A Memorial To The Best Program That Ever Was...

Now, they’ve done it. They’ve really done it!
They’ve gotten my Irish up.
Who?
Those wimps at NBC!
For the last seven years, I have changed my plans, rushed home, missed parties—all for one reason: So as not to miss one episode of the brilliant, cutting-edge West Wing—the best written and choreographed drama ever broadcast domestically on TV!.
No matter how bad things went for me or my plans in the real world, I always had the West Wing to retreat to.
There was the brash Josh Limon, Assistant to the Chief of Staff, ready to pick up the standard, Toby, Communications Director, standing in the wings ready to get in your face if you interfered with doing what was morally defensible or jump on a live grenade; there was the Chief of Staff Leo McGarry, as portrayed by John Spencer, the man who had searched forever to find an honest man to support for president and found him in Sheen’s portrayal of Jeb Bartlett, the man we could all doff our hat to, who didn’t go to bed at 9:00 and who suffered mega anxiety about everything he put his name to….Here was a president who cared and it showed. Despite the awesome responsibility—which this president understood—he was always prepared to make the hard decisions; and, of course, he was backed up by the best press secretary this nation has ever seen and a staff that it was hard not to love. This was not a scattered staff of divergent people; these were family. Among them, was the president’s secretary who was the arbiter of what was right and had been in his life working for his father even when he was a young man. She was never intimidated by his “rank” or stature and, to her, he was always the young man who needed to find his center and she would never let him forget it. With this president, you always knew where the buck stopped and it was at his desk! There were no excuses; no running away; no blaming anyone else for decisions that went wrong.. And if the president needed someone to turn to in the roughest of times, there was always his wife who brooked no nonsense and called a spade a spade while she treated him for his debilitating disease that he refused to let humble him..

. I will miss them all every last one of them. And when the Chief of Staff recently passed away in real life only months after his feigned heart attack, I felt that I lost someone who could have been a father to me, someone so inspiring in his steadfastness that I could not help but cry. It seemed such a senseless waste of one who had so much to give. John Spencer’s portrayal of Leo McGarry was just that good!...And all of us who yearn for good programming owe him a debt of gratitude along with the unrivaled staff of this beautifully inspired and unequaled television drama.

After the first couple of years, the wonderfully choreographed tight scripts of Aaron Sorkin and the smooth direction and photography and editing came under the attack of government for attempting to show a unreal and unfair world from a skewed democratic perspective. The Right Wing, it seemed, couldn’t take it. Sorkin, either by threat or because he recognized that his management was caving to the forces of government, decided to take a hike.
I thought I would lose interest. But it was due to his successor’s skill that I hung on and while the Show may not have quite reached the high standard that Sorkin set, it was damned good just the same. .
Who can ever forget such scenes as Toby at the Christmas funeral of the Vietnam veteran, discarded like so much detritus, who nobody cared about except that small cadre from the president’s office; or the president storming the halls of the cathedral arguing with God in Latin; or Christmas at the White House or the time the president’s daughter was kidnapped and nobody got a wink of sleep and all of the other ongoing events in all of the key characters’ lives. Like with family, there were some you took issue with and some who could do no wrong; but all of them, like family, were loved dearly by a devoted audience of West Wingophiles like myself and this will never be repeated!
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I had hoped upon hope that this series would never end; that eventually everyone would be enjoying it and deriving as much pleasure from the wonderful acting and the well-crafted scenes as I did. But I guess at some point in time, even the good things must end.
At least the other night, they ended with a Santos win and that was probably as much as anyone might have asked.

Les Aaron