons.

Character motivation has always been suspect as well. Viewers don't like when Carmela, for example, isn't acting the way she'd normally act. Is the fault in Chase's execution, or are viewers too impatient, raised on strict, formulaic network storytelling devices? Maybe a little of both, but again, "The Sopranos" is not a good series to dissect on a weekly basis. It packs a far bigger wallop and makes more sense as a whole, when the season ends.

It's easy to say that critical appraisal of "The Sopranos" has delved into the absurd, with Chase getting too much credit for creating high art or some momentous cultural accomplishment, when, after all, it's a TV show. But it's also true that standard interpretations of what television has offered over the years don't apply here.

Yes, "The Sopranos" is brilliant, but it's also different. And sometimes viewers have been either unaware or unappreciative of that difference. For example -- and this is an argument made many times here -- the most important element of this series is what's not said. Network television does not believe in long pauses. It doesn't allow viewers to read into facial expressions for more than a second. Network television -- particularly "The West Wing," by the way -- tells you how to feel or how the character's feeling. Not so in "The Sopranos," which remains daringly, originally, quiet and often lingers on scenes two or three times longer than network shows.

Two other things about "The Sopranos" that, for many viewers, oddly dilute the impact: First, Chase is not strict about motivation, preferring to imbue the characters and the series with a sense of real-life randomness. A lot of viewers, on the other hand, like plot points and action to click like cylinders -- it's a learned response from network television.

Secondly, "The Sopranos" has always been funny, and Chase, who apparently has one quirky sense of humor, routinely tries to fit humor into the flow. But some fans are so obsessively serious about "The Sopranos" that they view jokes as an irritant, a flaw that makes particular episodes weak. Episode three this season, which was not only loaded with humor but skillfully used selfishness as an overarching theme, was loathed by fans.

There seems to be a rush to judgment on both "The West Wing" and "The Sopranos," which is disconcerting. On the other hand, nobody's trying to start a national dialogue about "Boston Public" or "Dinotopia" -- which puts everything into perspective.

Posted by MorganG at 05:47 PM

Executive Decision

By Paul Droesch
TVGuide.com

Aaron Sorkin hasn't had a good fall. Okay, he won another Best Drama Series Emmy in September (and, okay, it was for the third year in a row). But that was before the season started. Lately, it seems, it has been nothing but falling ratings and sniping critics. Last week, The New York Times's Caryn James even used TV's dreaded "s"-word — "shark" (as in jumping one) — in her sorrowful assessment of The West Wing's season thus far.

The opener certainly was silly (picaresque, but silly): It's hard to imagine top White House aides stranded by the side of a cornfield or going the wrong way on a train. And change the background music (and maybe the lighting) and the quirky heartland characters Toby, Josh and Donna kept encountering could have been on Twin Peaks.

On the plus side, Bartlet (Martin Sheen) has held it together, and the Qumari-assassination storyline is a more plausible test of presidential character than last season's overheated MS crisis. But oddball new secretary Debbie Fiderer is just too much of an oddball (though Lily Tomlin comes close at times to pulling it off). And Toby (Richard Schiff) has been such a downer it's no wonder that he's not allowed in the president's sight on days when Bartlet's blood pressure's up.

Sorkin's giving Toby a love life — his ex-wife, a liberal Democratic congresswoman played by Kathleen York, is back in the picture, if not completely back in his life — and that might prove to lighten him up a bit. But it's hard to imagine a sexy Toby (sexy Toby?) as a response to the surprisingly stiff competition that The West Wing has faced from ABC's The Bachelor this fall. (It's harder to imagine disgruntled West Wing fans switching to The Bachelor, but stranger things have happened.) Besides, it's not as though the West Wingers have taken chastity vows. Next week, for instance, Christian Slater signs on for a guest stint as a love interest for Donna (Janel Moloney).

But if Sorkin wanted to seriously sex things up, he would have written a romantic storyline for Rob Lowe, the show's resident hunk. After the first season, though, Lowe's Sam Seaborn has been noticeably celibate (although his former fiancée has turned up from time to time), and now the raise-deprived Lowe is on the way out, so Sorkin must write Sam out. That process could begin to unfold tonight.

