Fantasy politicians… Assemble! When there is nothing in the way of a global or domestic crisis that can’t be solved by walking up a corridor at pace while spitting clipped, always perfect, zingers at each other before deferring to the inherent wisdom deep in the most secretly Republican Democrat President ever to sit in the Oval Office, you might be in The West Wing.
The critically acclaimed, and still highly watchable, The West Wing is now a quarter of a century old, and now I feel all old again. Creator Aaron Sorkin, along with quite a few of the cast, had a visit to the White House last week to celebrate.
Martin Sheen, Richard Schiff, Janel Moloney, Emily Procter, Melissa Fitzgerald, Dulé Hill, and Mary McCormack all met with President Biden in the map room, before the First Lady whisked them away for a tour. They were accompanied by executive producer Thomas Schlamme.
Afterthe tour, there was a small ceremony for the show held in the Rose Garden.
Sorkin gave an interview to Variety from the event and, inevitably, was asked if the show could come back in some form:
“If I had an idea, sure. I didn’t think about it seriously, frankly, until today… We’ll see what happens when I wake up tomorrow. But, if you’re asking me now, this is how I feel.
I just got a couple of ideas for episodes just walking around the White House. Like, ‘why didn’t we ever do this? Why didn’t we ever do that?’”
Sorkin seemed to admit that his highly idealized version of the President, and the politics surrounding them, simply wouldn’t fly in today’s cynical, butter and divided political world:
“I suspect that a new president would have a hard time living up to people’s memories of Martin, but maybe enough time has gone by and it’s a whole new generation.
Because part of it is being idealistic, it does need to feel like it’s taking place in the world that we live in for it to work. It does need to feel like our world…. We couldn’t possibly come up with stories in the room that are crazier than the actual stories that we see.”
There is clearly something floating around in Sorkin’s head, perhaps inspired further by the visit. The original show featured more than a season where the President’s fitness to office due to a degenerative disease was called into question, and the Vice President was often maneuvering to take over.
So who said today’s world is too crazy for storylines for the show?