Entry 027 - The West Wing 101 (Pilot)
In which we once again begin an elaborate course of escapism
SERIES: The West Wing
EPISODE NUMBER: 101
TITLE: Pilot
PREMIERE: 22 Sep 1999
DIRECTOR: Thomas Schlamme
DRAFT SCRIPT: PDF
Early on establishing Mr. Sorkin’s propensity not to know when to stop typing, the original draft script for The American President reportedly ran 385 pages, which through what had to be a thoroughly painful process had to be reduced down to 150 pages. Much of what got cut, as Mr. Sorkin would later tell the story, were additional scenes fleshing out the lives of the senior staff of the Shepherd White House — glimpses of which are still visible here and there throughout the final product, if you know where to look. (“It’s Christmas?” / “Yeah, you didn’t get the memo?”) Later retelling the tale of how he had so much written that had to be cut, Mr. Sorkin would fatefully be told by a Hollywood contact that it sounded like he had the makings of a television show.
Thus Mr. Sorkin went on to write a pilot script for a show called The West Wing, a behind-the-scenes look at the lives of the senior staff in a fictional White House administration. The pilot script reportedly ended up having its pick-up delayed due to the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and as such while it was the first TV pilot Mr. Sorkin wrote it would be the second to get developed. (I swear, my choosing that word is cooincidental.foreshadowing detected) Despite that order of operations, as we can see from the publicly available pilot script considerably less got changed between pilot script and pilot episode for The West Wing than did for Sports Night.
For one, there’s only one rename between script and episode: Leo McGarry was originally named Leo Jacobi in the pilot script, in a move that further establishes Aaron Sorkin’s credential as a writer primarily interested in the music of spoken word given the identical syllable structure of the two surnames. For two, the plot did not get a massive rewrite in any capacity like the Sports Night pilot received, which meant considerably more of the original dialogue survived — a fact that did not escape many who originally watched the pilot with advance knowledge of the pilot script. There are a few points where dialogue got rearranged between script and shoot — for the better, I’d argue — but the song is largely the same.
That isn’t to say there aren’t any major changes, however — like with the Sports Night pilot, the pilot for The West Wing had one of its characters rewritten almost entirely. Unlike the character change with Sports Night, however, the character rewrite herein isn’t a positive change for the character, but rather perhaps a dark portent of things to come from this character throughout the first season. Whether or not the character deserves what they got is certainly a matter for debate, but I suspect my part in that discussion will have to wait until we get to the end of the season. For now, it’s time to get into this first episode.
NEW Sorkin Drink: Dewar’s
WAITER: (V.O.) Two Absolut Martinis up, another Dewar’s rocks.
The first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one.
BILLY: Deep background — I’m not gonna come close to using your name.
SAM: You’re not gonna come close to getting a quote, either.
Already the music begins…
NEW Sorkin Name: Billy/Billie
SAM: Billy, I’m not talking about this.
BILLY: Who do I call?
Whom.
SAM: No one.
BILLY: Just tell me who to call.
WHOM.
RETURNING Verbal Tic: Bite me
Running count: 3
SAM: Well, you could call 1-800-BITE-ME.
“But that’s short a digit — wait.”
SAM: He’s not going anywhere, Billy, it’s a non-story.
Once again, we’re in a position where Mr. Sorkin is deliberately withholding information from the audience in favor of having the characters more knowledgeable instead — a sort of reverse version of dramatic irony. Who is Josh, and why do people think he’s on his way out — and why should we care? The audience has no data to answer those questions at the start and rather than having everything explained in the moment, additional data is instead drip-fed to them over the course of the episode. It makes for a novel way to keep the audience interested in what’s to come.
NEW Dialogue Motif: Alger Hiss reference
BILLY: Why do you keep looking over my shoulder?
SAM: Why?
BILLY: Yes.
SAM: ‘Cause Alger Hiss just walked in with my secret pumpkin.
That Alger Hiss reference, believe it or not, was not in the pilot script, the first in a number of small additions presumably made to make up for the time freed up by the complete rewrite of one scene. Much of those additions, like this one, serve to establish the main characters further as snark machines in the face of perceived affrontery — which will be a continuing subject for Sam in particular, as I’m sure I’ll go into further in a future entry.
RETURNING Sorkin Name: Leo
Previous instance: The American President
WOMAN: (O.S.) Telephone, Leo.
LEO: I’m in the shower.
WOMAN: (O.S.) It’s POTUS.
(LEO sits down and picks up the phone)
LEO: Yeah.
Our second in a series of character establishments: Leo was quick to lie his way out of a phone call until he heard who exactly was calling him, indicating a special relationship with this particular person that prompts him to set aside his clearly-valued domesticity to attend to this person. Who exactly this person is, once again, is left up to the audience’s imagination to start.
NEW Sorkin Player: Allison Janney
Character: C.J. Cregg
C.J.: You can have a normal life. You’d be amazed at how normal I can be. See, it’s all about budgeting your time. This time, this hour, this is my time — 5am to 6am. I can workout, as you see; I can think about personal matters; I can… meet an interesting man. The trick is —
MAN: Your beeper’s going.
C.J.: What?
MAN: I think your beeper’s going.
(C.J. checks her beeper while running, then gets distracted by what she reads and falls on the treadmill)
This character introduction actually got rewritten from how it is in the pilot script. Originally, our introduction to C.J. Cregg was to be her ending her morning jog at a Starbucks and immediately asking one of its two workers for his phone upon her beeper going off. Both introductions serve to establish her as a workaholic, though the one we see in the aired episode better establishes that the job itself is perhaps at fault for that, as she makes an effort to explain her ability to be “normal” in the face of little free time to this outsider. The change to this scene was presumably made after the part was cast, as an underhanded reference to the woman’s previous experience with pratfalls for the screen.