Sam's heading out to Orange County, Calif., where he happens to be from, to persuade the campaign manager of a recently deceased Democratic congressional candidate to stop campaigning because it's an embarrassment to the national party. But the campaign manager (played by Joshua Malina, the nerdy Jeremy on Sorkin's Sports Night) is no dummy, and the physically dead candidate might not be so dead politically. Could there be a campaign in Sam's future?

There is a campaign in The West Wing's present, although not so you'd notice that much. True, a Bartlet loss would end the series. That won't happen, and Sorkin has wisely realized that there's no point in dramatizing something that's not dramatic. So he has taken sidelong glances at the race, using it mostly as a soapbox for political issues, and using Bartlet's opponent, the gravitas-challenged "Bobby" Ritchie (James Brolin), as a Republican punching bag.

Bartlet (Martin Sheen) gets the chance to take plenty of shots at him tonight, when the two square off in their only campaign debate. It's the episode's centerpiece, but it, too, is treated in a sidelong manner (though Sorkin definitely imparts its flavor). More directly treated is the way debates are "spinned" by the two sides, and this gives Sorkin not only another opportunity to be a policy wonk (the subject: trade with China), it opens up another guest spot for Hal Holbrook as the enjoyably cantankerous State Department veteran Albie Duncan, who's a wary Bartlet advocate.

Next week: the election. Bartlet's up in the polls but down in the ratings. It's far too early to call him a lame duck, but the presidency is an office that has term limits.

Posted by MorganG at 05:45 PM

October 24, 2002

Footballs won't fly on 'West Wing'

By Jeff Merron
ESPN.com

"The West Wing" has been having its problems lately, with ratings down 20 percent overall and even more among young viewers. Industry wags have a bunch of theories for the decline of NBC's White House drama: lackluster plots, no romantic storylines for Rob Lowe's character, competition from other networks, and so on.

President Bartlet (Martin Sheen), left, has a penchant for pigskin, but the rest of his staff appears anti-football. Caryn James, the eminent New York Times media critic, even proclaimed Wednesday that " 'The West Wing' jumped the shark."

She's wrong. All those theories are wrong. The ratings aren't down because of plotlines or because the show has jumped the shark. They're down because "The West Wing" has chewed the pigskin, and spit it out. In other words, the ratings are down because the show has been dissing football.

An anti-football White House wouldn't survive in the real world, and Pres. Josiah Bartlet's administration isn't long for the tube unless series creator Aaron Sorkin changes his football-bashing ways.

Sorkin should know better. It's OK to criticize certain aspects of football, as happened often enough on "Sports Night," which was also his baby. But not so often. And not with such broad strokes.

Make no mistake: Bartlet, who attended Notre Dame, likes football. But his staff has been using football as a punching bag. To wit:

In the Oct. 2, episode, Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman and Donna Moss, his assistant, discussed problems that minor college sports have been having. What's the root of those problem?

Donna: It's not the fault of women's sports. It's the fault of football.

Josh: It's the fault of football?

Donna: Yeah.

Josh: Football pays for all the other sports.

Donna: There are 53 players on an NFL team. The University of Colorado has 130, 85 of whom are on full scholarship. I'm all for backups and substitutes but can't the guy who's fourth on the depth chart at right outside linebacker also be the fourth on the depth chart at left outside linebacker? If a college football team cut back to 70 scholarships, they'd still be three deep at every position and have a fourth-string punter and place kicker. 15 scholarships ... that's a wrestling team!

Keep in mind that Donna (whether you agree with her on the above or not) has already proven she knows nothing about the college game, having once lost $100 in a college football pool by betting on Central Indiana State ("The Fighting Okies") against Notre Dame.

Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) couldn't win his Title IX debate with Donna. In the Oct. 9 episode Bartlet, like so many presidents before him (think Nixon, especially), watched football on TV.

This was a smart move. Sorkin gave us the poor man's version of picture-in-picture, and on a Wednesday night even a snippet of Redskins, Raiders or Saints action would have quickened the pulses of many viewers.

