“I am the Lord your God. You shall not worship any other gods before me. Ah, those were the good old days.”
And that’s how we meet New Hampshire Democrat President Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen) in the pilot episode of “The West Wing,” which premiered on September 22, 1999.
That the protagonist’s first lines are the literal words of the Almighty is a statement of sorts. This was a series that saw politics as civic religion, a patriotic evangelism that appealed to our better angels but didn’t fit with earthly realities.
But before that, this was a well-crafted, emotional workplace drama. The pilot finds the White House in the midst of a crisis: personal, political, and many in between. A convoy of Cuban refugees heading to Florida is in danger. One of the president’s aides, Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe), has unknowingly been sleeping with a prostitute. Another aide, Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford), may lose his job after embarrassing a prominent religious conservative during a television appearance. And President Bartlet is injured after crashing his bicycle into a tree.
Written by creator Aaron Sorkin and directed by Thomas Schram, the episode establishes the show’s signature tone and energy. The camera rushes to keep up with the crew, and the dialogue moves at the speed of a ’30s screwball comedy. Music by W.G. Snuffy Walden heightens the action with starry sentiment. “Smart, smart, smart!” the pilot says. Busy, busy, busy!
Above all, the pilot establishes the show’s core illusion: that being right and being politically effective are the same thing. Josh walks himself into a mandatory apology meeting with a religious group. It doesn’t go well; his main antagonist turns out to be a cranky, nasty anti-Semite and the meeting devolves into a shouting match. Bartlet interrupts the meeting by correcting his guest for misquoting the First Commandment.
Instead of offering Josh’s head on a platter, the Christian missions want an apology and policy concessions. Bartlett, leaning jauntily on a cane, wants them differently. He had a bicycle accident because he was upset that anti-abortion extremists had threatened his granddaughter, who supported “a woman’s right to choose” in a magazine interview. “You’re going to denounce these people,” he says. “Until you do, you all get out of my White House.”
The President then pays tribute to the Cubans who died during the voyage for freedom and warns Josh not to commit fraud. Inspirational music plays and the President and his honored staff return to the business of the nation. The credits roll. God Bless America.
I was initially skeptical of “The West Wing.” I didn’t like its preachy approach and the way it favored paragons of public service. I lamented its dominance over HBO’s “The Sopranos” in winning Emmy awards during its first four years. (“Anyone who still believes ‘The West Wing’ is a better show than ‘The Sopranos’ doesn’t deserve to own a television,” I wrote in 2001.)
But I have enjoyed watching every episode of this show over its seven seasons. Just as a president must have genuine appeal to be elected, a show cannot become a phenomenon like “The West Wing” unless it excels at something. This show was the last, mighty breath of morally simple network soap opera, and it knew how to tug at our heartstrings like a concert harp.
Take, for example, the climactic showdown with religious conservatives, one of whom confronts Bartlett: “If kids can buy pornography on the street corner for $5, isn’t that too high a price to pay for free speech?”
“No,” the president responded. “On the other hand, I think paying $5 for porn is too much.”
Yes, this exchange is a clear example of Sorkin’s habit, later mainstreamed in his journalism drama The Newsroom, of constructing straw villains and setting up lines for his protagonists to smash like softballs being hurled at a baseball tee.
But it’s fun! It ends with a stroke of first-rate irony, as the scene plays out like the love child of Franklin Roosevelt and Groucho Marx. You’re fully aware that Sorkin is writing an argument for his own mouthpiece to win, and yet it’s so much fun you can’t help but get swooning.
I use the word “enamoured” carefully. Above all, “The West Wing” was a romance. Sometimes the romance was literal, like the slow, drawn-out affair between Josh and his assistant and sparring partner Donna (Janel Moloney). (Sorkin’s style and jokes were more like a movie love story than a political thriller, more like Gable and Colbert than Woodward and Bernstein.) But it was also a love affair between passionate professionals and their work, and a romantic comedy of good government.
“The West Wing” is the most old-fashioned of political wish-fulfillment. The series premiered in the waning days of President Clinton’s compromise-and-triangle administration. It portrayed an alternate Washington of iron-willed liberals who knew the amendment as well as the law, and who won by sticking to their guns (or gun control).
Even as the show entered the 2000s, it remained true to its 1990s roots. Republican George W. Bush narrowly won a Florida recount, but on “The West Wing” Bartlett handily defeated a quasi-Bush, played by James Brolin, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who derided the quasi-Bush for his ignorant ramblings.
Bartlett’s America rewards voters who combat lies and fear-mongering with facts and reason. Good faith and good argument prevail. People of good will debate rationally with their colleagues across party lines. Politics is a serious battle of ideas, not a war of attrition where everyone is pitted against everyone.
Just as “24” oversimplified the war on terror, “The West Wing” popularized a Vaseline-lensed view of politics. Strategist Elizabeth Spiers has written that a quarter century after the show first aired, political pundits are still plagued by “terminal ‘The West Wing’ brain,” a condition characterized by the belief that Americans are desperate to compromise and unite for the common good.
And it’s not just the political pros: Shortly before Kamala Harris’ nomination, Aaron Sorkin suggested Democrats replace President Biden with Mitt Romney, a move only Sorkin could come up with. (In the fourth and final episode of Sorkin’s series, Bartlet temporarily gives up his position as Republican speaker of the House.)
The show’s commitment to bipartisan uplift was integral to its old-fashioned storytelling style: Airing on NBC, “The West Wing” was essentially a 20th-century broadcast network drama: It needed to have a clear good guy at the center, and it needed to give them the victory.
But it came out the same year as “The Sopranos,” at a time when TV drama was changing dramatically. Tony Soprano’s America was in decline, the conflict was brutal, and everyone lived in their own self-interest. The system in “The Sopranos” was not an inherently good system in need of competent, selfless stewards. It was a gilded pyramid that stank from the top and oozed misery downwards.
In retrospect, the Emmy showdown between “The West Wing” and “The Sopranos” wasn’t just a battle for the artistic soul of television. It was a debate about the nature of the country. And the quarter-century of war, corruption, irresponsibility, prejudice, violence and erosion of trust that followed suggested we live in a place closer to Tony Soprano’s America than Jed Bartlett’s.
In reality, there was no deep and broad desire among good people to recognize common ground and solve problems together. People wanted to fight. Barack Obama may have had a “West Coast”-esque tone in his appeal for a united purple America, but he was hit with backlash and birtherism, and politics only became more polarized, ugly and tribal.
It was not with any Bartlett-style respect for the sanctity of government that the Jan. 6 mob tore down the Capitol when the election didn’t go their way. Of course, they fought under the banner of Donald J. Trump, whose ruthless reality show, The Apprentice, debuted on NBC in 2004, just as The West Wing and similar network dramas were being pushed aside by the likes of The Bachelor.
Times and sensibilities change, in Hollywood and in Washington, but there was always a touch of melancholy in “The West Wing,” a reminder of a bygone political era, a bygone spirit of sacrifice and bygone television dramas.
Knowing what happened next makes the pilot seem even older than its 25-year history. But even for a skeptic like me, rewatching it is an emotional experience. I know how the story ends, but I still find myself laughing and crying, even as I wonder if the America it celebrates actually existed.
For better or worse, a good romantic relationship, and writing a good political speech, make you feel it even if you don’t believe it.