NEW Sorkin Player: Bradley Whitford
Character: Josh Lyman
(Beeper goes off, awaking JOSH, who checks the beeper then immediately picks up his phone)
JOSH: Yeah, this is Josh Lyman. What’s going on?
Bradley Whitford is another A Few Good Men stage alumnus whom Mr. Sorkin would place a great deal of trust over the next several years, much like he did with Joshua Malina. Mr. Sorkin evidently liked him so much that this short character introduction here, establishing Josh Lyman immediately as someone married to their job, was added in after being absent from the pilot script — as was the very next character introduction:
FLIGHT ATTENDANT: I need you to turn off your laptop, sir. It interferes with our navigational systems.
TOBY: You know when you guys say that, it sounds pretty ridiculous to most people, right?
It is an absolute fucking crime that I am unable to label this man as a Sorkin Player. Richard Schiff is quite easily the most musical spoken word actor ever to grace the screens of modern television. There’s this between-the-eyeballs quality to his voice that honestly sounds to me like he’s singing in a spoken-word range of pitch. There will legitimately be times where I will have to restrain myself from whipping out my music engraving software to transcribe a Toby Ziegler line. What the hell has been stopping you from giving this guy another part without an audition, Mr. Sorkin?
TOBY: We’re flying in a Lockheed Eagle series L-1011 — came off the line 20 months ago, carries a Sim-5 Transponder tracking system. Are you telling me I can still flummox this thing with something I bought at Radio Shack?
You see?! My hands came dangerously close to opening MuseScore, I swear to you…
RETURNING Sorkin Player: Lisa Edelstein
Character: Laurie
Previous appearances: Sports Night 113/119
RETURNING Verbal Tic: How ya doin’
Running count: 16
RETURNING Sorkin Name: Sam
Previous instances: A Few Good Men, Sports Night 102
LAURIE: How ya doin’, Sam?
RETURNING Verbal Tic: Let me tell you something
Running count: 7
SAM: (O.S.) Let me tell you something — the water pressure in here is really impressive.
Hold on, I need a moment to recover from that concentrated burst of Sorkinisms. (inhales and exhales slowly) Aight, I’m good.
LAURIE: I’m wasted.
SAM: And probably free of cataracts.
LAURIE: I get that, that’s funny.
It may be funny, but it’s factually incorrect — Sam appears to be confusing cataracts with glaucoma, which are two distinctly different eye maladies. While THC has been shown to provide temporary relief for glaucoma, there’s no evidence showing any benefit from marijuana with regard to cataracts. If anything, smoking dope would probably make things worse in that department since smoking is shown to be a risk factor for cataracts.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, quite possibly the most obvious brick joke setup in the history of television:
LAURIE: (looking at both pagers) These things look exactly alike.
In isolation, you could say this setup is rather awkwardly done, but I think we’re able to get away with it here because the speaker in question is stoned, thus making it a believable character moment. Almost makes me wonder if the writer is speaking from experience…
SAM: You know what? I really like you, and if you give me your number, I’d like to call you.
LAURIE: Stay right here, save yourself a call.
SAM: It’s not that I don’t see the logic in that, but I really gotta go.
Okay, Sam — make sure to clock the monogramming on the towels before you leave, that may become important later.
LAURIE: Tell you friend POTUS he’s got a funny name — and he should learn how to ride a bicycle.
SAM: I would, but he’s not my friend, he’s my boss — and it’s not his name, it’s his title.
LAURIE: ‘POTUS’?
SAM: President of the United States.
Yes, my fellow present-day viewers, there was a time when the acronym POTUS was not as well recognized as it is today — 1999 was a wild time, indeed.
NEW Sorkin Player: Dafidd McCracken
Character: Mike (Secret Service)
MIKE: Nice morning, Mr. McGarry.
RETURNING Sorkin Name: Mike
Previous instance: Sports Night 109
LEO: We’ll take care of that in a hurry, won’t we, Mike?
MIKE: Yes, sir.
He keeps a good report with a lowly Secret Service agent — this guy seems really likeable, doesn’t he?
BONNIE: Don’t kill the messenger, Leo.
LEO: Oh, why the hell not, Bonnie?
Not in the pilot script! This addition is the first of a number of additions to the following sequence that I suspect were made as a direct result of Tommy Schlamme’s idea to turn the sequence into a set-establishing walk-and-talk, which called for adding more dialogue than initially written to match the distance to travel.
RETURNING Sorkin Name: Jeff(rey)
Previous instance: The American President
RETURNING Verbal Tic: Missed a name
Running count: 3
LEO: Hey, Emma.
EMMA: ‘Morning.
LEO: Wilson.
WILSON: Hey, Leo.
LEO: Joe.
JEFFREY: Jeffrey.
LEO: Whatever.
Ouch — I guess that guy’s new here?
RETURNING Sorkin Player: Janel Moloney
Character: Donna Moss
Previous appearance: Sports Night 111
DONNA: ‘Morning, Leo.
LEO: Hey, Donna — is he in yet?
DONNA: Yeah.
LEO: (beat) Can you get him?
DONNA: (beat, then turns to shout) Josh!
LEO: Thanks.