What did we get instead? According to Government Executive Magazine's "West Wing Watch," we got the Calgary Stampeders of the Canadian Football League. Maybe Doug Flutie, if he was watching, kept his eyes peeled for some old buddies. But thousands of viewers immediately switched to "NFL Films Presents: 1977 Buccaneers Yearbook" on ESPN Classic.

(TV junkies with a passion for minutia might have eventually figured out that Bartlet was probably interested in Stampeders long snapper and linebacker Michel Dupuis, who suffers, like Bartlet, from multiple sclerosis. But twitchy remote fingers have no time for such subtleties.)

C.J., Bartlet's press secretary, has also been making her anti-football views known. She notices that the President's watching football, and says, in that C.J. kind of way, "Is it OK that after every play someone requires medical attention?"

A real presidential press secretary would have been fired for making such a remark. The problem isn't that it's false. The problem is that it's anti-football. C.J. should have learned to keep her mouth shut about football after Bartlet made her go on "The Portland Trip," wear a Notre Dame hat, and sing all five verses of the Notre Dame fight song while Air Force One flew over South Bend.

Bartlet's coming up for re-election. He'll win, no doubt. But he could still lose the hearts and minds of even more viewers, unless his underlings get on the (foot)ball.

Posted by MorganG at 05:43 PM

October 23, 2002

Shark's Pearly Teeth Gnash Near 'The West Wing'

By CARYN JAMES
The New York Times

Maybe it happened when Lily Tomlin turned up as the ditzy secretary to the President of the United States. Maybe it happened when Toby Ziegler, the communications director, lectured the president — in Toby's increasingly pompous way — about how he has to stop trying to prove himself to his long-dead father. Maybe it happened over the summer when nobody was looking, but it happened: "The West Wing" jumped the shark.

An inspired phrase, "jump the shark" refers to the point at which a television series begins its downward slide. (The term comes from the moment in the aging "Happy Days" when Fonzie waterskied over a shark. Television viewers weigh in on those tragic leaps on the Web site www.jumptheshark.com and can even read a "Jump the Shark" book by the site's creator, Jon Hein, but neither form is as delicious as the concept itself.)

The words shark and "West Wing" shouldn't be turning up in the same sentence yet. But the first four episodes this fall have been contrived and dull — a startling tumble from the show's gripping, sophisticated heights. The change was abrupt. This summer, when Rob Lowe announced he was leaving the series, it seemed like a foolish move; now it looks prescient.

After three seasons any show's novelty begins to wear off, of course. And as news stories have indicated, the "West Wing" ratings have been hurt by competition from series that are younger, hipper and guaranteed not to make your head hurt, like "Birds of Prey," with its comic-book-inspired superheroines, and the matchmaking reality game "The Bachelor." (O.K., "The Bachelor" will give you a headache, but only if you actually try to connect it to reality.) But those are minor factors.

The real problem is that Aaron Sorkin, who created and still writes "The West Wing," has turned to desperate plot twists and preachier-than-ever dialogue this season. And the weak writing has been compounded by a trickier issue: as the show has tried to adapt to changes in the world around it, it has given us a fictional president who walks like a Clinton and talks like a Bush. The show's downward slide raises the question of the longevity of smart network series: do they have a shorter life span, when they get a chance to live at all?

Although the decline of "The West Wing" seems to have happened behind our backs, the seeds were there last season when Ms. Tomlin's character, Debbie Federer, first appeared. She is so flaky that she once ran an alpaca farm. This season she told the president she was high when she first met him, and made a satiric point on her background-check questionnaire that involved harming him (you know how the Secret Service loves a good joke). She is one step away from the wacky next-door neighbor on a sitcom.

This season, frantic scenes that seem intended to humanize the characters and get them out of their offices have only made them look silly. Toby (Richard Schiff) and Josh (Bradley Whitford), the assistant chief of staff, and Josh's assistant, Donna (Janel Moloney), were left behind when the presidential motorcade left a rally in the Midwest; they hitched rides, got on a train, and missed a plane home because they forgot they'd crossed a time zone. The next week the entire staff turned up at a Rock the Vote rally. Last week a flashback to the early days of the administration revealed that the press secretary, C. J. (Allison Janney), had a really bad perm.

