Late To The Party — Again

Although it's hardly a novel occurrence for us to come late to the party on any number of things, how we managed to miss Aaron Sorkin's TV series The West Wing in its original run on NBC during the years 1999-2006 is an occurrence beyond our understanding. We caught up with the series by accident on, of all places, Bravo, one of cable's trashiest channels, which runs two back-to-back episodes of the series each weekday from 8:00 AM to 10:00 AM Eastern. It's the story of the occupants of the West Wing of The White House (which includes the famed Oval Office) of fictional President Josiah ("Jed") Bartlet (played superbly by Martin Sheen); a West Wing and White House modeled conspicuously on the West Wing and White House of JFK (although some, we suppose, would say it was modeled rather on the West Wing and White House of Bill Clinton). So thoroughly convincing are the episodes that we often find ourself lapsing into feeling we're viewing an astonishingly intimate and detailed documentary of an actual, real-world Administration, the mood for each episode set wonderfully by a soaringly expansive, lushly orchestrated, American-populist-style-patriotic main title theme by W.G. Snuffy Walden the truncated nature of which drives us crazy by its lack of a proper closing cadence or coda:

So impressed are we by what we've seen so far of The West Wing we're considering buying the DVD set of the complete series, the first time we've ever considered doing anything of the sort. Or maybe we'll buy separately only the DVD sets of the first four seasons (Season 1, Season 2, Season 3, Season 4) as after Season 4 Sorkin left the series and the writing and production passed into other hands (Sorkin himself wrote all the episodes save three of the first four seasons).

The West Wing is everything a popular (as in mass-market), commercial television drama series can and ought to be, but only rarely is.