It’s difficult to overstate how momentous season 4 was in the life arc of The West Wing. It represents an inflection point as Aaron Sorkin and Tommy Schlamme, the show’s creators, left the series they loved so much. You might assume that Aaron and Tommy’s run ended with a star-spangled season finale featuring Bartlet and his staff, triumphant on election night. It did not. The story of the president winning reelection is told, of course; it just happened to arrive early in their final season, in episode seven. Aptly titled, “Election Night,” the West Wing debut of director Lesli Linka Glatter treated viewers to a stellar “victory montage” that included: a blizzard of patriotic confetti, countless waving American flags, a celebratory balloon drop, and what feels, upon reflection, like an eerily prescient cover of Bob Dylan’s classic folk song “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” They were indeed.
That said, we’d argue that the times actually began a-changin’ the week before, in “Game On.” While this episode didn’t exactly signal the end of an era, it did suggest the beginning of the end. The first hint at that transition involved the tie we mentioned in the previous chapter (the one Sam let Will borrow earlier in the episode because his tie “doesn’t go”). Hours later, around one a.m. in a Laguna Beach bar—and just seven seconds before this episode’s final credits—Will takes out the tie and tries to give it back:
WILL
Don’t forget your necktie.
SAM
Keep it.
Sam said that on his way out the door, without looking back. He didn’t even break stride. That sense of motion, lasting as it did through the episode’s final moments, was a critical element of director Alex Graves’s early vision for “Game On.” From its opening shot—over Leo’s shoulder, tight on a flummoxed, twitchy Toby getting pranked in his office—that first minute, and the forty that followed, could be best described as kinetic.
Before filming began—just as the script had been completed, in fact—Aaron put in a call to Alex. “This is the election episode,” he told him. “You’ll know at the end of the debate that the winner’s going to be Bartlet.” From that conversation on, Alex felt compelled to produce “a real razzle-dazzle episode.” A day later, Aaron took Alex aside and reiterated what had already been explicitly ordered in the script—“I don’t want to FADE IN, you should just CUT in.” That instruction, on the page and otherwise, sent the director off in search of what he calls an “edgier…fresher” approach.
“I decided to take the camera off the dolly and shoot handheld,” Alex says. There were, he explained, a couple reasons for this. “Not only did I think it would inject the beginning of the episode with a fresh energy, I thought it would be fun to see a presidential debate with a handheld camera because [we’d been] conditioned over the years to watching the debates from these locked off, very stoic video positions.”
Alex based the visual approach to the final Bartlet-Ritchie debate on those between Vice President Al Gore and Texas governor George W. Bush in the 2000 election. He was intrigued by the idea of shooting behind the debate moderators and their monitors and cameras. Establishing that visceral feeling—“like I was in the room watching two men perform in…this theater of the debates”—would, he imagined, “liven things up.”
Livening things up fell right in line with Aaron’s script. Despite several weighty, consequential events, it’s undeniable that “Game On” is pretty darn fun. “We had a ball shooting this,” Alex says. “Number one, we were in love with the writing. Number two…moving very fast”—due to the handheld camerawork—“really energized the cast. If we weren’t laughing,” he said, “we were filming. We were having such a good time.”
That was the good news. The bad news was, “Page count was long at the table read,” Aaron says. It’s not terribly surprising, then, that Alex’s first cut of the episode came in well over time. “There was,” as Aaron diplomatically put it, “a level of concern.”
Despite that concern, one of the longest scenes in “Game On” came nowhere near the chopping block. Set on Air Force One, it featured the return of Assistant Secretary of State Albie Duncan. This delightful sequence saw Hal Holbrook’s crotchety political operator getting prepped by C.J. for the post-debate “spin room.” According to Alex, it clocked in at nine pages. (MARY: An average TV scene tends to run one or two pages and can be as short as an eighth of a page.) “Holbrook came on, said hello to everybody…and in the hours it took to shoot the scene…never once looked at his sides or script.”
Of course, that scene staying in meant other things had to come out. A sizable chunk was removed from a Leo story involving a Qumari warship, a shipment of weapons getting redirected to a terrorist group, and Qumar’s UN representative, Ali Nassir. The most noteworthy element of that thread was the welcome reprise of Joanna Gleason as Leo’s lawyer, Jordon Kendall. Referring to Joanna as “a gold rush of an actress,” Alex still marvels at the dynamism firing between those two. “They were like an old, sexy married couple, who…no matter how tough the fight got…enjoyed every minute of each other.” This was, Alex went on to say, just as true of the actors themselves.