Worst of all, this season's dialogue has taken its cue not from the best the series has offered, but from its worst episode, last year's misguided season opener that acknowledged the terror attacks by locking the staffers in the White House with a class of visiting students. That gave Mr. Sorkin an excuse to preach at viewers about terrorism and racial profiling, but what's his excuse now?

Toby has become the main offender. He is the voice and the conscience we are meant to respect for his uncompromising idealism, but Mr. Schiff's overwrought performance makes the character off-putting. When Senator Ritchie, the fictional President Bartlet's Republican opponent in the next election, announces that he is against needle exchange to prevent the spread of H.I.V., Toby sits at a staff meeting and in a hectoring tone tells his colleagues and the president, but mainly the television audience: "I'd like someone to ask Ritchie if he's aware that needle exchange costs $9,000 for every infection stopped. Treating someone with H.I.V. costs $200,000. I'd like someone to ask him that." In a litany of clunky writing he continues this harangue as the staff walks out of the meeting, until C. J. asks, "Is there any chance I'm going to get an opportunity to speak in this conversation?" Toby's repetitious speech isn't poetry; it's bombast and it's wearing. Letting C. J. realize that the scene is talky doesn't change that.

Martin Sheen, as President Bartlet, once had the role of the pure conscience. The character and Mr. Sheen's performance have grown far richer and more fascinating as Bartlet has displayed more flaws. He failed to tell the country he has multiple sclerosis. He ordered the assassination of the leader of Qumar, the fictional country that is the show's villain in the Middle East, and the repercussions have led to this season's most intriguing and underused plot. (Tonight, in a repeat from last season, C. J. is upset because the United States may lease an air base to Qumar, which has a lousy record on women's rights; the episode is a reminder that Mr. Sorkin is able to balance preachiness and drama.)

Now the president and the series are caught in a head-spinning identity crisis. Bartlet, who arrived as a Clintonlike Democrat, still has such liberal social ideals that he recently became indignant about the country's poor record on greenhouse emissions. Yet more and more his rhetoric echoes that of the Bush administration's war on terror.

On "The West Wing," two pipe bombs are set off at a university in Iowa — a fiction that effectively evokes reality without creating stiff parallels. In reaction, at a White House dinner dramatically lighted with candles, Bartlet delivers an eloquent speech that resonates with the language of real events and fears. "We did not seek nor did we provoke an assault on our freedom and our way of life; we did not expect nor did we invite a confrontation with evil," he says. (If any word is associated with the Bush administration's war on terror, it's "evil.") "The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels tonight. . . . This is a time for American heroes."

During the Clinton years, Bartlet functioned as an idealized version of the real president. For much of last season, he occupied an alternate universe, a contrast to the Bush White House. But Mr. Sorkin can't have it both ways. As the echoes of reality have become stronger on the show, its vision of Bartlet has become disorienting.

"The West Wing" is still one of best shows on television, but that's beside the point. It doesn't matter that a show that was once so sharp and realistic is better than a lame sitcom like "Yes, Dear" or a mediocrity like "Jag." Mr. Sorkin cultivated a smart, thoughtful audience. Now he can't get away with insulting his viewers' intelligence by offering the ditzy secretary, the preachy communications director and the Jeckyll/Hyde presidency.

Posted by MorganG at 05:41 PM

October 22, 2002

'West Wing' at Ratings Crossroads

By LYNN ELBER
Associated Press

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Three consecutive best-drama Emmys. A prestigious Peabody Award. One of TV's most affluent audiences. All that, and "The West Wing" still must account for losing viewers to "The Bachelor."

In the bottom-line world of television, series that deliver a young crowd are the fondest desire of advertisers and networks — and ABC's dating game is among the new competitors sapping youthful strength from "The West Wing" on NBC.It's not a national crisis that people are being lured away from a finely crafted White House drama by the antics of marriage-hungry singles, although the reverse might gladden a concerned citizenry.

