Revisiting The West Wing
Nineteen-Ninety-Nine is often seen as one of the greatest years in film history, but it also saw the debut of many influential television shows. Freaks and Geeks launched a generation of young comedy stars, Family Guy became an adult animation classic, and The Sopranos has since been held up as “the Citizen Kane of television.” The West Wing was an expected hit given the extensive resources that NBC poured into Aaron Sorkin’s political drama, but that doesn’t mean that its impact was any less significant. After seven seasons and a tangible impact on the depiction of the political process on television, The West Wing found a new life when it was made available on the Max streaming service.
The West Wing has benefited because of how active its surviving crew and cast members are. Sorkin won an Academy Award for writing The Social Network, and transitioned into an in-demand, albeit divisive director. While Allison Janney reached the greatest level of success in comparison to her co-stars, other The West Wing veterans like Richard Schiff, Bradley Whitford, and Jimmy Smits have had respectable careers as character actors.
Former cast members Mary McCormack and Melissa Fitzgerald recently wrote What's Next: A Backstage Pass to The West Wing, Its Cast and Crew, and Its Enduring Legacy of Service, an extensive study into the show’s inception, survival, and resurgence in popularity thanks to a 2020 reunion special that reunited the cast for a recreation of the episode “Hartsfield’s Landing.” Although no making-of book would be able to get this much access without a positive spin, even if it wasn’t written by two of the show’s alumni, What’s Next is less toothless than one might imagine. In addition to the acknowledgment of the noticeable decline in quality following Sorkin’s departure at the end of the fourth season, there are also details on Rob Lowe’s departure, the impact of John Spencer’s death, and other creative differences that emerged.
The West Wing was ahead of its time in the reconfiguration of a political staff into the protagonists of a soap opera. The West Wing was bound by the erratic nature of politics, as it blended overarching storylines with “case-of-the-week” style issues that gave it an episodic feel. Not every episode was a classic in the vein of “Two Cathedrals,” but The West Wing’s hit ratio in its first four seasons was high.
A modern assessment of The West Wing could find aspects to praise in comparison to the schlocky political dramas that appear on streaming; even the worst of The West Wing is superior to the cynicism of House of Cards or the cloying melodrama of Scandal. Sorkin was smart to create his own version of history that didn’t mirror reality, and the approximation of legitimate details about political infrastructure added plausibility. Yet, What’s Next focuses just as much on the show’s relationship with real politics as it does with the creative process. There are far more interviews with future politicians and staffers inspired by the series than with current writers that grew up as Sorkin impersonators.
The West Wing was often at its weakest when it yielded to hypothetical lines-in-the-sand. While the series leaned fairly hard to the left, the insistence that every political conflict would result in a lesson learned has made The West Wing ring painfully in 2025. Issues such as women’s bodily autonomy, the recognition of LGBTQ people, military spending, and budgetary cuts could be condensed into puzzle boxes for President Josiah Bartlett and his staff to solve. Even if The West Wing didn’t always provide a clear-cut solution to the issues that it presented, it took efforts to condense them.
Sorkin’s abrupt departure at the end of the fourth season marked The West Wing shifting into its soap opera tendencies; the kidnapping of Bartlett’s daughter, which resulted in the brief transition of power to a Republican cabinet, was a significant low. Many of the best television shows of this era were more interested in dramatic conventions than a semblance of realism; few would look to The Shield for an authentic examination of the Los Angeles Police Department, or watch Boston Legal for insight on the judiciary process. The West Wing was the product of Sorkin’s genius as a wordsmith, as the “walk-and-talk” pattern of his snappy dialogue was immersive and entertaining.
However, the assertion that The West Wing was intended to provoke legitimate political change is far easier to criticize given the manner in which real life eclipsed even the wildest storylines. While viewers were likely savvy enough to recognize that Sorkin had presented an idealistic version of “checks and balances,” he hasn’t evolved as a pundit. Even Sorkin fans that weren’t dissuaded by the historical pastiches in The Trial of Chicago 7 or Being The Ricardos may have had to jump ship when he suggested that the Democrats select Mitt Romney as Kamala Harris’ running mate. The West Wing was a great television show, but it doesn’t need to be remembered as anything more than that.