The West Wing
July 29th, 2006
I caught the last two episodes of The West Wing this evening. It felt strangely anticlimactic for a season finale, what with the mechanisms of the US political system swinging into gear and ejecting our cast from the White House on schedule as the housekeeping department swung into the well-rehearsed routines by which one administration leaves every four or eight years and another arrives. (It would have been fascinating if the writers had decided to tell the story of the Bartlet administration’s final days and the arrival of President Santos through the eyes of the housekeeping staff. After all, many of them have probably seen off two or three administrations, so to them this is just another transition to facilitate. I know there’s no way in hell that the producers would have taken such a radical step for the show’s finale. That doesn’t mean it’s intrinsically a terrible idea.) There was a certain amount of dramatic tension over the question of whether Bartlet would sign a pardon for Toby, but the writers correctly resisted the temptation to liven up the last episode with melodrama by staging an assassination attempt or inflicting a late-breaking crisis to cause friction between Bartlet and Santos.
I really enjoyed the story of Santos’ fight for the nomination and the campaign against Vinick; it didn’t really feel like The West Wing of the Sorkin years any more, but as a politics junkie who has always been fascinated by American presidential elections I loved every minute of it anyway. Having said that, More4 did their second airing of the show’s finale this evening no favours at all by preceding it with a day of episodes from earlier seasons: the older episodes served to remind us of just how good the show used to be, and of how badly John Spencer will be missed. (In fairness, they also reminded us of just how far off the pace of contemporary American politics the show was from the very start. Still, in times like these there are worse crimes than a weakness for idealism.)
Taken as a whole, The West Wing was one of the TV highlights of the last decade. Here’s hoping Sorkin’s new show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip turns out to be half as entertaining.
July 30th, 2006 at 7:09 pm
I was very pleasantly surprised to see More4’s ad for Studio 60 - for whatever reason I hadn’t expected it to be picked up on a free-to-air UK channel, let alone this quickly.
Re John Spencer, I thought it was sweet of them to keep his name in the credits until the end of the run. This was not extended to Richard Schiff for non-Toby episodes. I understand there were some disagreements between Schiff and the writers/producers, which is a shame. I really enjoyed the final interaction between CJ and Toby though.
July 30th, 2006 at 9:34 pm
I hadn’t noticed Schiff’s name disappearing from the titles: considering that relatively minor characters like Mary McDonnell’s and Kristin Chenoweth’s stayed in the title sequence whether they were in a given episode or not (IIRC), I think it was pretty crappy to omit one of the original cast members. Toby and CJ were a great, great double act: I was glad Toby got his pardon - I can imagine him working with CJ in her new foundation.
I think the willingness of Channel 5 to snap up US dramas has discouraged Channel 4/More4 from hanging around for a season to see how a big US show does, so long as it’s not in a genre they’re not interested in like science fiction. Provided they treat the shows they buy reasonably well (ie not the way that Channel 4 has treated so many shows in the past five or six years) I don’t have a problem with that.
It’s strange to think that before John Spencer’s death the producers had planned to have Vinick win the election. That would have changed the tone of the last four episodes quite a bit, what with essentially all the characters we knew facing the loss of their jobs and the rejection of the work they did.