I gotta pause to take a moment to unpack the stage direction we see for Donna’s character in the pilot script: “25 and sexy without trying too hard, DONNA is devoted to Josh.” We’ll set aside the fact that the woman cast for the part turned 30 a few months into the run of the show — “sexy without trying too hard” is, I suspect, not the first description that comes to mind to most people for the character of Donnatella Moss. Frankly, I think it’s for the better that this direction is ostensibly ignored, as the baseline youthful flirtiness we got instead makes for a useful element in story beats later in the series — particular for moments where that baseline gets subverted. The devotion part, of course, was completely nailed.
DONNA: And what was the cause of the accident?
LEO: What are you, from State Farm? Go, do a job, would ya?
DONNA: I’m just —
LEO: He was swerving to avoid a tree.
DONNA: And what happened?
LEO: He was unsuccessful.
Leo McGarry, master of the laconicism, ladies and gentlemen!
RETURNING Dialogue Motif: By and large
Previous instances: Sports Night 108, 123
LEO: How many Cubans, exactly, have crammed themselves into these fishing boats?
JOSH: It’s important to understand, Leo, that by and large, they’re not fishing boats. You hear fishing boats, you conjure the image of… well, of a boat, first of all. What the Cubans are on would charitably be described as rafts, okay? They’re making the hop from Havana to Miami in fruit baskets, basically. Let’s just be clear on that.
It’s the ‘basically’ that makes it art.foreshadowing detected
LEO: How many are there?
JOSH: We don’t know.
LEO: What time, exactly, did they leave?
JOSH: We don’t know.
LEO: Do we know when they get here?
JOSH: No.
LEO: True or false, if I were to stand on high ground in Key West with a good pair of binoculars, I’d be as informed as I am right now.
JOSH: That’s true.
LEO: The intelligence budget’s money well spent, isn’t it?
To be fair, Leo, that budget’s probably largely tied up in Afghanistan still.foreshadowing detected
JOSH: What if the DEA suspected they had drugs?
LEO: Does the DEA suspect they have drugs?
JOSH: We could make a phone call.
LEO: Josh!
JOSH: If the DEA or Navy Intel thought the Cubans were bringing in drugs, wouldn’t we have to go out there and search those rafts with, you know, guns and blankets?
Not in the pilot script! This addition makes my previous note on the walk-and-talk more obvious as we now actually start to see the breadth of space we have to traverse in this White House.
RETURNING Dialogue Motif: Pissed as hell
Previous instance: The American President
JOSH: Listen, Leo — did he say anything?
LEO: Did he say anything? The President’s pissed as hell at you, Josh — and so am I.
JOSH: I know.
LEO: You gotta work with these people.
+1 to audience awareness — we start getting a faint idea of why reporters may be thinking Josh is on his way out, though once again it’s a drip feed that doesn’t give us the full context.
NEW Sorkin Name: Al
LEO: I’m saying, you take everyone on the Christian Right, dump them into one big pile, and label them ‘stupid’ — we need these people.
JOSH: We do not need [these people.]
LEO: [Josh.]
RETURNING Sorkin Name: John
Previous instance: The American President
JOSH: We need Al Caldwell — we want Al Caldwell. We do not need John Van Dyke, and we do not need Mary Marsh.
Slight rewrite from what we get in the pilot script: in the place of Josh’s insisting they don’t need the Christian Right, Leo notes that Al Caldwell “is Mrs. Bartlet’s man on teen pregnancy”. The implication of what got cut would have been that the First Lady is potentially to the right of the President himself. In its removal, we are instead left to wonder what the heck this White House sees in the Christian Right as valuable — a sentiment Josh appears to share in his additional lines here, as well as another addition later that we’ll touch on when we get there.
NEW Dialogue Motif: Damn straight
JOSH: It was stupid.
LEO: Damn straight.
JOSH: I was right, though.
LEO: (under his breath) Like I don’t know that.
Oh, and it appears Leo might be of the same mind as Josh to a certain extent — again, for reasons that go unexplained to the audience.
LANDINGHAM: Is anything broken?
LEO: A $4000 Lynex Titanium touring bike that I swore I’d never lend anyone.
LANDINGHAM: I don’t understand, how did [he —]
LEO: [He’s] a klutz, Mrs. Landingham, your President’s a geek.
“Cut! Come on, Mr. Spencer, you know it says ‘spaz’ in the script!”
LANDINGHAM: Mr. McGarry, you know how I feel about that kind of talk in the Oval Office.
LEO: I apologize.
LANDINGHAM: Just in this room, Mr. McGarry, is all I’m asking.
Another solid character establishment: Mrs. Landingham presents herself as a dedicated woman who expects a certain level of respect for the institution she serves, even from those internal to that institution. We certainly get quite a bit more from this character in future episodes, but for a first look we can see this private secretary has her priorities set right.
NEW Sorkin Name: Katie
NEW Sorkin Name: Simon
LEO: Oh, Bonnie — call OEOB and set up a briefing for the Vice President. Let’s coordinate with Katie Simon’s office on the appointments.
And here’s our first mention of OEOB, or the Old Executive Office Building — originally designed to be the primary office of the executive branch of the US government before the West Wing was constructed, thus demoting OEOB into largely an overflow building. Funnily enough, roughly a month and a half after this pilot aired, the building would be renamed to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, but The West Wing would never reflect that — almost certainly because EEOB isn’t quite as musical as OEOB.
NEW Sorkin Name: Margaret/Maggie
LEO: Margaret!
“He said the thing!”
NEW Plot Bunny: How do you spell Khaddafi?
LEO: Please call the editor of the New York Times crossword and tell him that ‘Khaddafi’ is spelled with an H and two Ds, and isn’t a seven letter word for anything.
MARGARET: Is this for real, or is this just funny?
LEO: Apparently, it’s neither.
