If I Ran "The West Wing"

That's West Wing the TV show, not the real thing...

On the 16th, John Spencer died. A damned fine actor, and it was a real shock that he went as suddenly as he did. It brings up, all over again, that peculiar intimacy you sometimes feel with celebrities you've never met--all that time they spent in your living room, etc. But in the real world, this is as close as I ever got to John Spencer:

Back in 1989, I spent a summer as an intern at the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival, which mostly means that I was an unpaid laborer who was occasionally allowed to do something that maybe resembled acting. At the same time, one of the real actors, Leland Gantt, was playing Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus for us then going off to shoot Presumed Innocent. He came back talking about how great it had been, not the work itself, but just hanging out with Harrison Ford and with this other actor I'd never heard of named John Spencer. That's it, that's as close as I ever got to the man--but I think it's telling that even before I became aware of him as an actor, I was already hearing about what a great guy John Spencer was.

But now he's gone, and that's a damned awful shame but it happens. As a fan of "West Wing," though (the Season 5 DVDs are currently on the way--yes, even without Aaron Sorkin I'm still getting the DVDs), I inevitably start to wonder what all the other fans of the show are wondering: how does the show treat the loss of a much-beloved principal character? Which is my roundabout way of getting to my hypothetical of the day: if I were John Wells, how would I choose to deal with the show's biggest challenge to date?

First off, John Spencer's character, Leo McGarry, has to die. You can't just push a Vice Presidential candidate off to the wings and pretend he's just not onscreen for several weeks. The most important piece of information, which I don't have, is how many unaired episodes Spencer shot before he died. If filming is complete through the election that is the center of this season, then you go one way; if it's not, you have to go another way. Put it this way: Democratic candidate Matt Santos loses his VP candidate just days before the election. Either he loses the election because a key part of his team has just disappeared (it happened just that way to William Howard Taft in 1912), or he wins but then has to wonder forever after whether he won on his own merits or because of a sympathy vote. Which is actually an interesting character question that could be fun for the writers to play with. On the other hand, if the election has already been filmed, then the show has to deal with a transition that is suddenly radically different than everyone expected--which can also be very interesting dramatically.

There's a second question, too, which is largely unrelated to Spencer's death: is this the show's last season? Again, there are two ways to go. The obvious one is, Yes this is the last season. This show was always about the Bartlet White House, and the obvious way to end it is to show Bartlet and his team handling the transition and then going off into that good night. In that case, it doesn't really matter which character wins the election--though it would certainly be interesting to see how Bartlet reacts to having hand off his administration to someone who approaches it from a different ideological point of view (which was already touched on in the episodes when Bartlet resigned in the wake of his daughter's kidnapping).

That's probably how I would handle it--the show has been very interesting lately in its in-depth exploration of a presidential candidate, but already it is straying far from what defined the show in the first place. On "West Wing" you were always led up to the point where the President made a big speech or launched into a debate, but the focus was always on what happened backstage. When the show did its live debate stunt, all the backstage stuff went out the window, and the essential character of the show went with it.

If NBC gets greedy (not likely, given the ratings lately) and pressures the producers into sticking around for another year, then I think Alan Alda's character has to win the election. It's the only way to keep the show dramatically interesting: go backstage with a whole different kind of administration. But that doesn't seem likely--in that "three years later" teaser at the beginning of this season, I could swear that the President about to get out of that limo had dark hair. Thus Santos wins. And as much as I like the character, and as much as I wish that someone like him could someday become President, haven't we already had seven years of wish fulfillment with the Bartlet administration?

Ah well. It's all completely idle talk, of course. The inescapable fact is that when the show resumes new episodes on January 8th, I'll be sitting there like everyone else, waiting and watching, and still terribly sad that John Spencer isn't around anymore.