To watch is to yearn for a different world: how The West Wing made politics feel glorious

Three-quarters of the way through Sam Esmail’s 2023 apocalypse film Leave the World Behind, 13-year-old Rose (Farrah Mackenzie) is lying in bed with her family. Her father (Ethan Hawke) is dead to the world. Her mother (Julia Roberts) is fretting over her brother, who is running a fever and losing his teeth. Rose lies in the middle, wide awake. When her mom whispers, “What are you still doing up?”, her reply is most unexpected.

“I keep thinking about this one West Wing episode,” she says and starts retelling a life-and-death story someone tells the president.

“You watched The West Wing?” her mother interrupts.

“Only the Aaron Sorkin seasons,” Rose replies.

It’s as funny as it is unlikely. The West Wing, which was launched on 22 September 1999, is 25 years old and an entire galaxy away from most 13-year-olds’ orbits today.

Sorkin created the series as a chronicle of a fictional US president (Josiah “Jed” Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen) and his wildly committed White House staff. The pilot lands you bam, in the thick of it. It’s early morning and the president has ridden his bicycle into a tree. His chief of staff, Leo (John Spencer), signs into the front desk of the White House and within minutes, the moving parts of The West Wing machine are pumping like a locomotive.

In the first of what will become the show’s signature move – the walk-and-talk – the camera tracks Leo over the 3:44 minutes it takes him to reach his desk, during which you meet the people (deputy chief of staff, Josh – played by Bradley Whitford – and Mrs Landingham, Bartlet’s secretary), the issues (Cuban refugees sailing into the port of Miami; Josh about to get fired for “going on TV and making sense”, ie calling out the objectionable flank of the religious right) and, most of all, Sorkin’s inimitably clever, quick-fire repartee, which keeps those two things so tightly bound and you glued to your screen.

Because the show starts in August 1999, a year and change away from the first (fictional) midterm elections, its timeline is neatly laid out by the US electoral cycle, with its two-term cap on the presidency. Unless Bartlet is impeached, dies or loses, you know you will be with these guys for the next seven years of your life.

There is no question that it feels dated. Early plot lines reference fax machines and the still-airborne Concorde. For Josh to rewatch the talkshow that nearly gets him fired, he has to rewind a video tape. Cars don’t have GPS and “writing emails” is something the characters discuss at length. Two seasons will go by before the show – along with the nation – has to reckon with 9/11.

The core sentiment of the show also feels like something from another time. Unlike its contemporary, The Sopranos, or the prestige TV that followed (eg The Wire or Breaking Bad), Sorkin’s show came from an alternative universe where celebrating goodness – good men, good leaders, good systems – was paramount. At its core, The West Wing is fundamentally hopeful, cleaving to old-fashioned values such as fidelity and devotion, respect and civic duty.

Sorkin has described The West Wing as “a valentine to public service” and that is exactly how the show reads. It’s why Sam, Josh, Toby and press secretary CJ Cregg (Allison Janney, oh how we love you) all, at one point or another, cancel dates with people they really like and why Republicans (a pundit, a senator, a lawyer) all agree to work in this Democrat White House. It’s why Mrs Landingham, as a government employee, won’t accept discounts she is offered or allow negative comments (like calling the president a klutz or a geek) in the Oval office. And when staffers rebuke temporary colleagues (Mary-Louise Parker as women’s rights lobbyist Amy Gardner) with “the only constituency that matters in this building is the constituency of one – the guy in the round room”, they are not being ironic. In almost every episode, someone says some version of: “I serve at the pleasure of the President.”

I still find it amazing that entire episodes are structured around things like a filibuster or that Back to the Future’s Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) moonlights as a constitutional scholar helping foreign lawmakers to write a body of law for their new nation. (Sorkin had left by the time of the latter storyline).

Even if critics have rightly pointed out that The West Wing inaccurately portrays American democracy (variously as “an aristocratic technocracy”, “magical thinking” and “personality-driven politics”), it has nonetheless directly impacted on people’s desire to get involved at all. In pretty much every interview the cast has given in the past two decades, one of them has mentioned how fans turned civil servants have come up to them saying: “You’re the reason I do what I do now.”

Yet the show was not about fantastically successful politics. In fact, as former writer Lawrence O’Donnell put it in 2021, it’s about the opposite: “compromise and disappointment”. This point is most emphatically underlined by Toby’s character. “We’ve been doing this for a year, and all we’ve gotten is a year older,” he says early on. “Our job approval’s 48% and I think that number’s soft. I’m tired of being the field captain for the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.”

