The West Wing reunion: Getting Americans to vote and prying open a time capsule

The special was shot as a play in an empty theatre in Los Angeles under coronavirus guidelines. PHOTO: SCREENGRAB FROM HBOMAX/YOUTUBE

NEW YORK (NYTIMES) - The episode Hartsfield's Landing, from the third season of The West Wing, first aired in February 2002, which was approximately 200 years ago.

Donald Trump was still two years from joining The West Wing (1999 to 2006) on NBC with The Apprentice (2004 to 2017) - his main television gig at the time was co-starring with Grimace in a commercial for the McDonald's Big 'N Tasty burger. Mark Zuckerberg had yet to start classes at Harvard. Elections played out at the relatively staid tempo of network TV news. And an idealistic network drama about politics could still be a Top 10 show, averaging over 17 million viewers an episode.

On Thursday (Oct 15), HBO Max premiered a stage performance of Hartsfield's Landing.

Its ostensible purpose was to benefit nonprofit group When We All Vote. But it couldn't help seeming like the prying open of a time capsule. It's not alone, however, in trying to fit in one last civics lesson before the polls close. It joins several stage works arriving on TV - including hip-hop musical Hamilton - that are framing the anxieties of 2020 within the pop culture of the last two decades.

As TV series go, The West Wing was a relative no-brainer to adapt for the stage. Its creator Aaron Sorkin always sounds as if he were writing for the theatre even when he isn't. Recorded under coronavirus protocols at the Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles, the performance instantly recalls why the series was such an intoxicating entertainment and seductive ideal. The original cast members are grayer, but their interactions still sparkle. (Sterling K. Brown fills in for John Spencer, who died in 2005.)

But the format also underscores the distance between then and now, as if the politics and cultural tempo of the early aughts themselves were now period-piece revival material. Premiering in 1999 after a run of relative 20th-century institutional stability, The West Wing believed that the system worked, even if the people in it could always be better.

President Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen) was an aspirational Gallant to reality's Goofuses. In the late Bill Clinton era, he was a fantasy of morally upstanding, unapologetic liberalism. In the Bush years, he was a fantasy of a proudly intellectual president. Today - well, take your pick. Wanting better leaders never goes out of style, but the series' reverent institutionalism now seems much more remote.

Hartsfield's Landing takes its title from a subplot in which the aide Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) frets over the results from the first small town to vote in the New Hampshire primary. It's an odd story because Bartlet is running for renomination essentially unopposed. But for a show enamoured with retail democracy in all its absurdity, it's too much to resist. (One does wonder, if the episode had been written in 2020, whether someone might at least note the inordinate power that the quaint tradition gives a handful of white voters.) This affection for civic ritual, in norms-trampling Trumpian times, now seems star-crossed and naive.

As actor Samuel L. Jackson put it during an act break: "Our politics today are a far cry from the romantic notion of The West Wing." Even the central metaphor of the episode, Bartlet's playing his advisers at chess, seems sadly nostalgic in an era dominated by players who prefer to kick over the board.

Well, fantasy is part of what TV is for. And fantasy can be a strong motivator. Arguably, part of what fuels Joe Biden's campaign against the Twitter president today is the promise, however improbable, of returning to a time of relative comity, reverence and quiet. But the show fed a lot of fantasies that have smashed hard and ugly against reality.

The West Wing was smitten with the power of words. But in the real world, there is no speech so masterly that it stuns your rivals into awed silence, no debate argument so irrefutable that your opponent can't just bark "Wrong!" over it a hundred times.

It's nice to think that going high always beats going low, but we know now what The West Wing learnt as it steadily lost audience to the likes of The Bachelor (2002 to present). What works in scripted drama does not necessarily fly in a reality-TV world.

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