After 7 years and 4 Emmys for Best Series, The West Wing is coming to an end at the conclusion of this season with the swearing in of a new president.
The show has been on the edge of cancellation for some time, and the recent move to Sundays, a night owned by ABC, certainly didn’t help any. Of course seven years is quite a while for any program, and while it would have been intellectually interesting to see how the show creators handled changing Presidents, it’s nice to see the whole thing come to a close finally.
It doesn’t look like Aaron Sorkin will be returning for the finale, as many have speculated (the current rock-free policy of the set keeps him away), but producers may have a chance at dragging Rob Lowe away from whatever nonsense he’s been doing to pay his mortgage (I think I saw him introducing movies on AMC or something recently. Good work quitting the show, Rob) so that Sam Seaborne can come back one last time.
And no amount of negotiations have been able to persuade John Spencer to return from the dead. The producers had considered re-doing his final episodes to cut him out, but then decided to leave him in. Leo McGarry will be biting the dust on the show soon.
The past two seasons haven’t been half bad – at least nowhere near as awful as season five, which was like torture for me. It’ll be sad to see an institution like West Wing go away, but I’m glad that the story gets to end at a natural point.