The third episode of The West Wing did nothing to disprove my belief that NBC is experiencing a meltdown of its flagship drama after executives forced creator and near-exclusive writer Aaron Sorkin off the show. The episodes don’t have the same snap to them that they had only six months ago.
It’s all about the writing, of course. The current staff can’t match Sorkin’s facility at creating complex but logical dialogue. Sorkin was sometimes vilified for his tendency to write speeches for his characters, but he has a gift for writing dialogue that makes such speechifying a pleasure to hear. Without his intimate knowledge of his characters and thoughtful stories presenting well-considered issues, the scripts have gone from being intelligent to trying to sound intelligent; the interleaving of plots, another forte, is now random at best. The humour–which has had me straining to take a breath at times, I’ve been laughing so hard–is all but gone.
The regular cast is still good, but they come across as being almost over-rehearsed; I’ve read that Sorkin was notorious for being late turning in scripts, and I wonder if that wasn’t partly deliberate to enhance the spontaneity of the performances. Even the production values seem to be weaker: television graphics and newspaper headlines in these three episodes have been less polished and realistic than those in previous seasons, which is odd because (like the actors) there’s more time to prepare them.
The West Wing is still among the best dramas on television, largely due to Sorkin’s residual–and waning–influence. I hope NBC recognizes the error they made by exiling him from the program he created, and doesn’t try to fix it any further in the way they have to date. There’s a single sure-fire way to return The West Wing to its former glory, and that’s to bring back Aaron Sorkin.
