This is going to be one of the more obscure posts I have ever written and that is saying something.
I am a huge fan of the long-off-the-air TV show called The West Wing. It was a show about the trials and tribulations of a fantastically liberal US President and his staff. Since I recently moved into my own little apartment and have been finding ways to adjust to what I believe is clinically referred to as “loneliness” I have been on a week-long marathon West Wing bender (all seven seasons are up on Netflix).
The West Wing is a show that I return to every so often the way that other people return to Star Wars periodically. I know these episodes in and out, I know the characters up and down and having them going on in the background while I unpack my pots and pans has been very comforting; like having some old friends around.
However, everything I just said is only true of the first four seasons of The West Wing. And this is why this is interesting(ish).
In addition to simply being a very good and grown-up television show, The West Wing was unique because it was created by a man named Aaron Sorkin who did almost all of the writing for the first four seasons and none of the writing for the last three. The shift in the writing is tectonic and I think that is a very interesting thing to be aware of on a writerly sort of level.
You know Aaron Sorkin whether you know you do or not. He wrote A Few Good Men (“You can’t handle the true!”) and The Social Network (“You know what’s cooler than a million dollars ..?”) as well as a bunch of other stuff you have seen, but The West Wing is probably always going to be his opus if only because it was on for so long and so consistently good when he was writing it.
So he wrote the first four seasons. My understanding of why it stops there has a lot to do with the fact that having one guy writing everything caused expensive production delays and also the A.S. had some drug problems which caused some legal problems which caused even more and even more expensive production delays. So he and the show parted ways and the people behind the show assembled an army of TV writers to take over. Whether or not they did a good job has been debated (in Entertainment Weekly, I guess), but I will spare you the suspense and just tell you that they did not do a good job.
The show had a very specific tone and style and rhythm when Sorkin was writing it. It wasn’t just specific, it was unique. Obviously a room full of people couldn’t replicate what one guy had been doing himself for four or five years.
What is interesting is what they did. Once they took over - suddenly and immediately - as season five begins, there is an effort to replicate what had been going on before. The show was known for very fast and heavy dialogue and the ability to distill complex and abstract issues of politics and bureaucracy into cogent ideas and dramatic storylines (There is an episode in the first season that makes the census seem both interesting and dramatic. The. Census.) and so for an episode or two the new writers tried to do that, only they had no idea how to do that. What they did instead was watch all of the old episodes of The West Wing, notice that there were very few explosions, very little gun fire, no car chases and virtually no sex, and determine that what THEY should do is downplay all of the climactic moments. They end up burying all of their dramatic moments because they made the assumption that that was what a show with no explosions, gunfire, car chases or sex must have been doing this whole time.
That play didn’t last very long though and by the third episode of this newly-committee-written show, they opened with some jumpy/jittery flashback bullshit about a character falling off her horse as a girl and that - yes, THAT - is supposed to provide some sort of thematic backbone to a storyline about a woman dealing with trauma. To which I have to ask, “Really?!” This was a show that previously did not have ANY metaphorically-dramatic horses! Also, flashbacks were never treated as flashbacks, but as fully integrated concurrent storylines.
By the fourth episode of The Season of What The Fuck? there is a storyline that involves a mean-spirited gag of a presidential speech accidentally - yes, ACCIDENTALLY - being loaded into the President's teleprompter.
All of this is just my fancy way of saying that the show went from being kind of amazing to being not even good. I remember all of this as it happened in real time when the show was on TV and I stopped watching it. So right now - tonight - this is all very exciting for me because there is a season and some change of this show which I have never watched. I’m told that it blows for another season and that there is an episode which blatantly rips off Michael Bay’s epicly craptacular Armageddon.
What is additionally interesting is that by the final season of the show, that roomfull of writers had actually figured out how to replicate Aaron Sorkin’s mojo and they got things back on track. I have watched that final season and it is pretty good. It (accidentally) foretells the 2008 Presidential campaign in that it has an energetic and idealistic minority Democrat candidate running against an older by maverick liberal Republican.
What is additionally - writerly-ly - interesting about that last season is that the storylines start to recycle from the original seasons. That room full of writers found their groove by recreating the work that Sorkin had already done.
If you take away for a moment the fact that I am being a total fanboy right now - we might as well be arguing about whether the the USS Enterprise B had a more efficient Dilithium Crystal arrangement than the USS Enterprise D - there is something worth being aware of when you watch this show that has such a marked rift right in the middle of it. Sure, it is something that most people in the world don’t care about, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth being aware of; what is on display here is how important good writing can be. Not just in making a TV show good or not, but in conveying ideas, or not. Go0d writing can make the census exciting and dramatic, or not. Good writing can be vital. It can be alive like blood pumping down an artery, or not. It can teach us about the world we live in. Or not. And understanding how and why that works is important. Not just to fanboys, but to all of us.
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