This is the eighth post of a series. I had intended to post all of these in chronological order, but that was broken early on when Tommie Smothers died and I felt I had to mention The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour out of order. I was going to save The West Wing for last, but Fresh Air just devoted an episode to it, so I decided to once again skip my planned order.
The previous posts are:
#1: The Howdy Doody Show
#2: 77 Sunset Strip
#3: The Edge of Night
#4: The Defenders
#5:
#6: The Dick Van Dyke Show
#7: The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
#8:
#9: St. Elsewhere
#10: The West Wing
I remember when I first heard about a show that was going to be devoted to the people in the West Wing of the White House, and my first thought was why would I want to watch a fictionalized version of that?
But for some reason, I watched the first episode, and I was hooked. Like quite a few other people. It was an intelligent show with smart dialogue and great acting and I fell in love with it immediately.
And I stuck with it as long as Aaron Sorkin was writing it. But after the fourth season NBC wanted to cut the budget and Sorkin decided that his quitting the show would be the simplest way to do that. And the scripts suffered accordingly. It wasn’t so much that the scripts were bad without Sorkin, but it was so obvious that it had become a different show with the characters developing in different directions, and I no longer cared for the direction it was going, so I stopped watching after a few episodes.
Thus, for me, The West Wing is really only the first four seasons. But those are four great seasons.
Anyway, Fresh Air is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the premiere of the show by repeating excerpts from interviews with creator/writer Aaron Sorkin, and actors Allison Janney, who played C.J., and John Spencer, who played Leo McGarry. They are all well worth hearing. I had previously heard the first two, but the John Spencer interview was new to me; if it’s new to you, you may lose your mind.
With this post I now have two top ten shows of the 20th century to go. You can probably guess at least one of them quite easily by seeing where in the chronology it should go, though if you knew me in high school, you may very well guess the other one as well.