Aaron Sorkin was moved on Friday during his visit to the White House to celebrate the 25th anniversary of “The West Wing” — so much that it has him pondering a revival of the critically adored political drama.
“If I had an idea, sure,” Sorkin said in a press statement afterwards. “I didn’t think about it seriously, frankly, until today… We’ll see what happens when I wake up tomorrow. But, if you’re asking me now, this is how I feel.”
Sorkin, director/exec producer Thomas Schlamme and stars Martin Sheen, Richard Schiff, Dulé Hill, Janel Moloney, Emily Procter, Melissa Fitzgerald and Mary McCormack met with President Joe Biden in the map room, and then were given a personal tour of the building.
President Biden then left for meetings in Delaware. Later, First Lady Jill Biden held a formal Rose Garden ceremony for the show, held right outside the real-life West Wing and Oval Office.
“I just got a couple of ideas for episodes just walking around the White House,” he added. “Like, ‘why didn’t we ever do this? Why didn’t we ever do that?’”.
Sorkin added he has hesitated on a new edition of “The West Wing” in the past because he feared audiences would miss the original cast too much.
“I suspect that a new president would have a hard time living up to people’s memories of Martin,” he said of Sheen and his character, President Jed Bartlet.
“But maybe enough time has gone by and it’s a whole new generation. A generation which, by the way, thanks to streaming, thinks we’re making the show today!”.
Sorkin noted he doesn’t have a political agenda when it comes to considering a “West Wing” revival.
“I just thought it was a great workplace against which to set,” he continued. “There are all kinds of stories that come over the transom that you can tell, and that aspirational, idealistic, romantic style of writing suits me.”
The political environment has changed dramatically since “The West Wing” left the air after seven seasons in 2006.
Sorkin admitted, “We couldn’t possibly come up with stories in the room that are crazier than the actual stories that we see.”
He agreed that sticking to an aspirational, idealistic story might be “very hard” in this climate.
“Because part of it is being idealistic, it does need to feel like it’s taking place in the world that we live in for it to work,” Sorkin said.
“It does need to feel like our world. So, it would be hard, but as Brad Whitford, as Josh Lyman, says in the Season 3 premiere, ’20 Hours in America,’ ‘it’s gonna be hard,’ and Toby says, ‘it’s the hard that makes it good.’”
Sorkin stated that it’s a good question whether a second Trump presidency would make a “The West Wing” revival more or less appealing to him.
“It would certainly present incentives to do it, but also headaches,” he noted. “The worry would be that everything we did on the show would be seen as a rebuttal to the world of Donald Trump.”
Warner Bros. TV chairman Channing Dungey, who was also at the White House event, said she’s open to whatever Sorkin decides he wants to do.
She also hinted in the past that she’d be open to a new version of “The West Wing.”
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