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June 03, 2004
'West Wing' Romance? Actors Aren't in Love with It
zap2it.com
LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) - They've been dancing around the subject for five seasons now, and on the season finale of "The West Wing," it looks like White House staffers Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) and Donna Moss (Janel Moloney) might finally realize they're in love.
Unless, you know, they don't.
"I'm not sure this will turn into anything other than just a deeper part of their platonic relationship," Moss says of the two characters. "I wouldn't be surprised if that were the case."
The situation in Wednesday's (May 19) finale is certainly ripe for a declaration of love. The penultimate episode saw Donna seriously injured when, on a fact-finding trip to the Gaza Strip, her car was bombed, killing two congressmen and retired Adm. Fitzwallace (John Amos). Josh is overcome when he hears the news, and later flies to the German hospital where she's been taken for treatment.
President Bartlet (Martin Sheen), meanwhile, struggles with the question of responding to the attack on the American delegation, with his advisers calling variously for military or diplomatic action.
Whitford and Moloney seem a little ambivalent about whether their relationship should take a romantic turn. On one hand, Whitford says that when he's asked the will-they-or-won't-they question, "My standard answer is I've always been ready to move further with our relationship, and I'm just waiting for the pages to come down."
Yet he realizes that such a relationship might not ring true in the context of the show. However "The West Wing" differs from the real-life White House, its depiction of staffers not having much of a life outside work is on the nose, Whitford says.
"Partially because there's a kind of hierarchy to them" -- Donna works for Josh -- "acting upon romantic feelings would be kind of inappropriate," he says. "But it's also a very realistic situation of working in the White House, where people are usually too busy to have relationships."
Moloney is aware that a number of the show's fans are rooting for Donna and Josh to become a couple, but she thinks just about as many are hoping they don't. She also says that showrunner John Wells is concerned that "it's gonna get silly" if a romance is thrown into the mix.
"I think three-quarters of the fun is just, you definitely wanting them to get together," she says. "One of the incredibly artful things about this accident and him coming to Germany is you get to see the relationship become very intimate. There's an intimacy and an emotionality that you haven't seen between them that's pretty fun, I think.
"I'm not sure it's totally necessary to put them together. I know that a lot of people want us to, but I think it's probably 50-50. I think a lot of people don't."
"The West Wing" certainly doesn't want to succumb to the David-and-Maddie syndrome, in which characters (like those in "Moonlighting") become less interesting when after taking the romantic plunge. Whitford puts it this way: "Unlike life, there's nothing more boring on television than consummation."
Posted by Jo at June 3, 2004 03:58 PM