I'M PULLING A SEABORN
The Final Term
By Eden Harrell
TheScotsman.com
January 24, 2006

"I'm pulling a Seaborn."

This was the oft-heard excuse at my American university for staying up all night before a term paper was due: to toil and agonise over what would hopefully become 1,500 eloquent, inspiring words.

"Seaborn" refers to a key character in the Emmy award-winning US TV drama The West Wing: President Josiah Bartlet's Deputy Communications Director, played by Rob Lowe.
He was everything my fellow students and I hoped to be: eloquent, encyclopaedic, a late-night crammer, very good looking. The West Wing debuted on TV during my first year at university, at a time when it was actually reasonable to think that gaining a degree would help you get into politics (and every first-year student, save the engineering nerds, thinks they want to get into politics). Huge groups of students watched the show together; episodes were referenced in discussion groups more often than the required reading.



But it wasn't just students who loved it. The West Wing, whose cancellation was announced yesterday by NBC Television, was one of the most successful shows of all time. The final series, to be aired in May, will be its seventh. Its viewing figures were never record-setting: it peaked at 17 million, compared to the current 20 million that Lost is pulling in. But with 19 individual Emmys, including a record four "best-drama" awards in a row, it ranks an impressive eighth among the most decorated drama series of all time.

The show, which tells the story of President Bartlet's presidency through the everyday professional lives of his White House staff, brought to life the inner workings of "inside the beltway" politics. Like Shakespeare's histories, the best West Wing episodes succeed in extracting the inherent drama in politics, illuminating the conspiratorial, often claustrophobic world of the modern-day King's court. Critics immediately applauded the show's tight pacing and gripping dialogue; within two seasons, the show had even spawned a new film-making term -- "pedaconferencing" -- meaning a shot that would follow two characters down a hallway as they converse, eavesdropping in the corridors of power.

It seems remarkable now, as the MS-afflicted President Bartlet limps to the end of his final presidential term, and President Bush swaggers and smiles his way through his, that The West Wing was first conceived as a true-to-life dramatisation of the inner workings of the White House. But it was; that parallel being the cause of its success -- and, later, its downfall.
President Bill Clinton, a Rhodes Scholar from Little Rock, Arkansas, was the model for President Bartlet, a brainy but down-to-earth economics professor from New Hampshire. Clinton was famous for corralling his young, Ivy League-educated staff into late-night brainstorming meetings over beer and pizza. So, too, would Bartlet's staff foresake sleep and formalities in service of the President. Bartlet's staffers, like Clinton's, were smart, engaged, unashamedly serious, but also attractive and likeable. The West Wing characters were what would have become of the Friends characters if they hadn't chosen to move to New York and bum around a coffee shop for ten years.

"The show is what viewers hope life [really] is like in The West Wing, because these are all good people, trying to do the right thing," said actress Alison Janney (West Wing Press Secretary CJ) of the Clinton administration at the time of the show's debut. "And from the people I've personally met in The West Wing, I would say that we're right on track."




 The show's plots also received recognition for their accuracy. Critics admired its willingness to address real-life political issues, from the headlines (terrorism, abortion) to the backpage (federal budgets, squabbles with Congress). And although Bartlet's administration is reliably liberal (Republicans branded it 'The Left Wing'), it was a tough brand of liberalism, hardened by political realities. In one episode, Bartlet denies clemency to a death-row inmate. In another, he orders an airstrike on the Middle East.

The verisimilitude was intentional. The show's celebrated creator and chief writer, Aaron Sorkin, hired a host of Washington insiders to consult on the show. One, Eli Attie, was a speechwriter for Al Gore. Script consultant Kenneth M Duberstein was a chief of staff to Reagan.

One of Barlet's most inspirational speeches, about the Cold War race to the moon ("we gazed up to the sky and with outstretched fingers touched the face of God"), was lifted directly from one of Reagan's.

The problem with investing your stake in real-life politics, however, is that real-life politics change, and not always in ways you can successfully script. Within a year [of the first episode], President Bush and his hawks were perched in office, casting an altogether different shadow on The West Wing. The show has struggled to adapt. When the whole of America shifted even further right after September 11, the show's creators were suddenly in new and unfamiliar territory. The tensions showed in the cast first. Rob Lowe, around whom the show had been conceived, quit in protest over the trivialisation of his character. Tensions were not helped by the tendency of the actor playing the fictional president, Martin Sheen, to outspokenly criticise everything the real president did.
Two seasons later, inevitably, writer and co-creator Sorkin left the show. His resignation followed a series of embarrassments, including an arrest for possession of cocaine and hallucinogenic mushrooms, but was just as likely the result of his reluctance to adapt his far-left political writing to the current political climate. In a final blow, John Spencer, the actor who played Leo McGarry, died unexpectedly of a heart attack just a few weeks ago.



By the fourth season, TV analysts were predicting the show's demise with all the gloom of Democratic pollsters in the South. The show's viewing figures had slipped to eight million. That The West Wing continued into its seventh series is testament both to the respect it gained among NBC executives and its devoted audience of wealthy, left-leaning viewers. Alas, they are the minority. America is now Bush country; there is no room for Bartlet.

For me and my university friends, the show's demise only highlights what we began to suspect after September 11 and what led most of us to give up on a future in politics: most of us cannot bear too much reality. Witness Reality TV, which is anything but real.

As real life becomes more complicated and scary, the desire to escape grows stronger. Is it any coincidence that the current hit US TV show dealing with a horrific air crash is not a thoughtful examination of the aftermath of September 11, but a fantastical tale of a plane wreck far, far away?

TV has always offered escape, a great expanse through a small box. Early episodes of The West Wing were bold in that the great expanse it imagined was the scope of the human imagination itself. Now The West Wing leaves us. Will the public even notice? Probably not. They're Lost on an island. God help us.






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