Farewell

The final episode of The West Wing aired earlier tonight. There are few television shows that reach out and grab you, and even fewer that do so because of their intelligence and their wit. The West Wing was a seven-year ride of brilliant dialogue and story development and easily ranks among the best political fiction of any kind. Unfortunately, many of us wished it could have been more than fiction. When Bush won the White House, the weekly look at the Bartlett Administration was a refuge from reality.

There is no disputing that The West Wing took a downturn after the end of the fourth season when Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme left. It took the show a good two seasons to find its footing after that, but this last season it became a great show again. Deadlines, of course, have a way of bringing out the best in everyone, and with the series ending, there was a rush of energy in the last dozen or so episodes. It would have been great to see the early days of the Santos Administration.

The West Wing, no doubt, took shape from the remnants of Sorkin's film The American President. The similarities between the two are unmistakable. There is no equal for the dialogue of Aaron Sorkin. The thing about The West Wing was that it seized your attention right from its first minutes on the air. By the time the opening credits of the pilot episode roll over John Spencer's arrival and walk-and-talk through the White House, the show has you moving at breakneck pace, and it kept up that speed for four seasons. When the first episode ended, you couldn't wait for the next one to air. You knew you were seeing something unlike anything else.

It's easy to nitpick, to make disparaging remarks about what happened after Sorkin left, or to complain that the timeline of the show skipped a whole year in between the end of season 5 and the start of season 6. But even at its worst, it was still better than anything else on network TV. It will be a long time before we see anything like it again.