It may not even be a crucial problem for "The West Wing," which is a stronger candidate than early ratings returns indicate.

Granted, any audience shrinkage comes at a difficult time for the show's producers and studio. Warner Bros. Television and NBC will begin hard bargaining over a new contract early next year and diminished ratings would hurt Warner's cause.

The studio now gets about $2 million per episode from NBC, according to an executive familiar with the contract who spoke on condition of anonymity. Warner may seek up to $8 million per episode next season.

There's more than money at stake for "The West Wing" creator Aaron Sorkin and his fellow executive producers, including John Wells (whose other NBC credits include "ER" and "Third Watch").

After being emotionally knocked off balance by the Sept. 11 terrorism attacks, Sorkin feels he has regained the perspective needed to craft a drama that examines political machinations and partisan clashes.

"When I came back at the beginning of this year ... I was suddenly comfortable in my chair. The show was a lot of fun to write and was being written with a certain spirit and energy," Sorkin said. "And so we're back."

"Creatively, we're off to the strongest start we've ever been," added Wells.

"The West Wing" has carefully etched a campaign between the liberal President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) and a conservative Republican nominee (played by James Brolin), which culminates in their debate Wednesday, Oct. 30. Election results roll in on the Nov. 6 episode.

There is tension as usual on the international front, with Bartlet facing the increasingly dangerous aftermath of the covert U.S. assassination of a Middle East figure linked to terrorism.

Hints of how Rob Lowe may be eased out of his role as the deputy communications director (Lowe had sought a pay boost) have been strategically placed: Is Sam Seaborn ready to make his own stand as a candidate?
And, as always, the Sorkin-written dialogue is furiously fast and witty.

"You on your date?" Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) asks in a telephone call to ex-flame Amy (Mary-Louise Parker), then cautions: "You probably don't want to let him know it's me on the phone. It's too intimidating. It's like going out with Cher, and Sonny calls."

Not everyone has remained a fan. In its fourth year, the series is down 26 percent in total viewers and 31 percent among viewers 18 to 49 compared to the same period last year, according to Nielsen ratings.

The networks' avid quest for presumably free-spending young adults in the 9 p.m. EST Wednesday time slot is one reason. Other choices besides "The Bachelor" include Fox's cop drama "Fastlane" and the WB's superhero saga "Birds of Prey."

But the numbers may be a misleading assessment of the NBC show's durability and its value to the network.

Current ratings for "The West Wing" are consistent with its performance at the end of last season. It drew 17 million total viewers for the first month of this season compared to 16.7 million for May 2002.

The drama was watched by approximately 7.7 million viewers age 18 to 49 last May, compared to 7.5 million for the first four weeks of the new season.
While young viewership is down, the series continues to reign among another sought-after demographic: the crowd making $75,000 or more, including young adults in that income bracket.

Consider whether "that core group of people who are really committed to the show and who the advertisers covet" are deserting, Sorkin said, then supplied an answer: "They're not."

The fall slump likely is due in part to the lack of a previous season cliffhanger, such as the fall 2000 follow to an assassination attempt on the president.
The drama also has focused on stories with long arcs, like the election, meaning a delayed dramatic payoff for viewers. Sorkin and Wells won't apologize for complex plots that demand patience.

"There are lots of places to go on the dial where everything gets wrapped up in 42-and-a-half minutes," said Wells. "That was never the intent of the show. ... this is a long-term examination of an administration."

The drama remains a mainstay of NBC's dominant Wednesday schedule that includes "Law & Order." Keeping the night intact remains even more vital if "Friends" indeed wraps up this season, weakening another key NBC night, Thursday.

"It's still huge," industry analyst Stacey Lynn Koerner said of "The West Wing," despite its drop in younger viewers. "It's well-rated, well-respected and winning Emmys. We're not talking about a property any network is going to lose."

The business-savvy Wells understands the posturing that proceeds big series negotiations (the Warner-NBC pact for "ER" ended up costing the network a record $13 million per episode). But he and Sorkin insist they're genuinely content with their show's performance.

