Winging into History

This past Sunday, The West Wing aired its farewell episode on NBC.

There's not a lot that I can add to all the chatter that's already gone on about it, except to note that it was one of the few "appointment TV" shows I've ever had on my list. In the first four seasons it featured smart, snappy dialogue and one of its signature visual styles was the "pedeconference", where characters would walk and talk at the same time and the camera would stay just a pace or two ahead of them during the whole tracking shot.

After the fourth season, creator Aaron Sorkin left the series for a number of reasons. Some say the heart went out of the show at that point, and I tend to agree. The fifth season was a mess and I think that's where the show lost a huge chunk of its audience. The focus changed from the characters' driving the plot, to the plot driving the characters. And everyone blamed new Executive Producer John Wells. It may be fair, it may not. He was given a pretty difficult situation to resolve. What's clear to me is that the plot began to drive the characters rather than the other way around.

Having said that, the last season and a half have been very good, covering the elections to replace President Bartlet. There was still a lot to deal with, including the death of John Spencer, the actor who portrayed Leo McGarry, in December. This reportedly threw the story arc into a bit of a tailspin but the recovery was good.

Not many television series get the opportunity to wrap up most of the storylines and give the viewer some idea of where the characters end up, so the last few episodes of The West Wing were pretty satisfying in that sense. Someone at the website Television Without Pity compared it to watching a movie that's about 140 hours long, where the story ebbs and flows and ultimately comes to an end. That's not a bad analogy, actually.

If you haven't seen the show, go catch the re-runs on Bravo. Then send me a nice Thank-You email after you've seen a few.

Anyway. This is just a quick open "Thanks" to everyone involved who made the show happen. The West Wing made me believe in an America that can happen if we choose to stay involved and informed.

Comments

[yellojkt]

My comment got eaten yesterday, so I'll try again.

The show jumped the shark when Sorkin quit writing episodes and/or gave up mushrooms. I liked that you had to be Dennis Miller level to get all the asides and in-jokes. The new writers took the exposition down to middle school civics level. Dare to be smart and hope the audience keeps up.

Claude replies from behind the firewall: Sorkin didn't stop writing episodes; he left the show altogether at the end of the fourth season because of disputes with NBC (and the drug bust didn't help his case any). Up until then, even the episodes he didn't write he remained intimately involved with. But you're right; as I mentioned above, the fifth season was a mess and everyone turned into the Exposition Fairy.

[colleen]

I loved the show and wished that Jed Bartlett or Martin Sheen was our real president. I think TV shows lose audiences when they stay off haitus too long and then do re-reruns in the middle of the season. It's so cheap and irritates me. I agree about the change and the change in time didn't help.