What will become of the popular political TV series, The West Wing, now its creator and writer has quit, asks Oliver Burkeman
There was a time when the White House of The West Wing was considered to be so much in tune with the White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that the fictional version began to take an active role in policy development. Members of Congress wanting to test the water on planned legislation, it was rumoured, would submit their proposals first, not to focus groups or to Washington Post correspondents, but to Aaron Sorkin, the creator, writer and all-round deity of the award-winning television series. If the avuncular, public- spirited administration of Josiah "Jeb" Bartlet could only be persuaded to take an idea on board, the reasoning went, that guaranteed it a public airing and an intelligent mulling of its benefits - more, perhaps, than it might get in the real world.
Now, though, there is a decidedly anachronistic feeling to a White House where the president seems never to sleep, or where his staff openly revel in the exchange of witty barbs with the press corps (Typical Josh Lyman: "I'm not your girlfriend, I'm not your camp counsellor, and I'm not your sixth-grade teacher you had a crush on. I'm a graduate of Harvard and Yale, and I believe that my powers of debate can rise to meet the Socratic wonder that is the White House press corps." Typical Ari Fleischer: "I'm not going to comment on that.") Martin Sheen is as likely to be mentioned in the media as a result of his famous - and in many circles deeply unpopular - opposition to the war in Iraq as for his role as President Bartlet, the thoughtful Catholic from New Hampshire.
The vocally-liberal presidential aides of The West Wing, holding meetings as they walk at improbable speeds down the corridors are, in the real world, off writing memoirs, or waiting in a holding pattern at Washington think-tanks until a Democratic president is elected. In the Bartlet White House, reproach is most frequently delivered through bitter sarcasm, delivered at machine-gun speed; in the Bush administration, former staffers have said, late arrivals are greeted by the rather more sinister, and only half-joking, "missed you at Bible study".
It is not just the changing times that seem to be to blame for the news this week that Sorkin is to leave The West Wing at the end of this season, severing his connections with the series that he dreamed up and for which he wrote 70 pages of dialogue a week, dominating the writing process in a way unheard-of on team-based shows such as Friends or The Sopranos. According to sources on the show, there were missed budgets, missed deadlines, and extremely well-paid actors kept waiting for scripts they then couldn't memorise in time, thanks to the often stunning complexity of Sorkin's trademark crackling dialogue. Then there were the recurring disputes over actors' pay, including the rancorous departure of Rob Lowe, and Sorkin's high-profile drugs bust - hardly helpful for the NBC network.
While ratings continued to soar, though, it seemed that executives there were content to tolerate Sorkin's famously close-to-the-wire working methods, which often echoed the crisis-to-crisis long-hours culture of the Clinton White House. Comparing his working methods to those of the writer of Ally McBeal and The Practice, David Kelly, Sorkin described how Kelly told him: "'Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I write Ally McBeal, Thursday, Friday and Saturday I write The Practice. Sunday, I'm with my wife and kids.' And I thought, I have a real schedule, too. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, I freak out 'cos I haven't thought of what next week's show is. Thursday I start yelling at people because I haven't thought of what next week's show is. Friday, I go, 'Oh my God, there's going to be half an hour of dead air' . . . and then it finally gets done."
But The West Wing never left the top 10 in the United States until this season, where it now languishes at number 23. This time last season it attracted an average 17 million viewers; this season the figure has plummeted to 13.5 million. The same tolerance, it appeared, could no longer be extended.
"This has been the experience of any writer's dreams," Sorkin said in a statement. "I had the best job in showbusiness for four years, and I'll never forget that."
But behind the scenes, exasperation was setting in. "Was it a dysfunctional family? Sure," a West Wing insider said. "Aaron is brilliant, and I'm sure they'd have wanted him to continue with the show, but the problems were pretty well known for everyone involved."
At the height of its success, The West Wing's links to the real-life corridors of power were genuine - Clinton chiefs of staff John Podesta and Leon Pannetta both acted as advisers to John Spencer, who plays Bartlet's sharply intelligent aide, Leo McGarry - and the cast made little secret of where their political sympathies lay.
The show is what viewers "hope life is like in the West Wing, because these are all good people, trying to do the right thing, and I think they really want it to be what it's like", Alison Janney said of the Clinton administration at the time, discussing her role as CJ. The only slight problem was that Sorkin seemed to operate his punishing weekly schedule, producing script after script redolent with optimism and hymns of praise to public service, side by side with a fairly serious drug habit. After cocaine and hallucinogenic mushrooms were discovered in his suitcase at Burbank Airport in Los Angeles in April 2001, as he was preparing to take a flight, he pleaded guilty to two felonies, paid a fine of $7,000, entered rehab and embarked on a round of public contrition.
"I'm really no longer going to be the guy who wrote A Few Good Men," he told the now-defunct Talk magazine, referring to the play, later a film, that first propelled him to fame. "I'm going to be the guy who got into drug trouble." Earlier, when writing the 1995 movie, The American President, his schedule of round-the-clock writing and little sleep had been fuelled by cocaine smoking, he told Talk. But it was not just the drugs, or the change in the political colours of the real White House that left executives feeling the show had lost its touch: more central was the transformation in the political atmosphere that followed September 11th.
Rapid-fire witty dialogue - Sorkin's true genius - could no longer occupy quite the same central place in the show's scripts, for a start, and moreover, the episode, Isaac and Ishmael, written hurriedly to respond to the attacks, was widely interpreted as condescending and saccharine. Terrorist crises, malfunctioning presidential planes and snipers outside the White House now seem to occur pretty much every week under President Bartlet - a resort to the stereotypical high drama of political fiction that The West Wing had earlier avoided.
On top of that, Rob Lowe's departure - in a dispute over pay, though cleverly disguised in the current series as necessitated by Sam Seaborn's decision to run for Congress - seriously injured the show in the ratings.
"They lost the guy whose major appeal was to the younger audience," says the show insider, noting how The West Wing has been losing out to reality television such as American Idol and Survivor. "The others, these older guys, were not going to pull in that audience." As for Sorkin, the source said, "he was The West Wing. God knows what it's going to be without him".