The West Wing is one of those rare cultural artifacts that manages to be both wildly popular and oddly niche at the same time. It’s the kind of show your parents talked about at dinner parties while you were still trying to decide if the latest Blink-182 album was their sellout moment. It was TV as idealism—a manifesto wrapped in the warm, cozy blanket of network drama. And it asked us a simple question: what if politics could be…good?
Let’s start with the obvious: The West Wing is pure fantasy. Not the kind where elves fight dragons, but the kind where adults in government actually care about what they’re doing and, crazily enough, try to do it well. Aaron Sorkin, the show’s creator, gave us a world where every conversation is an intellectual tennis match, where a room full of speechwriters, press secretaries, and Chief of Staffs could trade quips faster than most people can remember their passwords. The dialogue was like verbal jazz—improvised, unpredictable, always circling back to some deeper truth. It was like watching a bunch of Harvard Law graduates try to write a sitcom. And somehow, it worked.
The show is often described as “aspirational,” which is a nice way of saying it was delusional. It presents the American government as a place where decency and debate still matter, where the public good is always a couple of clever speeches away. President Josiah Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen, is essentially the platonic ideal of what a leader could be—brilliant, empathetic, a touch arrogant, but always with his heart in the right place. He’s the president we all wish we had but never quite seem to get. In Bartlet’s America, the most pressing question isn’t how to get re-elected or how to spin the latest scandal—it’s how to do the right thing. And isn’t that the most beautifully naïve idea you’ve ever heard?
What made The West Wing special wasn’t just the script or the dialogue or even the star-studded cast (although Allison Janney as C.J. Cregg is a national treasure and should be treated as such). It was the way the show made us feel. It turned the mundane into the monumental. Walking and talking through hallways? An art form. Dropping a one-liner about agricultural subsidies? Poetry. For forty-two minutes, we were allowed to believe that competence could be sexy, that intelligence could be a weapon, and that government employees might actually have souls. The show was a shot of adrenaline straight to the part of our brains that wants to believe the world can be better than it is.
Of course, this is also why the show feels dated in a way that something like The Sopranos or The Wire does not. The latter shows were gritty, dark, almost nihilistic. They mirrored a reality where good guys don’t always win, and sometimes, the bad guys are more interesting anyway. But The West Wing? It’s as if someone took Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and ran it through a glossy, early-2000s Instagram filter. It’s not just optimistic; it’s aggressively so. It’s optimism weaponized, optimism on steroids. Watching it now feels a bit like scrolling through your old MySpace page—charmingly outdated, yet oddly comforting.
But here’s the real trick of The West Wing: it never lets you feel bad for believing in its version of reality. You’re never made to feel stupid for wanting a President Bartlet or a C.J. Cregg running the country. Instead, it’s like the show is constantly winking at you, saying, “Yeah, we know this isn’t how things really are, but wouldn’t it be nice if it were?” It’s the kind of fantasy that’s so deeply intertwined with our cultural psyche that it almost feels like it could happen if we just tried a little harder.
So, what’s so great about The West Wing? Maybe it’s not the plotlines or the characters or even the idealism. Maybe it’s that the show existed at all. Maybe it’s that for seven seasons, we got to live in a world where the Oval Office was a place of integrity and passion, where debates were won with ideas, not insults, and where, just maybe, the world could be saved by a well-timed monologue. It was fiction, sure, but it was the best kind—the kind that makes you wish it were real. And in a world where reality often falls short, isn’t that exactly what we need?