Aaron Sorkin was clearly emotional on Friday during his visit to the White House to celebrate the 25ththe anniversary of “The West Wing” — so much so that it got him thinking about a revival of the critically adored political drama.
“If I had a concept, sure,” Sorkin advised. Selection afterwards. “I haven’t thought about it critically, frankly, until now… Let’s see what happens after I wake up tomorrow. However, if you’re asking me now, that’s how I really feel.”
Sorkin, director/executive producer Thomas Schlamme and stars Martin Sheen, Richard Schiff, Dulé Hill, Janel Moloney, Emily Procter, Melissa Fitzgerald and Mary McCormack met with President Joe Biden in the map room, then took a private tour of the building. (President Biden then left for meetings in Delaware.) Later, first lady Jill Biden held a proper Rose Garden ceremony for the show, held outside the real-life West Wing and Oval Office.
“I just picked up some concepts for episodes just by walking around the White House,” Sorkin said. “Like, ‘Why haven’t we done this? Why haven’t we tried this?’”
Sorkin mentioned that he has been hesitant about a new version of “The West Wing” until now because he was worried that audiences would miss the original cast too much. “I think a new president would have a hard time living up to people’s memories of Martin,” he said of Sheen and his character, President Jed Bartlet. “But maybe enough time has passed and it’s a whole new era. An era that, by the way, because of streaming, thinks we’re doing the show now!”
Sorkin said he doesn’t have a political agenda when it comes to contemplating a “West Wing” revival. “I just thought it was a great place to set myself,” he said. “There are all kinds of stories that come down the drain that you can tell, and that aspirational, idealistic, romantic style of writing suits me.”
After all, the political landscape has changed dramatically since “The West Wing” went off the air after seven seasons in 2006. And Sorkin admitted, “We couldn’t provide stories in the room that were crazier than the real stories we see.”
He agreed that maintaining an idealistic, aspirational story is perhaps “very exhausting” in this local climate. “As part of it is being idealistic, it has to really feel like it’s happening on this planet that we live on for it to work,” he said. “It has to really feel like our world. So it can be exhausting, but as Brad Whitford, as Josh Lyman, says in the Season 3 premiere, ’20 Hours in America,’ ‘It’s going to be exhausting,’ and Toby says, ‘It’s the exhausting that makes it good.'”
Sorkin also mentioned that it’s a big question whether a second Trump presidency would make a revival of “The West Wing” more or less interesting to him. “In fact, it will present incentives to do it, but also complications,” he mentioned. “The concern may be that everything we’ve done on the show could be seen as a rebuttal to Donald Trump’s world.”
Warner Bros. TV President Channing Dungey, who was also at the White House event, said she is open to whatever Sorkin decides he wants to do. (She has hinted in the past that she would be open to a new version of “The West Wing.”)
“There are a lot of shows right now that are doing reboots, and I feel like it might be exhausting to go back to ‘The West Wing,’ but I wouldn’t put it before Aaron,” she said. “He’s a really good man. What I really liked about ‘The West Wing’ is that it wasn’t a partisan show. It was a show that was about people who were prepared to fight for something bigger than themselves. They often had arguments and debates between both sides of the aisle. I really liked that as a kind of idealistic view of how things could work. If you were to start now, in this moment, in the current climate, it would certainly be completely different. The political landscape has changed a lot since this show was made.”
Dr. Biden, Sorkin and Sheen all gave speeches at the White House event, and Sorkin drew applause for declaring that Joe Biden’s decision in July to end his presidential campaign for the good of the nation felt like an idealistic moment straight out of “The West Wing.”
“Over the years, I’ve seen that at times of peak political rigidity, pundits have warned us not to count on a second ‘West Wing,’ not to count on the selfless act of statesmanship, not to count on anyone to put the nation first,” Sorkin said in his speech. “Yet the reality is that ‘West Wing’ moments happen. And Dr. Biden, we saw proof of that on the morning of July 21.”
Sorkin later noted that he remembered thinking, when news of Biden’s exit from the race broke, that it was such a “West Wing”-esque sacrifice that “you could practically hear the music coming up behind what he did.”
Sorkin said he doesn’t mind when pundits label something like this as a second “‘West Wing.'” “I hope it’s something to aspire to,” he said, especially in this dark and divided political world. “You don’t have to look very far to see reminders of how sad it is how far we’ve come. But I don’t think we’ve gone so far that we can’t go back. I hope we can fix this.”
The White House event featured many distinctive touches inspired by the show, including a performance by the White House Marine Band of “The West Wing” theme and a cocktail party dubbed “The Jackal,” named after a dance and lip-sync by the show’s press secretary, C.J. Cregg (performed by Allison Janney). A “big block of cheese,” another reference from the show, could be discovered among a bunch of memorabilia parked inside a White House show celebrating the 25th anniversary.the anniversary of “The West Wing”, as well as a model of the show’s set.
“I can’t tell you how many Marine Corps people, bandmasters, Secret Service agents and senior aides would say that ‘The West Wing’ was what made them want to go into public service, and that was a big deal,” Sorkin said. “It was an exciting day. They clearly watched the series!”
Dungey added: “It’s amazing the kind of impact that ‘The West Wing’ has had over the years. It was really cool to see how many people were excited and impressed to satisfy their TV heroes. You can’t help but be impressed by that. There was one moment when they surprised us, when we went out on the balcony of the East Wing, and they had the Marine Band play the theme song. Everyone’s eyes were teary.”
In his remarks at the time, Biden praised the narrative of the present: “When ‘The West Wing’ lights up our screens, every wave of the opening theme, every quick line, every quick walk through seemingly limitless hallways — every efficiency — shapes how we see the public servants behind those white walls, fighting for a better tomorrow. So whenever we start to slide into cynicism or apathy — we simply have to remember Jed Bartlet’s White House. A place where there are big blocks of cheese and everyone belongs. The place where you do good. That’s the story that ‘The West Wing’ showed the nation: this family we’ve created here, dedicated to a purpose greater than any of us.”
Biden then brought out Sheen, who delivered a fiery speech that could have come from President Barletta on the campaign trail, reading from Rabindranath Tagore’s “Where the Mind Is Without a Care.” (The poem, written about India under British rule, ends with the line “let my country awake” — perhaps now also a call for citizens to stop sleeping on the problem facing democracy in the U.S.)
Sorkin mentioned his authentic plan to mark the 25ththe The idea behind “The West Wing” anniversary was simply to send an email to Schlamme and reflect on how much time had passed. Instead, with the assistance of Warner Bros. TV, it became a weeklong celebration — including a cast reunion during Sunday’s Emmys.
“The thinking behind ‘The West Wing’ from the beginning was that, in general, in popular culture, our elected leaders are portrayed as Machiavellian or idiotic,” he said. “I thought, what if they were as dedicated and competent as the doctors and nurses on a hospital show, the cops on a cop show, the lawyers on a David E. Kelley show? Hopefully, we needed 9 to 10 o’clock to entertain you, to compel you for however long we asked for your attention, and everything else was gravy.”
Missing from the White House ceremony were a handful of stars busy filming duties, including Alison Janney, Rob Lowe and Bradley Whitford. “The rest of us are apparently unemployed,” Sorkin joked. To which Biden interrupted with a quick response: “Not yet!” she joked.
