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September 24, 2003
Transitional team starts to rebuild 'The West Wing'
BY PHIL ROSENTHAL
Chicago Sun-Times
In case you haven't noticed, the Bartlet White House -- if we can still call it that -- is a mess.
Everyone close to the scholarly, supposedly sage Jed Bartlet wonders aloud if he has made some serious mistakes over the years, errors that could reverberate for years to come, putting them in a hole from which they can't dig out.
This is a leader who stepped aside for the greater good, but his action has allowed other voices -- simpler, louder and quite possibly more popular -- to be heard and be empowered, and it may not reflect well on him in the end.
NBC's "The West Wing" never has been shy in packing commentary on real-life events into its fiction, but usually its critiques target the political world. John Wells' script for this week's *** fifth-season opener, the first without series creator Aaron Sorkin as puppetmaster, seems intent on reflecting the state of the series itself.
Mistakes were made, Wells seems to acknowledge. Redemption awaits.
"We've put [Martin Sheen's President Bartlet] through quite a bit and the whole beginning of the season is actually about ... getting to the point where he's questioning how he ended up making some of the decisions that he's made and how does he get himself back to leading in the way he originally envisioned himself leading," said Wells, the "ER" boss who took control of "The West Wing" after fellow "Wing" executive producers Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme left at the end of last season.
They departed amid slumping ratings, partly because ABC's "The Bachelor" siphoned viewers and partly because auteur Sorkin had taken a series that had won fans through its ability to weave drama out of the gossamer of ideas (and lefty ideals) and turned it into one that increasingly traded in bombast, bomb blasts and melodrama.
The show still somehow won its fourth successive Emmy Award on Sunday as the best prime-time drama series, suggesting the TV industry is more forgiving of the show's decline than the rest of us -- or those at NBC eager to stem the Nielsen bleeding.
"The basic tension is, what do you do for short-term gain that might in fact ... be of long-term damage to the show," Wells told reporters last week. "Every network is always interested in what's going to happen tomorrow night, and I see my job as being responsible for making sure we don't [hurt the show long term]."
So Wells must take what Sorkin has left him -- the kidnapping of daughter Zoey Bartlet, the installation of Speaker of the House Walken (John Goodman) as ersatz president, the seclusion of Bartlet and his family in the White House residence -- and slowly try to fix ... what Sorkin has left him.
The opener is still a tad too overwrought and too dimly lit. But Sorkin's soliloquies are largely gone (mostly because they are difficult to write, according to Wells) and the Republicans on the show finally make sense much of the time.
"If Zoey Bartlet turns up dead, I'm gonna blow the hell out of something and God only know what happens next," Walken tells his security council, serving notice there's a new sheriff and that "Wing" now may trade in a different kind of wish fulfillment.
The backstage spectrum of series advisers has widened to include more voices from the right, including Reagan chief of staff Ken Duberstein and columnist John Podhoretz, a former staffer for the first President Bush who once was a Ginsu-sharp TV critic at the New York Post.
"We want to have conversations about international intervention," Wells said of the transformation, "not to make comments or to take potshots in any way at what the Bush administration's been doing, but quite the opposite, to discuss how complex the issues are and how there aren't easy choices."
The opener at 8 p.m. Wednesday on WMAQ-Channel 5, is, by definition, transitional and therefore something short of wholly satisfying. You know what has to happen and it doesn't. Not yet.
In the fictional world of "The West Wing," it is impossible to imagine Bartlet will emerge from this experience unchanged. That goes double in the world of network television.
"Our hope would be that you don't sense that it's very different," Wells said.
Except, of course, that so many people are hoping it is.
Posted by Jo at September 24, 2003 09:11 AM