The West Wing as It Should Be, Given We've Had a Preview.
How a single TV series informed my own writing, though I may not have known it at the time.
I’ve been watching “The West Wing” again. This is the third time—the entire series from start to finish, though I confess to loving the first three seasons most. I watch it for two reasons: first because the writing is great. It’s beyond compare in any series I’ve ever watched in all the years I’ve been watching TV series. I have laughed, I have cried—many times—and I have marveled at the way Aaron Sorkin, along with writers like Lawrence O’Donnell, brought life to a White House West Wing we could only hope might run that way. (Yes, that Lawrence O’Donnell. He wrote 16 episodes and was producer and co-producer of many more.)
Secondly, I’m watching it again because I need the strength of Josiah Barlet, Leo McGarry, Toby Ziegler, Josh Lyman, Sam Seaborn, C.J. Cregg, Charlie Young, et al, as I try to get through the real-life events happening right now in our White House West Wing, knowing what a full-out disaster it has become.
I find I’m weeping more often this time around, and that’s okay. It’s how I should feel today. The West Wing series ran from 1999 to 2006, during which I was writing my blog, Ramona’s Voices. The topics, built on real current events, were ever-present on my mind. Looking back they may well have—no, they obviously—influenced me, though I wasn’t putting two and two together at the time.
But I do now.
I want those people back, flawed as they were. They had heart and guts and an essential brand of patriotism so sorely lacking now I can only look to fiction to find it.
I want to write like the writers on “The West Wing” did. I’ve always wanted to do that, not as a TV writer—I couldn’t do that and I know it—but as a writer who can pull from the political events of the day and give them such a writerly jolt people would sit up and listen.
It’s my dream, and the dream of every writer political and non-political who has taken on the task of bringing attention to the atrocities foisted on us by the Trump regime, to witness and chronicle the actions facing us, reminding every American that facts matter, that heart matters, that patriotism requires the sacrifices that greed, hubris, and unearned power do not. It’s ordinary citizens (and non-citizens) who are paying for the turnaround that was the 2024 Presidential election. We suffer now for the folly that was that election, an election outcome that could so easily have been avoided by the simple act of voting in numbers large enough to overcome the electoral college. But it’s done now and we’re working to undo it.
I want Americans to read us, to listen to us, to believe us now. And then I want them to act on our words so that nothing like this will ever happen again.
“Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things...every one! So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, ‘Liberal,’ as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won’t work, Senator, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor.” --
Written by Lawrence O’Donnell and spoken by Jimmy Smits as Matt Santos on The West Wing
(See full transcript here)
(Cross-posted at Constant Commoner)
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The Diplomat, whose three seasons I've now watched twice, is every bit as smart as The West Wing and goes beyond it into both geopolitical brinkmanship and the complex marriage between two diplomats, brilliantly played by Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell. Alison Janney is in it, too, and so is Bradley Whitford. The dialogue is terrific, even the silences are impressive--and the settings in England are mouth-watering.
Anyone not horrified by the photo of an unarmed protester beaten down by weaponized law enforcement has something seriously wrong with them.