What do you mean, ‘neither’? It’s clearly both!
By the way, the actress who played Margaret? She’s actually younger than Janel Moloney! You probably wouldn’t know it looking at her, would you?
RETURNING Verbal Tic: What do you want from me?
Running count: 5
C.J.: Is there anything I can say other than the President rode his bicycle into a tree?
LEO: He hopes never to do it again.
C.J.: Seriously, they’re laughing pretty hard.
LEO: He rode his bicycle into a tree, C.J., what do you want me — “the President, while reading a bicycle on his vacation in Jackson Hole, came to a sudden arboreal stop” — what do you want from me?
C.J.: A little love, Leo.
Uh oh — is Ms. Janney a jazz musician, too? That last line wasn’t in the pilot script.
SAM: Somewhere between twelve hundred and two thousand Cubans began embarking from a fishing village thirty miles south of Havana.
STAFFER: Where are they headed?
JOSH: Vegas.
“Cut! Come on, Brad, you know it says ‘Atlantic City’ in the script!”
JOSH: C.J., if one of these guys could throw a split-fingered fastball, we’d send in the USS Eisenhower.
Not in the pilot script! We had some more time to fill, and I’m all for this addition, as it establishes further that Josh prides himself on a very well-defined moral compass which was already hinted at with his objection to Leo’s ostensibly wanting to cozy up to the Christian Right.
TOBY: Oh, for god’s sake, forget about the journey, okay? The voyage is not our problem.
C.J.: What’s our problem?
TOBY: What to do when the Nina, the Pinta, and the Get-Me-the-Hell-Outta-Here hit Miami.
Not sure how I want to feel about these Cubans’ having their plight underhandedly compared to that of Christopher Columbus… I think I’ll just let the music of the line take me.
LEO: Sam?
SAM: Can’t send them back — they’ll go to jail, if they’re lucky.
TOBY: We’ll get whacked in, what, at least —
SAM: Three Congressional districts — Dade County.
TOBY: Those seats are gone.
Oh, okay, we’re straight into political consequences now, I guess. Interestingly, cut from the pilot script is Sam’s first response to Leo’s prompting him wherein he lamely suggest they “cross [their] fingers and hope they have a valid passport, work visa, and driver’s license”. Considering it tonally clashes with the rest of what Sam has to say in the conversation I can understand why it got cut.
JOSH: Not to mention the fact that it’s wrong.
Brad, you’re killing me! It says ‘to say nothing of the fact’ in the pilot script! Way to deny me another meter click, dude!
SAM: I’m just saying, isn’t this more of a military area?
(stunned silence)
LEO: Military?
SAM: Yeah.
TOBY: You think the United States is under attack from twelve hundred Cubans in rowboats?
SAM: I’m not saying I don’t like our chances.
TOBY: Mind-boggling to me that we ever won an election.
I have just physically restrained myself from my keyboard shortcut to open MuseScore.
TOBY: They’re running for their lives. You don’t have to start a game of Red Rover with Castro, but you don’t send in the National Guard, you send food and you send doctors.
JOSH: Sam, see that INS is working with the Red Cross and the Centers for Disease Control.
Strangely, this last line was traded from Leo to Josh between pilot script and shoot. For anyone looking to make an org chart in their mind, it serves to confuse matters considering Josh and Sam theoretically work in different “departments” — and this won’t be the last time the org chart will be thrown into question in this pilot, as we’ll see later.
LEO: Moving on — let’s talk about Josh.
The “let’s talk about Josh” addendum? Not in the pilot script! Frankly, I think it would have been better to leave it out, as it would have left his coworkers’ awareness of his overall situation more ambiguous, which would have made Sam’s defense of Josh to Billy at the top of the pilot more believable. Instead, we’re forced to consider the possibility Sam actually did straight up lie to a reporter.
BILLY: Listen, I had drinks with Sam Seaborn last night.
WOMAN: And Sam said that the President was going to fire [Josh?]
BILLY: [He needs these] people. He’s going to have to give them Josh.
Never mind, looks to me like this reporter deserves to be lied to.
NEW Sorkin Name: Suzanne
C.J.: Details can be found in the pool report that Linda and Suzanne are distributing, along with pool photographs of the President resisting the help of a Secret Service agent and then falling down again. By all means, enjoy yourselves. (smiles)
Ain’t that a nice strategy — leaning into the self-deprecation in a disarming manner. I’m loving this press secretary already.
RETURNING Sorkin Name: Chris
Previous instance: Sports Night (recurring)
CHRIS: C.J., has the President —
C.J.: It’s a light day, Chris, let’s just get through this and then I’ll take a couple of questions.
Ooh, and she’s quick to slap back attempts at disorder, too — we have a versatile player here.
MARY: (on video) I can tell you that you don’t believe in any god that I pray to, Mr. Lyman, not any god I pray to.
JOSH: (on video) Lady, the god you pray to’s too busy being indicted for tax fraud.
+1 to audience awareness — that is certainly no way to comport yourself as a representative of the White House on television, we can see why the President might be pissed. At the same time, though, there are still some questions left unanswered for the audience — at least for the moment, Josh still has his job, which means there’s a hesitation on the part of the President to fire him. What is prompting that hesitation? Is there something to that “tax fraud” song that has a glimmer of truth to it beyond the hyperbole that’s most easily inferred? Certainly the implication here that Mary’s primary god may not necessarily be Yahweh has some fire behind it that deserves further exploration.
RETURNING Plot Bunny: Television neckties
Previous instance: Sports Night 111
DONNA: You shouldn’t have worn that tie on television — it bleeds.