They may have made it look easy, but for Joanna Gleason “Game On” was anything but. “It was a challenge because I arrived on set in the early afternoon, and we shot until about four in the morning. But John never flagged—there was much kibitzing, which led to the ease of the on-screen banter!”
Given the crisis with Qumar, the chief of staff has to stick close to home, even as the president and the rest of his team head off to San Diego for the debate. As far as Leo is concerned—he’ll say as much, later, to Ali Nassir—not attending the debate is “like missing my brother’s wedding.” Indeed, in an exchange early on with the soon-departing president, Leo nods him out to the portico for a heartfelt pep talk.
LEO
There’s no such thing as too smart. There’s nothing you can do that’s not going to make me proud of you. Eat ’em up. Game on.
The idea embedded in that West Wing quasi haiku existed in the world of the show…and outside of it, too. Even for a position as critical as leader of the free world, certain voters are put off when a candidate comes across as a know-it-all. “That’s Bartlet’s vulnerability,” Aaron points out. “And he’s been getting nudged by Toby for a while not to try to run from that. To be the smartest guy in the class.”
Governor Ritchie, meanwhile, is his perfect foil and polar opposite, the plainspoken “guy you wanna have a beer with” straight out of central casting. This debate episode was, in part, Aaron’s reaction to the 2000 campaign and what he saw as Gore “trying not to be himself, for fear that being himself was…unattractive to too many people.” The choice for Bartlet to actually be the smartest kid in the class, to lean in to his intellect and his command of the issues was, for many viewers—these two included—like a dream sequence come true. “I could’ve written the debate with the Republican…wiping up the floor with the Democrat,” Aaron says. “The point was that intelligence isn’t a vice.” (In a way, this can be seen as an analogy for the show itself: it’s okay to use acronyms and long words, it’s okay to talk fast and underexplain, it’s okay to make one big scene out of eight little ones. Intelligence—in television, as in politics—isn’t a vice.)
But enough about the main event (for the time being), let’s get to the undercard: Josh Malina’s West Wing debut!
The first time viewers ever laid eyes on Will Bailey, he was managing the political campaign of a dead man named Horton Wilde and barking out orders from the middle of a mattress store in Newport Beach. Quick refresher: It wasn’t that the underdog Democrat vying to represent California’s Forty-Seventh District was “dead in the polls.” He was actually, well…dead. Dead dead. That’s why perfect-looking Sam Seaborn and his perfect-looking necktie had shown up. To persuade the campaign to, at long last, shut down and spare the White House (and the party) any further embarrassment. But Will Bailey wasn’t having it.
WILL
There’s a campaign being waged here, and I’m not embarrassed by it. There are things being talked about, things you believe in, things the White House believes in, and they’re only gonna be talked about in a blowout, and you know it. And you know there’s no glory in it, and you still come here twice and tell me my guy’s a joke!
That’s quite a moment for a new cast member—playing a weary, rumpled “David” facing off against the well-dressed “Goliath”-size ego and righteous indignation of one of POTUS’s best and brightest. Malina, though, didn’t flinch. Not in the mattress-store showdown and not in that tense-making press conference scene. Oh yeah—that.
As Josh recounted to us, the fact that the first West Wing scene he ever shot was directed by Alex Graves really put him at ease “because I knew him from directing me five times on Sports Night.” That said, it was a press conference scene, which meant “there were,” as Josh put it, “a lot of quick answers and a lot of policy.” Press conference scenes can be especially demanding on an actor because, of course, whoever’s at the podium—as C.J., Will, and cocky-’til-his-comeuppance Josh Lyman can attest—has virtually every bit of dialogue, interrupted occasionally by a reporter shouting a question…at which point you dive into yet another chunk of dense policy.
On his first day, Josh’s experience kicked in. “I was in game mode,” he says, “and in the right headspace, frankly, because I had trained for this moment. I had done forty-five episodes as Jeremy on Sports Night, seven hundred and fifty performances of A Few Good Men. I didn’t go to acting school, I trained in the Aaron Sorkin Conservatory, and it served me well when I stepped onto the West Wing set. I’m sure I had first-day nerves—I am human—but I felt prepared.”
Josh’s readiness didn’t go unnoticed. “He walked in to a team playing ball,” Tommy Schlamme says, “and he stepped right in.” Piggybacking on those comments, Alex added, “And he did it with incredible grace. He had the crew and cast cracking up half the time when we weren’t shooting.”
