Problems with The West Wing
Aaron Sorkin's Brilliant TV Drama Is Hampered by Its Genre
The West Wing, created by Aaron Sorkin, has had more political effect than a TV drama can support.
Aaron Sorkin’s series The West Wing was absolutely compelling. It had a great range of characters, a meticulously researched background, and storylines which made buying the boxed set n inevitability. But the requirements of writing a TV series may have prevented Sorkin from producing a truly probing political drama.
Obviously fictionalising a real setting, such as the White House, imposes constraints that a documentary would not have to work under. Audiences for fiction demand more complete and intricately plotted stories than those for reportage – it’s arguably one of the reasons why we consume so much fiction.
It would ludicrous to imply that Sorkin wanted to write a documentary, but had to fictionalise it to get the audience. However, his work was taken very seriously by a lot of people: British university students have been told to watch The West Wing to get a handle on American government, and a poll undertaken ironically in America showed that “President Bartlett” (Martin Sheen) had pretty good name recognition compared to many politicians.
The elements involved in a good Sorkin-style drama: high tension, flurries of brilliant banter, the triumph of intelligence and guts over self-interest and inertia, guide the stories into certain ends. Sorkin is extremely good at engaging the audience’s attention and sympathies with characters whose complexity and integrity makes them worth following over the long hours of a series. None of the main characters is going to do anything just because they’re a bit of a b*****d, as they might do in a soap, because it wouldn’t convince the audience or make sense within the genre.
Problems also tend to resolve quickly within the genre, and thrive on surprising denouements. When, for example, when Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) offends the Christian right with his joke about God and tax evasion, he is saved not by the resolution of the issue of whether he was right or wrong, but the introduction of another layer of complexity, and a dramatic coup, when Bartlett enters the room with his quotation from the Decalogue.
If Sorkin is writing about a comedy show in Hollywood, this generic tendency has little effect, but he wrote about the White House. Coupling Sorkin’s talent for characterisation with a political setting has some kind of political effect, regardless of his own feelings about the current situation. This must be especially true in a period when politics, and foreign policy in particular, has become of more immediate public interest than it has been for some time.
It is surely a good thing that dramas like The West Wing use political storylines, and develop them with nuance and accuracy. But, though it’s fascinating and addictive, The West Wing is a great drama about politics, not a great political drama.