JOSH: I don’t think it was the tie that got me in trouble.
DONNA: No, but I’ve told you a zillion times…
Before anyone asserts this is a reference to Janel Moloney’s previous appearance on Sports Night — it’s actually more likely a coincidence. The exchange here exists in the pilot script, and it’s important to note once again that this pilot script was written before the pilot for Sports Night — and as such was written before the bit about ties in Sports Night. The best we could speculate about its being something more than a coincidence is that Mr. Sorkin remembered her performance in that episode of Sports Night and lobbied to have her play Donna after-the-fact as a result — note that Ms. Moloney originally auditioned for the part of C.J., so it’s not like she herself could be the agent of self-reference.
JOSH: Donnatella Moss, when did you start working for me?
DONNA: Hmm, during the campaign.
JOSH: And how long have you been my assistant?
DONNA: A year and a half.
We’re a year and a half in from the start of the President’s campaign — got it, saving that info for later.
DONNA: You won that election for him — you and Leo and C.J. and Sam…
TOBY: (knocks pointedly) Open the damn door.
DONNA: … and him.
Here we are being set up to feel invested in and cheer for our cast of main characters as the ones responsible for getting our President elected — or are we? Another valid interpretation at this point, given the off-screen characterization of the President himself so far, is that these characters are responsible for propping up an empty shirt. Which is the correct interpretation is not fully answered until the end of the episode.
JOSH: ‘Sup?
Ceiling.
RETURNING Dialogue Motif: Don’t get cute
Previous instance: A Few Good Men
TOBY: What’d I tell you before you went on the air yesterday?
JOSH: You said, “Don’t get cute with Mary Marsh.”
TOBY: I said, “Don’t get cute with Mary Marsh.” I said Al Caldwell is not to be treated like some revival tent clown.
JOSH: Al Caldwell wasn’t there.
TOBY: He sure as hell was watching.
RETURNING Verbal Tic: What do you want from me?
Running count: 6
JOSH: Look, I already took Leo’s morning beating. What do you want from me?
TOBY: I want you to keep your job.
That our band of characters seem quick to have each other’s backs is suggestive that we should be cheering for them, but that still isn’t definitive proof yet.
NEW Dialogue Motif: Calamitous™
TOBY: In preparation for the Sunday morning radio address on family values —
JOSH: When did that get on the schedule?
TOBY: Listen to me for one second.
JOSH: When did it get on the schedule?
TOBY: It’s the regular Sunday morning, listen [to me for just this one second.]
JOSH: [Yeah, but when did we schedule] family values?
TOBY: We scheduled it, Josh, after your smug, taunting, you know, calamitous performance on Capitol Beat.
I’m with Josh, why the hell is this White House submitting to the dog whistle of “family values”? Another point in the “empty shirt” column at this point.
Side note: the pilot script originally name-dropped Meet the Press as the program on which Josh has his god faux pas. Place your bets on how far the genericizing trend continues.
JOSH: Al Caldwell’s friends with bad people, I think he should say so for the common good. Screw politics, how about that?
TOBY: You don’t run social policy for this government, how ‘bout that?
Not in the pilot script — and once again, its addition confuses the org chart of the White House. What do you mean, the Deputy Chief of Staff doesn’t run social policy for the government? Why is it that the Communications Director is claiming territory from the Deputy CoS? (sigh) I probably shouldn’t read that much into it…
NEW Sorkin Name: Lennox
TOBY: Guess who’s leaving Lennox-Chase to start consulting in town? She’s leasing offices downtown, she starts today.
JOSH: Who’s she working for?
WHOM!!
JOSH: That’s a good picture of her.
Oh no, are we setting up a potential romance storyline? Please don’t do it, Mr. Sorkin…
NEW Sorkin Name: Bruce
MANDY: Bruce! I may have just gotten back into the business this morning, but I didn’t come by way of a turnip truck, you know what I’m saying? … You faff me around on this, and I’m going to get cranky right in your face. Now I was your source on 443 — big, fat byline, above the fold — so I think it’s time we play “what have you done for me lately”.
Our introduction to Mandy Hampton is completely different from what we have in the pilot script. Instead of her speeding and running lights through D.C., the pilot script introduces her during her move-in process into her new office. In that scene, she and her assistant Daisy discuss their plan to be able to index what was in the many boxes they had shipped to the office, which hinged on a piece of paper doing just that — which ended up getting stored in one of those boxes.
SOUND FAMILIAR?!
In the aftermath of Daisy’s chewing out Mandy for doing such a thing, Mandy tries changing the subject as they start searching the boxes for the index:
DRAFT MANDY: Did you know there’s a town in Iowa with 841 residents, each and every one of whom are named Miller?
DRAFT DAISY: (pause) Mandy, I’m like this close to setting you on fire.
DRAFT MANDY: How do you suppose they get their mail delivered?
SOUND FAMILIAR?!?!
The character introduction as written in the pilot script arguably sets up Mandy to be established later as a kindred spirit to those in the White House: an occasionally scatterbrained intellect with her heart in the right place. Instead, in the episode as shot her character can be more accurately described as being set up to provide a foil to our band of heroes, with her attempted strong-arming of a reporter over the phone providing a glimpse at a me-first mentality. No one in this White House can be truthfully accused of such a mentality.
FRED: Another two and a half percent in the third quarter at the end of the fiscal year.
LEO: That’s fine, but the President’s gonna look at the WBO revenue analysis and say that economists were put on this planet to make astrologists look good.
WARNING: CONTINUITY ERROR DETECTED!!