"We're happy, I gotta say, for the audience we have," Sorkin said. "I wrote 'Sports Night' for two years and these aren't low ratings. This is great. This is Club Med."

Posted by MorganG at 03:00 PM

October 21, 2002

Trouble in 'The West Wing'

By BILL CARTER
The New York Times

Just a month ago, Aaron Sorkin, the man responsible for creating and writing the hit NBC series "The West Wing," walked out of a theater in Los Angeles gripping his third consecutive Emmy award for best drama. He had every reason to believe he could head right over to NBC, brandish the latest award and, using the leverage that every producer of a hit show up for renegotiation has, tell the network to pay up.

But in one of the more intriguing subplots of the television season, circumstances have changed suddenly and unexpectedly for "The West Wing" and Mr. Sorkin. NBC, which must strike a new deal if it wants to retain the prestigious political drama next season, is, at least for the moment, sitting on its wallet.

The network has its reasons. The ratings for this season's early episodes have fallen, and the young adult viewers that NBC prizes (women in particular) have defected in big numbers. Critics, and even some fans of the show, are saying that the season's plots are not compelling. Some network executives are disappointed in the way one of the show's stars, Rob Lowe, has been used. And there may even be some lingering bad memories from the negotiation for another show, "ER," which involved the same two parties: NBC and Warner Brothers.

All of this backstory has made the build-up to the formal negotiations as intensely political and fractious as anything seen in the show's fictional White House.

Warner Brothers currently receives a fee of just under $4 million an episode for "West Wing," according to an executive with knowledge of the contract. Despite the recent ratings dip, it is pushing for a huge fee increase, to as much as $10 million an episode, for a "West Wing" renewal. NBC is sending out messages that it would balk at $6 million.

The "West Wing" side still believes that it holds the cards in the negotiations. The show still attracts an affluent audience and enhances NBC's entire Wednesday night line-up. And, the show's executives say, NBC may have difficulty filling the hole, particularly when it is losing another of its top-rated shows.

"Does NBC want to have to replace `West Wing' the same year it is going to have to replace `Friends?' " asked John Wells, one of the "West Wing" executive producers. "I'm pretty sure they don't."

Despite persistent rumors that "Friends," television's biggest comedy, might still return for a new season, Mr. Wells said, "I really don't think that's going to happen." Warner Brothers, as it happens, also owns "Friends." NBC, at least for now, seems to be shrugging off any halo effect that "West Wing" might be having on its Wednesday night, and is not flinching from the prospect of staring down a schedule without those two shows if it means an eye-popping savings on its bottom line.

But Warner Brothers thinks it has one other trump card: interest from other networks to provide leverage on NBC. So far, though, executives from the other networks seem content to remain on the sidelines.

Mr. Wells, who has been through this all before when he was executive producer of "ER," warned that "all kinds of posturing goes on in these things, and we won't know what people really think until we get into the formal negotiations."

Those do not begin until Feb. 1, when NBC will be granted an exclusive month in which to make a bid for future episodes of the show. The formal negotiating period, however, does not preclude the two sides, which have been talking about a new deal for a long time, from concluding an agreement beforehand.

Most of the principals declined to make on-the-record comments. But several did outline their positions in interviews last week, and the picture that is forming is one of a growing, and potentially unpleasant, impasse.

That is not good news for Mr. Sorkin and the show's other profit participants. "It's like you come all ready to the World Series of poker," he said, "and the show is suddenly like your little kid that you're standing in front of trying to protect. You have to tell him: `Kid, they're going to start calling you names.' "

The first name being thrown around right now is ratings-bleeder. The total viewership for the first four episodes of "The West Wing" this season is down almost 20 percent, and 30 percent of its young female viewers have gone elsewhere.

A phalanx of new competition in its time period, all aimed at younger viewers, has hurt "The West Wing." But numerous television industry executives, as well as Mr. Sorkin, noted the odd circumstance that Warner Brothers, or a sister production unit, is supplying three of the shows taking younger viewers from "The West Wing"' — ABC's "The Bachelor," WB's "Birds of Prey" and Fox's "Fast Lane." Warner Brothers is a unit of AOL Time Warner.

