Watching 'The West Wing' 20 years later can be depressing ... and hopeful

They’re all so smart.

That’s the first thing you notice when you go back and watch the first episode of “The West Wing,” an often-brilliant, sometimes-maddening exercise in liberal government wish-fulfillment that debuted on NBC in 1999.

Some people do some dopey things, to be sure, and would continue to over the entire seven-season run of the show. But what is so encouraging in theory and disheartening in actual contemporary practice is that intelligence practically leaks out of the ears of every character we hear from.

And we hear from a lot of them — politicians, reporters, priests, Secret Service agents and more.

Also: no Twitter.

Politics has changed a lot since the show debuted, on Sept. 22, 1999. So has television. In fact, both would be almost unrecognizable today to someone beaming in from 20 years ago. But going back to “The West Wing” isn’t just a nostalgia trip. It’s also an instructive — and yes, entertaining — look at what now seems like a simpler time, but didn’t then.

Aaron Sorkin created the show, and it stands as a highlight in the career of a writer who won an Academy Award for “The Social Network” and is enjoying good notices for a Broadway version of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” to name just a couple of his achievements. Sorkin is known for hyper-verbal characters who rarely shut up; his “walking-and-talking” motif has never been put to better use than in “The West Wing.”

The show follows the administration of President Jed Bartlet (Martin Sheen), a Democrat with liberal leanings who is both brilliant (he’s an economist by training) and practical (his go-to phrase is, “What’s next?”).

What you may not remember, even if you were a fan, is that Bartlet was supposed to be a supporting character; the show was going to be about his staff more than about him. Sheen doesn’t even show up till about halfway through the first episode. But Sorkin scrapped the idea and Bartlet became, if not the central figure in the series, certainly a kind of first among equals.

But what a staff — and cast! Bartlet’s original chief of staff is Leo McGarry, played by the late, great John Spencer. (Spencer died during the course of the show.) Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) is the deputy chief of staff. Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff) is the communications director, C.J. Cregg (Allison Janney) the press secretary. Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) is the deputy communications director.

The first episode set the template for most all that would follow. (Sorkin, no stranger to melodrama, would occasionally venture off into ill-advised plot lines like an assassination attempt at the end of the first season.)

The president has ridden his bike into a tree on his vacation. More than a thousand Cuban refugees have boarded makeshift rafts and are heading to Florida, unaware of a huge storm. The big story is that Josh, while appearing on a TV talk show, has disparaged the religious right, a group Bartlet can ill afford to lose politically.

“Lady,” Josh says to a representative of a conservative Christian group, “the God you pray to is too busy being indicted for tax fraud.”

OK, that part sounds contemporary.

A large part of the episode is devoted to whether Bartlet will fire Josh, and how the White House can fix things. But those who believe that “The West Wing” was never anything less than a highbrow exercise in political theory would do well to remember that one of the subplots involves Sam accidentally sleeping with a prostitute. (There’s also some unfortunate slapstick involving C.J. on a treadmill.)

It’s a really busy episode, as most of them were; Sorkin works that way. But it was also perfect for how TV worked then. You couldn’t stream episodes. You got your 44 minutes of “The West Wing” once a week, so you had time to digest a show so densely packed with so much policy, drama, wit and, ugh, the occasional tone-deaf gay joke. You didn’t finish this one and bore right into the next. You had a week to think about what you’d seen, and Sorkin knew it.

But the changes in TV have nothing on the changes in politics. In an effort to smooth things over with the evangelicals, the staff convenes a meeting with three conservative religious leaders. Josh apologizes, and one of the leaders starts asking what they get in return. She also makes an anti-Semitic remark, which rightly infuriates Toby.

One of the others says there is so much talk from the White House about the First Amendment but not the First Commandment. “The First Commandment says, ‘Honor thy father,’” he says.

Toby goes off on him. Honor thy father is the Third Commandment, he says. Then what, the smug religious leader asks, is the First?

“I am the Lord your God. Thou shalt worship no other god before me,” Bartlet says, walking into the room — the first time in the series we have seen him. “Boy, those were the days, huh?”

He proceeds to dismantle the three leaders, and it is a thing of beauty. He’s brusque, no doubt — he ends the meeting by telling the representatives that until they denounce a fringe group that sent his 12-year-old granddaughter a Raggedy Ann doll with a knife stuck in its throat because she mentioned a woman’s right to choose in a magazine, “you can get your fat asses out of my White House.”

This is Sorkin at his best. Yes, crudity has become a White House staple; we get a daily dose of it on President Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, it seems like. But this isn’t just name-calling or lashing out in thoughtless anger at perceived slights. This was Bartlet knowing his subject better than the people complaining did, and using that knowledge against them to win the argument. Even if you sided with the religious right, you’d be hard-pressed not to want to cheer when he was done.

That had a lot to do with Sheen’s performance, of course — as noted before, this led to his becoming a more integral part of the ensemble.

Don’t misunderstand, “The West Wing” was a fantasy when it aired 20 years ago. It would eventually usher in the George W. Bush administration, and was thought to be at least in part a reaction to it. But the brilliance on display when Bartlet enters the room is thrilling. Imagine using intelligence and reason in a political dispute. Imagine a political dispute in which opposing sides sit down and talk, for that matter. It seems so quaint as to be almost impossible to imagine.

Maybe not. Like most shows, “The West Wing” lost a lot of steam and quality as it hung on too long. But ideally it would not serve as simply as a relic of a lost time, but as an inspiration for a better one to come.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Watching 'The West Wing' 20 years later is both sad and hopeful.