Okay. Back to the main event—that final presidential debate. Everyone (minus Leo) is backstage in San Diego, ready for the bout to begin. When we say “everyone,” we’re not just talking about C.J., Sam, Toby, and Josh, nervously circling the president prior to his entering the ring. And we’re not just talking about Charlie and his episode-long panic about the demise of the president’s “lucky tie” or the first lady, who’s minutes away from injecting mischief into her husband’s pregame ritual. We’re talking about Bartlet’s opponent, the gentleman to the right of him, both literally and politically.
Governor Ritchie was played with good-ol’-boy bravado by the great James Brolin. That the man was able to come in and hit the ground drawling is as much a tribute to the stellar fortune of an educated guess as to Mr. Brolin’s sizable talent. You see, according to Aaron, they needed to cast the role of Governor Ritchie before a scene for that character had even been written. “All I was able to tell you guys about the character,” Aaron later reminded Alex and Tommy, “was that his response to [Simon Donovan] being shot was going to be ‘Crime, boy—I don’t know.’ We had to cast it on that basis.” That worked out pretty well, and not just because it led to this badass Bartlet moment:
PRESIDENT BARTLET
In the future, if you’re wondering…“Crime, boy—I don’t know” is when I decided to kick your ass.
—“Posse Comitatus”
When you think about the seconds right before the president heads out to debate, what do you remember most? The first lady cutting off POTUS’s tie with scissors? The mayhem that came next? Or perhaps it’s Richard Schiff in the background of the intimate exchange between Jed and Abbey, chomping on a baby carrot. (We’ll wait while you cue up the scene and double-check. It’s there. As Rob Lowe told Aaron on his podcast, “If you let him, Richard Schiff would enter every scene on a unicycle, juggling a pizza.”)
What Tommy loved about this chaotic Abby-snipping-off-POTUS’s-necktie sequence was the contrast it featured in Martin, the man at the center of it all. “You have this really great ‘low comedy’ moment and then…he’s capable of doing this.” By “this,” Tommy meant the barrage of knockout punches that Martin then delivers in the debate. His Bartlet doesn’t pull a single one:
PRESIDENT BARTLET
Well, first of all, let’s clear up a couple of things. “Unfunded mandate” is two words, not one “big word.” There are times when we’re fifty states and there are times when we’re one country, and have national needs. And the way I know this is that Florida didn’t fight Germany in World War II or establish civil rights. You think states should do the governing wall-to-wall. That’s a perfectly valid opinion. But your state of Florida got $12.6 billion in federal money last year—from Nebraskans, and Virginians, and New Yorkers, and Alaskans with their Eskimo poetry. 12.6 out of a state budget of $50 billion. I’m supposed to be using this time for a question, so here it is: Can we have it back, please?
As if that wasn’t enough to put the political world on notice that Josiah Bartlet wasn’t some soft, elite academic that Governor Ritchie could shove around, there was this:
PRESIDENT BARTLET
There it is…That’s the ten-word answer my staff’s been looking for for two weeks. There it is. Ten-word answers can kill you in political campaigns. They’re the tip of the sword. Here’s my question: What are the next ten words of your answer? Your taxes are too high? So are mine. Give me the next ten words. How are we gonna do it? Give me ten after that, I’ll drop out of the race right now. Every once in a while…every once in a while, there’s a day with an absolute right and an absolute wrong. But those days almost always include body counts. Other than that, there aren’t very many unnuanced moments in leading a country that’s way too big for ten words. I’m the President of the United States, not the President of the people who agree with me. And by the way, if the Left has a problem with that, they should vote for somebody else.
The president’s hammering of Governor Ritchie with those two powerful rhetorical flourishes was an uplifting moment that the campaign, and the show itself, really needed. The West Wing would soon face a moment of significant transition, with all the attendant worries and excitements that come with times of seismic change. It would advance toward this pivot point armed with a culture that had long been established—and with the resilience of a cast and crew that knew its way to greatness. There was, then, good reason for disorienting, debilitating anxiety, as well as an abiding confidence that the level of quality they’d grown accustomed to could be achieved again. This jumble of emotions was captured—unwittingly and through the eye of a shaky, distant handheld camera—as two combatants met each other…in the middle of the stage.
GOVERNOR RITCHIE
It’s over.
PRESIDENT BARTLET
You’ll be back.