Though Warner Brothers is a production studio and does not control a network's program schedule, it is certainly unusual for a show to be damaged by this many products from its own company. (Networks have in many cases given studios scheduling consideration and not placed sister shows against one another, usually when the studio has other hit shows at the network.)

In addition, as often happens when a hit show displays some sudden vulnerability, the notion that the show itself is at least partly to blame is now being widely discussed. That point is passionately disputed by the show's creative team. Mr. Sorkin said, "I feel like the show is more fun that it has ever been." Mr. Wells said, "I've seen some of the upcoming episodes, and I really feel we're doing some of our best work ever."

Jeff Zucker, the president of NBC Entertainment and the man in the middle of the negotiations, said, "Obviously `The West Wing's' performance is not what it was a year ago, but it still remains the best show on television."

Some NBC executives have been less than happy with some of the ways Mr. Lowe has been used, thinking he has the kind of sex appeal that might keep more young women viewers loyal. Mr. Lowe has said he wants to leave, and his status on the show beyond this season remains up in the air.

Mr. Sorkin said: "We too love Rob. My fingers are crossed that he'll stay." As for the need for a sexier story line for Mr. Lowe, he said, "I've given it serious thought."

The talks between Warner Brothers and NBC are already complicated by the history from the "ER" negotiations, which wound up costing NBC a record $13 million an episode. A big difference, though, is that "ER" had retained its overpowering young-adult ratings for four years (and still does.) Mr. Wells noted that NBC had every opportunity to conclude a deal earlier that would have saved it a lot of money.

The same thing could have happened with "The West Wing," although this time NBC seems to have benefited from waiting.

According to several accounts from both sides, an earlier resolution was discussed, but no firm offers were made. One apparent impediment was the status of Mr. Sorkin himself, the show's creative voice, and the source of its defining, theater-quality dialogue. In April 2001, Mr. Sorkin was arrested for drug possession. That became either reason or excuse for NBC to back away.

But until the last four weeks, there seemed no doubt NBC would eventually do whatever it could to keep the show. The network had previously paraded the program to advertisers, boasting that it contained the most desirable audience in television with the highest percentage of wealthy and well-educated viewers.

"We're still getting more households with more than $75,000 in income than any other show in television," Mr. Wells said. Like many of the other executives involved, he said he expected that after all the posturing ends, NBC will step up and pay what it takes to keep the show.

"I'd be really saddened if they didn't," he remarked, adding, "That said, at the end of the day, it's a business."

Posted by MorganG at 05:39 PM

October 18, 2002

‘West Wing’ dialogue is too racy

By D.L. Stewart
Dayton Daily News

No matter how many Emmys it wins, I just can’t understand The West Wing.

I don’t mean to sound disloyal. Half the cast, after all, is from Dayton, and if we don’t support them, eventually North Carolina will claim they were born there and it will put Martin Sheen’s picture on its license plates.

Nor do I want to appear ungrateful. My wife and I had a chance to visit the set when cast members were taping the program a few years ago, and all the stars were as gracious to us as they could possibly be.

And I certainly hope this won’t upset anybody’s parents. The fathers of Rob Lowe and Allison Janney still live here and are acquaintances of ours, although they probably would not want to be identified as friends of mine.

But, in spite of all those connections, I still can’t understand The West Wing.

I’m not saying the story lines are too complicated for me to follow. I’m not questioning all the awards the program receives, either.

What I’m saying is that I can’t understand The West Wing.

Literally.

Every Wednesday at 9 p.m. my wife and I sit down in front of the television to watch the show. And every Wednesday by 9:10 we’re looking at each other and asking, “What’d they say?”

Just about the only word we consistently can make out is “yeah.” Which, fortunately, constitutes about 50 percent of the script. I’ve heard rap songs that were easier for me to understand.

I’ll be the first to admit that my hearing is not as good as it once was. So when The West Wing comes on, I turn up the volume until the bar at the bottom of the screen is all the way to the right. But it doesn’t help. I still can’t guess what they’re saying.

