How the West Wing was supposed to end

A number of friends have remarked to me over the last few days that we may be heading for the West Wing election.

The run-off at the end of that great programme was between Matthew Santos, the first serious Hispanic contender for the Presidency, and Arnold Vinick, an ageing Republican with humane views and a strong appeal to independents.

Santos won.

The parallels between Santos-Vinick and Obama-McCain are obvious. (David Brooks has a very good column this morning on Obama v McCain)

So it's amusing to learn that a Santos win wasn't the original plan. And certainly Santos seems quite openly liberal to win the White House. The makers of the show wrote the final series with Vinick as the final winner.

Then John Spencer, the man playing Leo, the Santos VP candidate, died. And everything changed. The producers decided that it would be too much of a downer (to who? I wanted Vinick) to lose Leo and the Santos Presidency at the same time.

Cue a Santos victory.

Comments

[Derfel]

I knew it!! I was so disappointed with the ending to this excellent series.

Even a reasonably liberal minded person like me felt that a Santos win was one bit of over-indulgence too far for the Democrats that wrote the scripts. It just tipped the whole thing over from being a great depiction of 'how things might have been' into a partisan dream world for Democrats.

It would have been better and more realistic to let Alan Alda's character win through and show that Democrats and liberals would be quite happy to live a moderate-republican President who could unite the country.

Maybe we could start a petition for them to film an alternative ending ;-)

[Andrew]

I had thought it would make a better story in Santos lost and expected that was where it was to go so, if you are right, I'm pleased my feeling about the way it should end was right.

[Daniel Lucraft]

That's really interesting. I have always thought that a Vinick win would have made the West Wing a better programme to look back on.

There was always a tendency for the WW writers to write to their fantasies rather than reality. That wasn't so bad because it made it more fun to watch.

But as the series wore on it got ridiculous. The sympathetic and sincere Reps were gone, replaced by, basically, evil people.

A Vinick win would have shown that the writers did care about making an adult show and won back some of my (and your?) respect. But they blew it, and the West Wing was only half the show it could have been.