Here’s yet another piece of evidence that this episode was originally written over a year before the next episode. It’s pretty jarring considering the President is established to be a Nobel laureate in economics in the very next episode — perhaps Leo’s indicating a healthy self-deprecating humor in our President?
RETURNING Sorkin Name: Luther
Previous instances: A Few Good Men, Sports Night (recurring)
LEO: Luther — ballpark, one year from today, where’s the Dow?
LUTHER: Tremendous, up a thousand.
LEO: Fred — one year from today.
FRED: Not good, down a thousand.
LEO: A year from today at least one of ya’s gonna look pretty stupid.
LUTHER: Can we go now?
Where the President maintains plausible deniability where self-deprecation is involved, this economist had his stripped — the pilot script has Luther respond “no doubt about that” rather than ask if he and his colleague can go.
SAM: We have a storm system moving into South Florida.
LEO: See, with any luck, the Cubans’ll turn around and live to defect another day.
JOSH: Yeah, ‘cause they’re probably all tuned to the National Weather Service…
Now, come on, Josh — one need not look at a weather report to know that they’re approaching a storm. Are you really so serially indoors as to be unable to do that yourself?
RETURNING Sorkin Name: Lloyd
Previous instance: The American President
RETURNING Sorkin Name: Russell
Previous instance: Sports Night 107
JOSH: Thirty second hypothetical — you’re Lloyd Russell, newly crowned prince of the White suburban woman, the upper middle class Black man, and the teacher’s union. You’re no friend to the sitting President. What do you do?
LEO: Put together an exploratory committee.
JOSH: Who do you get to run it?
LEO: You.
JOSH: I already got a job.
LEO: For the moment.
Ouch.
RETURNING Sorkin Name: Mandy/Madeline
Previous instance: Sports Night 102
LEO: Well, if I could get Mandy to leave 900 thousand dollars a year at Lennox-Chase, I’d get Mandy.
“But only if there’s a minister handy.”
LEO: (indicating JOSH to SAM) Hey, come to think of it, you think she’d be interested in his job?
Holy hell, he’s laying it on thick — here’s hoping Toby’s plan to save Josh comes to fruition…
SAM: That the same suit you wore yesterday?
JOSH: Yeah. (beat) You?
SAM: Yeah.
But for entirely different reasons!
Side note: this is not how this button was written in the pilot script. In the pilot script, after Josh swats away a “how ya doin’” from Sam (another meter click denied), Sam quips to Josh that Mandy’s “probably just here ‘cause she wants your job”. This cut is the first of a couple of cuts that removes the explicit implication that Mandy could be considered qualified for Josh’s job — which was a necessary change considering how thoroughly she got recharacterized between script and shoot.
RETURNING Sorkin Name: Jennifer/Jenny
Previous instance: Sports Night 114
JOSH: This is Mandy Hampton. She’s excellent, too.
STUDENT 1: From the campaign?
STUDENT 2: Didn’t you guys used to be a thing?
STUDENT 1: Jennifer!
STUDENT 2: Sorry.
JOSH: She used to steal money from me.
Cut from the pilot script was Mandy offering a response of her own before Josh chimes in:
DRAFT MANDY: Girl friend, he was the love of my life. But he done me wrong. So I sent him packing and said don’t you come back no mo’, no mo’.
Best I can figure, she’s riffing off the song “Hit the Road Jack” by Ray Charles with this thoroughly teasing line. As for the line itself, I don’t really miss it — with Mandy’s characterization getting flipped, having this line stay in would theoretically have been a tonal clash for her.
MANDY: What do you wanna know? Is Lloyd going to run?
JOSH: I really don’t care one way or the other, he’s a lightweight. I just —
MANDY: You don’t like him.
JOSH: Not when I can’t use him, no.
Yet another reminder that we’re looking at a team of political professionals, despite the fact we’re being told this team is potentially more idealistic than your average White House staff — particularly Josh, who has demonstrated a propensity to put his moral compass before his political compass until now.
MANDY: You should get to know him.
JOSH: I have enough friends.
MANDY: Not these days, you don’t.
JOSH: Please, Mandy, it’s not like these people were in our camp to begin with.
MANDY: That’s right, Josh, and they’ve been waiting for you to trip over your mouth and you handed it to them.
Yes, quite the contortionist is Josh Lyman.foreshadowing detected
Side note: that last couplet? Not in the pilot script! We have yet another addition that adds more fuel to the speculation that the White House’s attempts at cozying to the Christian Right is perhaps not as set in stone as outside appearances would suggest.
RETURNING Dialogue Motif: ‘Woman’ as an insult
Previous instances: Sports Night 103, 108, 122
JOSH: You’re dating Lloyd Russell.
MANDY: Yes.
JOSH: (beat) Wow… that’s great.
MANDY: Are you gonna freak out?
JOSH: No, no, no, not at all, it’s just… I always thought he was gay.
MANDY: No, you didn’t.
JOSH: I did.
MANDY: He’s not gay.
JOSH: You sure?
MANDY: Very sure.
JOSH: He always seemed effeminate to me.
MANDY: He happens to be very athletic — plenty masculine.
JOSH: I think he’s a woman.
MANDY: Josh, take me seriously.
JOSH: I do.
All evidence to the contrary…
MANDY: The New York Times is gonna release a poll in the next few days that brings your unfavorables up to 48%.
JOSH: This is the first I’m hearing of it.
MANDY: You’ll have it in about an hour.
JOSH: Where’d you get this?
MANDY: We don’t play for the same team anymore.
JOSH: Wait a minute, one minute you’re giving me career advice, the next minute you’re telling me [we don’t play for the same team?]
