Last night, almost certainly crushed in the ratings by the Survivor three-hour finale, West Wing took its final bow from the television screen.
Nobody, I think, will sit around and say that it is likely that any president would face all the troubles that Jed Bartlet went through (an assassination attempt reminiscent of Reagan's, a Vice President who resigns in shame, a kidnapping of his daughter that causes him to invoke the 25th Amendment and put the Speaker of the House from the other side of the aisle in charge for a few days, and his former chief of staff becoming a winning VP candidate who dies in the middle of election day).
Yes, there were unbelievabilities about it, but that is television drama. What was more important about West Wing was that it showed that -- by and large -- even crazy situations like that, the government has processes to work through damned near everything. Last night's finale was a classic example of that, showing something that is fairly rare still in our global society: the ritualized and orderly transition of power from one elected official to another.
I was a little disappointed that we didn't actually get to see Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff), or Danny Concannon (Timothy Busfeld), especially since Toby's now a free man, pardoned by Bartlet in the final minutes of power.
Peter David said it best when he said: If the first rule of show biz is "Always leave them wanting more," then West Wing succeeded beyond all imagining. Despite D's complete lack of enthusiasm for the show, I always wanted to tune in every week to see what was going to happen. It was one of a handful of shows I almost always insisted on watching live, not on DVR, because I simply couldn't wait, and would suffer through having to watch commercials if I had to in order to avoid that waiting.
Bartlet was always the kind of President I wanted. This is not -- at all -- to say that I agreed with him on all of his policies during his television tenure, but you at least realized that he felt like he was doing the right thing. By and large, his actions were rarely controlled by an opinion poll, or by how public opinion would change afterwards. They even hammered that point home for those who couldn't figure it out, having him spend a good six months being that typical politician, and the White House became a political mess. Only when they got back to the guiding principle of "Let Bartlet Be Bartlet", did governance return to its normal path.
West Wing left itself completely open-ended for its finale. If it wanted to, it could come back for a Season Eight, and have a good dozen storylines to pick up and run with. It's disappointing to me as a viewer to know that we'll never see what happens there, except insofar as we can infer them from "future shots" shown occasionally during the series, but it's also realistic, because life doesn't just tie up neatly at the end of one President's term.
It looks like Sorkin has a new show starting next fall, with some of the same actors (Bradley Whitford) as well as actors who had great runs of their own, but wanted desperately to join the West Wing cast (Matthew Perry). With any luck, it'll get another long run, and not get double-tapped the way Sports Night was....
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