Will you miss "The West Wing"?

Salon staffers explain why they stopped watching -- or why they're still hanging in there.

Editor's note: On Sunday, NBC announced that the current season of "The West Wing" would be its last. After seven seasons, the show will go off the air in May.

Read more: Arts & Entertainment, Arts & Entertainment TV Features

Jan. 24, 2006 | Chewy dialogue and other irritants
An ex-boyfriend of mine used to describe the dialogue on "The West Wing" as "chewy." He was an actor, and that one pretentious yet obscure adjective prejudiced me against the show from the very beginning, that and the fact that I wasn't permitted to speak during the entire hour "The West Wing" aired, lest my then-boyfriend miss some particularly chewy exchange. Thanks in part to these extenuating circumstances, I quickly grew to resent the show's nonstop onslaught of political information, packed tightly into a tart coating of wit and understatement, and then volleyed to and fro, from C.J. to President Bartlet, from Josh to Toby as they strode purposefully through the corridors of the White House. How could every character on the show speak in the same clipped, stylized, clever monotone? What single human could manage that kind of talk, let alone manage it while pacing swiftly through those hallowed hallways? What kind of demented geniuses could shift from spirited jokes to snide remarks to solemn pronouncements, all the while knowing that the fate of the free world rests in their hands?

Oh, but these weren't normal human beings. The characters who populated "The West Wing" weren't just clever super-geniuses capable of bandying their wit to and fro without breaking their stride, they were also deeply moral humans the likes of which you'd be lucky to encounter in your lifetime. Every one of the characters, each one, was so incredibly, absurdly righteous and solemn and high-minded and idealistic. And they never faltered! Sure, Leo had his drinking problem and Sam sometimes slept with the wrong woman, but no one took advantage of anyone or made any really big, really terrible missteps, at least not for the first few years on the air. No one was swayed by lobbyists throwing favors around. No one was remotely self-interested. They all had the good of the nation on their minds!

When "The West Wing" was at its best, I hated it -- or maybe I hated my boyfriend? Sometimes it's tough to tell the difference. But now that "The West Wing" is about to leave the air, like an irritating but charming houseguest, I feel a little sad to see it go. Maybe my sudden rush of nostalgia springs from the realization that no show about the executive branch is likely to compare to "The West Wing" at its best. "Commander in Chief," for one, makes it all too clear how difficult it is to keep a show like this fresh and interesting for the viewer. Veering into schmaltzy or sentimental territory, revisiting tired old stories everyone's seen before -- the pitfalls of dramatizing the presidency are countless. Looking back on "The West Wing," with its smart, lovable characters -- lovable even when we didn't know that much about them (Toby), or they had the same vague crushes for years and years (Josh and Donna) -- it's tough not to wish they could stick around for a few more years.

Is Geena Davis alone an acceptable substitute for "The West Wing's" remarkable cast? Are the flashy theatrics of "E-Ring" supposed to distract us from the fact that the show has the sort of oversimplified grasp of foreign policy that calls to mind Cold War thrillers of the '80s? Even taking into account the melodrama of the last few seasons, no other political show can quite compare to the charisma and intelligence of "The West Wing" at its prime.

And that's not to mention its chewiness.

-- Heather Havrilesky

Nerd Heaven
At its peak, "The West Wing" was Nerd Heaven: You learned how the government worked, that it was corrupted but could be saved. You learned Gilbert & Sullivan arcana (Rob Lowe's character was especially useful on this point). You learned that the president can learn to be a better dad, and that high-powered Washington feminists sometimes go home to sit on the floor in an old pair of jeans and listen to "Astral Weeks" and cry.

All this emotion, all this loving chitter-chatter about the Middle East and the tobacco lobby and the "press corps," was self-evidently the work of one man, perhaps more so than any major television drama in the medium's history. If Aaron Sorkin was really a pothead, that would make sense; the peculiar fugue state marijuana intoxication can produce in a highly driven Type A personality might well result in a meticulous and obsessive universe like that of "The West Wing." When Sorkin left the show, its new "runners" tried to keep the nerdiness intact, but the pull of melodrama -- the polestar toward which all TV inevitably gravitates -- was too strong.

When John Goodman, playing a right-wing Republican House speaker, temporarily became president, someone remembered the right geeky details: He had to resign his congressional seat, because you can't work for two branches of government at the same time. So the scene seemed right, but the impulse driving it had gone all askew. For one thing, I can't remember what crisis had provoked this improbable event, and I don't care. In Sorkin's "West Wing," the details -- the pure force of procedure, Machiavellian as it might be in its short-term operations -- always trumped the melodrama, and there was a kind of Yale debating-club certainty that procedural purity and doctrinal virtue went hand in hand. I don't think this has ever been true in the real world, but it made for reassuring television. As the real executive branch in Washington set out to destroy the constitutional separation of powers and swaddle itself in ever-thicker garments of imperial authority, "The West Wing" tried to follow, dreaming big neocon dreams and inhaling the fumes of terrorist fantasies. So it lost its soul. But then, haven't we all?

-- Andrew O'Hehir

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