MANDY: [I’m just gonna be here a while,] and I want you at your fighting weight when I start bitch-slapping you guys around the beltway.
That is quite the colorful imagery there…
By the way — before Mandy’s citing the poll there’s another line that got cut from the pilot script:
DRAFT JOSH: There was one job for the two of us and the President gave it to me. I’d think you’d be the last person who’d want to see me keep it.
Once again, the story beat that Mandy would be a serious candidate for Josh’s job is dropped between pilot script and shoot, which when paired with the change in her introduction ultimately serves to change her story arc to come — which we’ll see in the very next episode.
RETURNING Verbal Tic: Almost hard to believe
Running count: 4
LEO: What’s my name? My name doesn’t matter. I’m just an ordinary citizen who relies on the Times crossword for stimulation — and I’m telling you that I’ve met the man twice, and I’ve recommended a preemptive Exocet Missile strike against his airforce, so I think I [know how to —]
C.J.: [Leo!]
LEO: (checks phone) They hang up on me, every time.
C.J.: That’s almost hard to believe.
You know, upon hearing what Leo just said over the phone, C.J. probably should be going into damage control to make sure no one at the New York Times ends up writing a less-than-flattering piece about the White House Chief of Staff and his attempts to strong-arm the Times crossword editor. I suppose I might be reading too much into that…
NEW Sorkin Name: Hutchinson
C.J.: There might be a press leak on A3C3.
LEO: That was Hutchinson.
Bring me the finest foreshadowing in all the land.foreshadowing detected
C.J.: You know the President.
LEO: So do you.
C.J.: You know him better.
LEO: I’ve known him forty years, C.J., and all I can promise you is that on any given day there’s really no predicting what he’s going to choose to care about.
Casual bit of backstory thrown in — Leo is the man on the President’s staff who has known him the longest, which adds some color as to why he was quick to drop his shower excuse and answer the man’s call. It’s a welcome element to include, especially considering this entire scene wasn’t in the original pilot script.
NEW Sorkin Player: William Duffy
Character: Larry
LARRY: The 76 year old grandmother.
ED: Every time we use those assault stats, Carr and Gilmore come back —
SAM: Who’s the 76 year old grandmother?
LARRY: Every day, 17 thousand Americans defend themselves with a gun —
SAM: That is flatly untrue.
LARRY: — including a 76 year old grandmother in Chicago, who defended herself against an intruder in the middle of the night.
Oh, fuck off with that story.
NEW Sorkin Name: Larry
SAM: The 76 year old grandmother doesn’t defend herself with a modified AK-47 assault rifle, Larry, unless she’s defending herself against Turkish rebels.
Thank you, Sam — now I’ll feel less compelled to reach into the television and strangle someone now that I know someone in this White House is on the side of reason.
RETURNING Sorkin Name: Cathy
Previous instance: Sports Night 108
CATHY: Excuse me.
SAM: Oh, you guys know my assistant, Cathy?
ED: We’ve talked a lot on the phone.
What the hell is this introduction? We’re half a year into this administration, if we do the math on Donna’s tenure as Josh’s assistant, and yet we’re supposed to believe Ed and Larry have yet to come face-to-face with Cathy up to this point? It’s not like we can say she’s new, since Ed outright says they’ve talked on the phone “a lot”. Something doesn’t add up here…
CATHY: Leo’s wife called.
SAM: That woman hates me.
CATHY: Yes.
SAM: What’d I do?
CATHY: You tried to hit on her at a party fundraiser.
SAM: Yes, I meant recently. I meant why did she call.
CATHY: She wants you to [talk to —]
SAM: [For the hundreth] time, I didn’t know who she was. How much longer am I gonna be crucified for that?
For hitting on the boss’s wife? As long as it takes for you to apologize properly, you Brat.
CATHY: She was supposed to give a tour to some students from her daughter’s fourth grade class. She can’t make it and she wants you to do it.
WARNING: CONTINUITY ERROR DETECTED!!
Leo McGarry’s wife was in a position to provide a tour of the White House, you say? Are you sure about that? Don’t want to wait a few episodes before putting that out into the wild?
SAM: Hi, you paged me?
WOMAN: (over phone) Who is this?
SAM: This is Sam Seaborn.
WOMAN: (over phone) I’m sorry, there’s been a mistake.
SAM: Who’s this?
WOMAN: (over phone) Cashmere Escort Service.
“Cut! Read the script, woman, it says ‘Champagne’, not ‘Cashmere’!”
SAM: Page me and punch in the number.
(CATHY punches in SAM’s number)
Brick joke landing on the runway in three… two… one…
CATHY: You switched pagers with someone.
Thank you for flying Brick Joke Airlines, please stay in your seats until the plane comes to a complete stop at the gate.
LAURIE: (over phone) You called me.
SAM: Yeah, uh, actually you called me, and that’s because, uh, you have my pager… and… I have yours.
LAURIE: (over phone) Oh.
SAM: Yeah… look, listen, can I come by and see you real quick?
LAURIE: (over phone) Yeah.
Be sure to change cabs twice on the way there, Sam.
C.J.: Guys, I don’t have a lot of time to answer questions right now.
Should I talk about it? Yeah, I suppose I should talk about it. It doesn’t exactly pertain to the goal of this project, but nonetheless we should note that as we go through this first season, yes, the press briefing room does not have a proper location in this West Wing. To my recollection, this scene is the only one in which the press are shown loitering around outside where the press briefing room is in the real-life West Wing. Otherwise, post-briefing scenes have our briefer exiting into a seemingly random location throughout the first season of this show. Get used to it, it’ll be fun.