Besides, it’s not just me. My wife has trouble figuring out what the characters are saying, too. And she can hear me twist the top off a bottle of Bud Light from three rooms away.

My wife thought maybe it was because the actors aren’t always facing the cameras when they deliver their dialogue. So, during a commercial one week, I switched from The West Wing to a baseball game. Not only could I understand the play-by-play announcer, who was never on camera, I could make out what the hot dog vendors in the bleachers were saying.

Another thought I had was that maybe the speakers in our television are going bad. But we have five sets in our house and The West Wing dialogue is unintelligible on all of them.

The biggest problem, I think, is the speed of the dialogue. The program’s creators apparently believe the show will have a more authentic feel if the lines are delivered at twice the speed of sound. In fact, I have an acquaintance who says all government workers talk that fast. I don’t know if that's true. One of my sons is a government worker in Washington, D.C., and I can understand him. Or, at least, as much as I ever could.

All I can guess is that the producers have intentionally made The West Wing’s dialogue impossible for my wife and me to follow due to the fear shared by all network programs that someone over the age of 30 might tune in.

So it could be that the only solution for us will be to turn on the closed captioning.

As soon as we finish our speed-reading class.

Posted by MorganG at 05:37 PM

...But He Plays One on TV: Ron Silver to Guest-Host "Crossfire"

Washington Post

AOL Time Warner-owned CNN has asked Ron Silver, who plays a presidential election strategist on "The West Wing," produced by AOL Time Warner-owned Warner Bros., to guest-host "Crossfire" tonight.

Silver, a political activist and one of the founders of the Creative Coalition, will do battle with Bow Tie Boy on the Right.

Poor Bow Tie Boy.

Silver's filling in for real-life presidential election strategists James Carville and Paul Begala, neither of whom could make tonight's live show, said senior executive producer Sam Feist.

Feist insisted that the whole AOL Time Warner you-scratch-my-back-I'll- scratch-yours thing never entered into the conversation when he was deciding to ask Silver to guest.

"It never was a factor," Feist told The TV Column. "He has done 'Crossfire' plenty of times in the past. . . . We love having him on" as guest host.

Actually, the last time Silver was on "Crossfire," according to CNN, was way back in 1992 when the show was debating the merits of Vice President Quayle's attack on the fictitious unmarried woman Murphy Brown, about the fictitious baby she fictitiously conceived in the course of the CBS scripted fiction sitcom "Murphy Brown."

But the "Crossfire" discussion that night quickly devolved into a skirmish between Silver and Charlton Heston, repping the right, over whether Heston should have played Michelangelo in the 1965 film "The Agony and the Ecstasy," since the artist was gay:

Silver: Mr. Heston had a very distinguished career and still does. He starred in a movie called "Michelangelo." Now, I don't know, Chuck, you can tell me. Were you gay in that movie? Because Michelangelo was a gay person. He was serving gay popes, Julius. There was a lot of gay artists in the Renaissance --

Heston: It seems a curious point to be raising in our current debate, Ron, but I --

Silver: Well, Pat Buchanan raises the debate.

Heston: . . . I've studied Michelangelo and I perhaps know more about his life than most people do. The least important thing in his whole life was his sexual orientation. He had no relations with either men or women except on two separate occasions . . . The only thing in the world he cared about was carving marble.

We can only hope that tonight's "Crossfire" is as entertaining.

Asked if "Crossfire" has had any other celebrity guest hosts since it was revamped in April, Feist cited Dee Dee Myers and Ann Coulter. Yes, in Washington, D.C., Myers and Coulter are considered celebrities. Sigh.

Actually, when we later mentioned Feist's comment in a conversation with CNN's Washington publicist, she got back with us to clarify that Feist had thought we'd asked him about guest hosts, not celebrity guest hosts, and that he certainly didn't think that Dee Dee Myers was a celebrity.

On the other hand, the rep noted that when she moved to Washington recently, she had lunch with a bunch of youngish women who pronounced Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld handsome. So there you go.

Posted by MorganG at 03:48 PM

October 14, 2002

EHS Grad's Work Yields Emmys

By STEVE SMITH
The El Dorado Times>