Loved, LOVED The West Wing (the Sorkin years). Besides being smart entertainment, it really helped me hold on to my political idealism through the soul-destroying Bush administration.Aaron Sorkin is my god. "Two Cathedrals" just gives me chills. You can tell how much his writing drove the show - even in this bare bones form, the personalities and the action come blazing through. While I don't generally condone recreational drug use, if that's what Sorkin needs to write like this, I say let him have whatever he wants. (Studio 60, which he wrote while sober and angry, was incredibly bad. In fact, I still feel personally offended by how bad it was. And yet I watched it to the bitter end, such is my love for him.)

The West Wing Script Book

Aaron Sorkin has famously remarked that a writer's job is to captivate you for however long he (or she) has asked for your attention. Consider us captivated, sir.  The West Wing Script Book  is a selection of the best teleplays from the series' first two seasons (including the masterful "Two Cathedrals," which James Lipton once described without too much hyperbole as "the finest hour of television ever produced"). These then are the polished, elegant drafts of those hours - the crisp, perfectly paced and all-around sparkling repartee that flowed like champagne over the lips of great actors like Martin Sheen, John Spencer, Allison Janney, Richard Schiff and so many more who trod the boards of those amazing Warner Bros. soundstages.  In brief introductions to each teleplay, Sorkin teases us with a few behind-the-scenes anecdotes of how the series came together. It's fascinating to learn that its genesis was in a casual conversation over a movie poster and a pitch meeting at which Sorkin had nothing prepared and was forced to spitball. Some day someone will write a definitive history of this epic filmed exploration of the American presidency, but for now, Wingnuts will have to satisfy themselves with the occasionally contradictory bits and pieces offered here and in other works like Rob Lowe's  Stories I Only Tell My Friends.   But that's not why you're here. You're here to watch President Bartlet curse God in Latin. You're here to see his senior staff come together emotionally (and historically) as they wait in terrified anticipation for Josh Lyman to recover from a gunshot wound. You are here, to put it bluntly, to see the blueprints of greatness (and note with a chuckle the peculiar way Sorkin spells "sit down" in dialogue.) Sorkin himself would argue that his words mean nothing without the hundreds of other talented cast and crew who assembled them into what unspooled over NBC weeknights for seven years running, and continues to be held up as an aspirational example of the power of what government can do when smart and dedicated people who believe in it are in charge. But in the beginning was the word. And so, good reader, FADE IN.

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