By Stephen Silver

In March of 2000 I attended a college journalism conference in New York for which the centerpiece was a screening of an episode of NBC's then-relatively new series "The West Wing," followed by a press conference featuring cast members Martin Sheen, Allison Janney, and Dule Hill. It was great to have the chance to ask Sheen questions both about politics and about his legendary film career, though one comment from the afternoon that always stuck in my head was one by Janney: "If Bush wins [the election], our show will basically be over."
Janney, her recent Emmy win notwithstanding, couldn't have had any idea just how right she was. After a great first season and even better second one, "The West Wing" took a huge nosedive in quality last year and judging by its two-hour season premiere on Wednesday, recovery is nowhere on the horizon.
"The West Wing" has suffered through more than its share of highly publicized behind-the-scenes trouble since its second season, including creator Aaron Sorkin's arrest for drug possession, a series of contract disputes involving both the cast and the writing staff, and the recent news of the impending departure of original cast member Rob Lowe. All of those things may have had an effect, but what really hurt the show were two major historical events over which Sorkin & Co. really had no control. If the election of George W. Bush is what crippled the show, it was the attacks of September 11 that rendered it next to irrelevant.
For the first year and a half of "West Wing"'s run, the fictional Bartlett Administration was essentially a shadow of the Clinton Administration- a group of left-of-center true believers who dealt with a Republican Congress, faced the occasional minor scandal, and confronted just about every major political issue that was important in the pre-recession, pre-War on Terror days of 1999-2000.
Bush's election, as Janney predicted, changed that calculus, as the show could no longer directly "rip from the headlines," in the tradition of its leadout, "Law & Order." This was originally masked by a long plotline involving President Bartlett's near-impeachment over nondisclosure of his suffering from Multiple Schlerosis, which while a desexualized rehash of the Clinton impeachment drama was nonetheless very well-written and well-acted. But Bush's election coincided with Sorkin's arrest and other behind-the-scenes troubles, seeming to indicate that trouble was on the way for the show. There were even whispers that Sorkin had always written the episodes while high and therefore the quality might suffer if he tried it sober.
Then September 11 happened, and the show- naturally- moved further and further away from real life and real politics. Now, "West Wing" exists in an alternate universe in which several things are different, such as: Jed Bartlett is the President, presidential elections take place in such years as 1998 and 2002, and September 11 never happened. That does make sense: it would be next to impossible, from a narrative perspective, for the show to deal with the events of (and after) 9/11 and pretend that Bartlett was president, simply because Bush, and his decisions as president, were so germane to the history of the attacks and their aftermath. So the show decided to continue on, dealing with issues based on real issues, but always sidestepping that one major event. As a result, nearly every episode of the past year has felt somehow empty- it's as though the rest of the world was transformed on that day, while only "The West Wing" stayed in the same place.
The show has attempted to address 9/11 indirectly several times in the past year, most infamously in its embarrassing season premiere last season- a ludicrous "lecture" by several of the characters teaching "lessons" about terrorism and tolerance that were clearly obvious to anyone over ten years old. (contrast that with "Law & Order"'s amazing 9/11-based season finale last year, probably the best hour of series television in the entire '01-'02 season). Over the course of Season 3 the subject was brought up weakly a few more times, mostly in connection with the fictional terrorist nation "Qumar." None of these plotlines worked either as drama or as commentary on the events of "real," non-"West Wing" America.
The past season was full of glaring weaknesses, from an uncharacteristic lack of seriousness to numerous dumb subplots, most notably the affair between Josh (Bradley Whitford) and the head of the National Organization for Women (Mary Louise Parker)- the fact that she was using him was known apparently to everybody but the writers. Excellent characters like Emily Proctor's Ann Coulter-based constitutional lawyer and Timothy Busfield's tough White House correspodent were dropped suddenly without any explanation whatsoever. And the storyline that the show had built towards since its inception, the re-election campaign, has been shockingly lackluster. In the greatest indication so far that Sorkin has either slipped considerably or simply has no idea how to commentate on the Bush era the way he did with Clinton, he's made Bartlett's Republican opponent Robert Ritchie (James Brolin) into nothing but a dimwitted Bush stand-in (one who, oddly enough, has the same name as Kid Rock). It's as though Sorkin has built up an entire season on nothing more than his desire to act out his fantasy of the Bush surrogate losing decisively to the Clinton surrogate- the triumph of The Northern Intellectual over The Southern Simpleton.
In Wednesday's two-hour season premiere (which for no apparent reason was two hours long; I kept waiting for the "Law & Order" episode that never came) Bartlett aides Josh and Toby find themselves stranded in Indiana during a campaign swing, coming into contact with numerous Middle American types, most of whom make no secret of their contempt for the president. This is another failure by Sorkin to understand America's long-simmering "Red-Blue Divide," which was exposed in the 2000 election. His depiction of midwesterners as inarticulate hicks plays directly into the hands of critics who call him (and by extension, "West Wing" itself) a practictioner of East Coast/Left Coast elitism.
Indeed, most people who hate "The West Wing" are conservatives driven batty by its liberal bias, though I don't feel that the bias is the problem- the show could never reasonably be called propaganda by anyone who's ever paid attention, as it really does make an effort to show more than one side of each issue (even more fair and balanced, I'd say, than Fox News Channel). The show is still full of very smart and generally well written dialogue, and God knows I'm rooting for it to regain its relavance. When "The West Wing" inexplicably won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series last Sunday, even Sorkin himself was dumbfounded that his show could defeat "Six Feet Under," especially since "Six" had just finished its best season and "West Wing" its worst, and everyone in the room knew it.
Unless another rule of "The West Wing"'s parellel universe is the absence of a 22nd Amendment, the show can theoretically last for only four more years. As a lover of quality television and a student of American politics, there are few things I would like to see more than a return to greatness (and relevance) for "The West Wing." But with the apparently continuing War on Terror, Bush presidency, and decline in the writing abilities of Aaron Sorkin, I can't say I'm too optimistic.