NYT: 'West Wing' Writers' Novel Way of Picking the President
By JACQUES STEINBERG
Published: April 10, 2006
Like many political campaigns, the presidential election depicted last night on "The West Wing" on NBC would have had a different ending had it been held four months ago.
But the reversal of fortune for Matt Santos — the Democratic nominee, played by Jimmy Smits, who was the victor — had nothing to do with any shift in opinion among voters.
Instead, Lawrence O'Donnell, an executive producer of the show, said he and his fellow writers had declared Santos the winner only after the death, in mid-December, of John Spencer, who portrayed Santos's running mate, Leo McGarry. At the time of Mr. Spencer's death, the plot for last night's episode had been set: the election was to be won by Alan Alda's Arnold Vinick, a maverick Republican (modeled a bit on Senator John McCain), whom many Democrats (including the Democrats who write the show) could learn to love.
But after Mr. Spencer died, Mr. O'Donnell said in a recent interview, he and his colleagues began to confront a creative dilemma: would viewers be saddened to see Mr. Smits's character lose both his running mate and the election? The writers decided that such an outcome would prove too lopsided, in terms of taxing viewers' emotions, so a script with the new, bittersweet ending — including the election-night death of Mr. Spencer's character — was undertaken by John Wells, executive producer of "The West Wing" and "E.R."...
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Mr. O'Donnell, a onetime adviser to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, said he was especially proud of the show's response to the increasingly shrill political debate in the real world, particularly on cable news. As it became tougher to learn much of any substance from programs like "Crossfire" on CNN, now defunct, "The West Wing" seemed to delve deeper into real issues like health care and education, as exemplified by the raw, one-hour live debate last fall between Matt Santos and Arnold Vinick....(T)here were no registered Republicans in the most recent incarnation of the "West Wing" writers' room, which included Eli Attie, a former speechwriter for Al Gore. Though the show began at the end of the Clinton administration, it soon found its creative niche by evoking a parallel reality, one that imagined how the White House might have been different if George W. Bush had not been elected to two terms....
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/10/arts/television/10wing.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
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