In a flashback to the first Bartlet campaign, you see him sitting in a bar drinking early in the day. A woman asks if he’s any good at his job.

“As a professional political operative?”

She nods – how many wins has he had?

“All together? Including city council, two congressional races, a senate race, a gubernatorial campaign and a national campaign?”

She nods again.

“None,” he says, after a long pause, taking a drag on his cigar. And he is drinking, he explains, because he is about to get fired from the Bartlet campaign.

Sorkin held from the start that the show was pure fiction and nonpolitical. He had intended to tell a gripping what-if reimagining of the 2000 election in which Dubya would not beat his Democrat opponent, Al Gore, and the left would not be relegated to the outer reaches of public life.

So the story is that Toby is not fired from the Bartlet campaign. Instead, he along with Josh and Sam and CJ and Leo, gets this Democrat New Hampshire governor and Nobel laureate in economics elected by the skin of his teeth – with 48% of the vote.

This sets the scene for the perfect hero narrative arc. From the outset, Bartlet and his people are battling a Republican House and Senate to get anything done. “I’m so sick of Congress I could vomit,” says Josh in season one. By season five, you see him jumping out of a cab one evening to shout at the Capitol building in sheer, unadulterated frustration.

There are a lot of things in the show that you watch through your fingers now: the casual homophobia, the white-saviour complex underpinning every fictional storyline set in Africa, the anti-Muslim racism in the show’s response to 9/11, the basic misogyny written into most every female character for laughs. Few people, really, have ever found Sorkin’s jokes funny.

What Sorkin is best at writing is frustration and indignation: Toby’s lovable apoplexy at being right and having to compromise. Sheen’s rage – at hackery, at incompetence, at anyone taking aim at his daughters for political gain – making him lose his voice. CJ’s righteous anger at the mistreatment of girls in Saudi Arabia or gay high-school boys in Minnesota. Sam’s fury at being played by political opponents.

Also, no one since has written a part for Rob Lowe that is as funny or as charming as the character Sam Seaborn – whether he is being a nerd about dental hygiene or highway directions, or being taken to town on national television by a Republican pundit much smarter than he is.

What also comes through is Sorkin’s deep-set belief in the possibility of conciliation. For all the partisan bickering deployed to amp up the drama, there are as many West Wing subplots that hinge on finding common ground.

Think of John Goodman’s cameo as President Walken, a Republican who steps into the breach when Bartlet’s daughter is kidnapped and his ability to govern is ripped to shreds; Alan Alda as Republican candidate Arnie Vinick who agrees to serve as a Democrat’s secretary of state, despite having just lost to him in the primaries; Matthew Perry, in one of his best bit parts, as a Conservative West Wing lawyer, undaunted in his convictions by petty childishness and always willing to get alongside someone he disagrees with.

Political scientists concur that definitions of the left and the right, since the early 2000s, have exploded. The global political mood in 2024 seems to lead people to vote not out of hope but weariness. The UK general election saw the lowest voter turnout since universal suffrage in 1919 – more than a century ago. But the problems voters face – from housing to violence to poverty to energy and food insecurity – only seem to be getting harder.

We are quite desperately in need of government, at every level, to be even a tiny bit as good as The West Wing believes it can be.

To watch is to yearn for a world and a political system that can achieve that. A world in which a US president nominating two judges on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, simply because that will foster healthy debate and ensure the whole nation is represented, doesn’t come across as destructive. A world where leaders can sit down to tea and work out their differences. A world where the person in charge takes responsibility for their failings.

Midway through season three and despite his staff’s best attempts at shielding him, Bartlet is censured by Congress for not disclosing his multiple sclerosis to the voters. I think often about the change in his attitude. First bluster, then arrogant non-apology apologies, but then, actual humility.

“I was wrong,” he says, his voice gruffer with every word. “I was, I was just … I was wrong. I may not have had sinister intent at the outset, but there were plenty of opportunities for me to make it right. No one in government takes responsibility for anything any more. We foster, we obfuscate, we rationalise. ‘Everybody does it’ – that’s what we say. So we come to occupy a moral safe house where everyone’s to blame, so no one’s guilty.” He sighs. “I’m to blame. I was wrong.”

Imagine one of the many people patently responsible for our current messes owning up like that, in a way you could truly trust. As CJ would put it, now that would be a sight to see, I mean, a sight to see.