LEO: He also spent eight months travelling around the country discouraging young women from having abortions.
CALDWELL: Oh, hang on. He never said [anything —]
LEO: [He does] not believe that it’s the government’s place to legislate this issue, but that’s never stopped him from playing his role as a moral leader.
Fuck off — anyone in real life who considers discouraging women from having abortions a moral imperative is actually a moral degenerate. Don’t make me go into my berserk-button spiel about how opposing abortion is morally repugnant, you don’t have the time.
CALDWELL: Why does he insist on demonizing us as a group?
LEO: Because your group has plenty of demons.
CALDWELL: (snorts) Every group has plenty of demons.
LEO: You don’t have to tell me about it, Reverend, I’m a member of the Democratic Party.
This scene is not in the pilot script, which could feasibly mean this exchange was written after the Monica Lewinsky story broke. Whether the parallel was intentional is a mystery for the ages…
NEW Dialogue Motif: Six-to-five and pick ‘em
CALDWELL: … I want to make sure you take me seriously!
LEO: You don’t think we’re taking this seriously? Twenty-four hours ago, the President ordered me to fire Josh Lyman. I’ve been trying to talk him down from it ever since. He’s getting off the plane in ten minutes, it’s six-to-five and pick ‘em whether Josh still has a job.
+1 to audience awareness — Josh’s actions were indeed egregious enough to warrant the President to consider taking away his job. Nonetheless, there’s still something going on that’s prompting the President to be amenable to Leo’s implorations not to fire Josh. What is it that’s keeping the President open to reconsidering?
NEW Verbal Tic: Can I ask you something
SAM: Can I ask you something?
LAURIE: “Am I a hooker?”
NEW Dialogue Motif: Insistent night job terminology
SAM: No no… what I was gonna say is this — i-is it possible, that in addition to being a law student and part-time bartender, that you are what I’m certain would have to be a very high-priced call girl. I, by the way, making no judgements, the thing is, with my job —
LAURIE: Yes.
SAM: (beat) Yes?
LAURIE: Yes. I’m sorry, I should have told you. I wanted you to like me.
So let me get this straight: Laurie, a high-priced call girl, is hanging out in a bar late at night. Presumably, a woman of that profession is looking for a client in a setting like that. Instead, she finds herself infatuated with a man at the bar not even looking to pay and sleeps with him anyway. She theoretically missed out on a night’s pay with this liaison, but she didn’t seem to mind — at least, until she learned the man in question works for the President of the United States. She has a good head on her shoulders, in that regard:
SAM: Listen, I-I don’t know how often you get up —
LAURIE: Sam… go. You don’t know who I am.
SAM: (beat) It’s just that there are people who’d pay a lot of money to try —
LAURIE: I know. Go — it’s okay.
(sigh) I suppose I should talk about it now.
It’s going to be hard not to hit on subjects that are already covered in The West Wing Weekly podcast, I want to state that upfront. Of particular interest to me with this scene, however, is something that isn’t brought up in that podcast until eleven episodes later. As a professionally trained musician, I should state my philosophy on film music: in an ideal world, there should never be non-diagetic music playing over dialogue.
I realize that’s a bold thing to say, but the thing to understand, as I’ve stated on multiple occasions, is that with Sorkin dialogue in particular spoken word has a musicality of its own. As such, having music playing over dialogue can amount to playing two songs at the same time. At worst, it can lead to a particularly egregious tonal clash between word music and music music.
This scene is exhibit one: the subject matter of the dialogue is frankly rather dark, but the music playing over it appears to be attempting to establish a romantic moment. It’s the first of a number of instances where, as would be explained on the aforementioned podcast, our favorite production triumverate — Sorkin, Schlamme, and Walden — had to defer to the tastes of NBC production and have more sappy music cues overlay what would otherwise have been more understated moments. These musical cues are basically NBC’s equivalent of ABC’s original sin of the laugh track on Sports Night — and thankfully for everyone involved, like the latter the former would only last a season as well.
DONNA: You’ve been wearing the same clothes for 31 hours now, Josh.
JOSH: I am not getting spruced up for these people, Donna.
DONNA: All the girls think you look really hot in this shirt.
(After a beat, JOSH grabs the shirt from DONNA)
Damn, she knows how to manipulate him…
SAM: I don’t know what to say to them.
CATHY: You’re supposed to tell them about the building and its history. You need anything?
SAM: I need someone to tell me about the building and its history.
“Okay, I’ll get Margaret.”foreshadowing detected
SAM: Which one’s Leo’s daughter?
CATHY: What does it matter?
SAM: I want to make a good impression. What does she look like?
CATHY: I don’t know.
SAM: Okay — I’d just like to thank you for all of your help.
(beep) Sarcasm Self Test complete! (beep)
RETURNING Sorkin Name: Mal(l)ory
Previous instance: Sports Night 104
MALLORY: Mr. Seaborn — Mallory O’Brien.
…
SAM: My name is Sam Seaborn and I’m the Deputy Communications Director. What does that mean exactly? Well, to begin with, I’m a counselor to the President, mostly on domestic matters, though generally not security related. I work with Toby Ziegler, the Communications Director, and C.J. Cregg, the Press Secretary, on crafting our message and getting it out through the electronic and print media.
Hoo boy — there’s another way to date this episode: “electronic and print media,” he says. How times have changed…
SAM: And while my functions here are generally perceived to be politically skewed, it’s important to remember that it is not the DNC but rather your tax dollars that pay my salary, so I work for you whether you voted for us or not.
(awkward pause)
“Mr. Seaborn? We don’t vote or pay taxes.”
“… S-sure, I knew that.”
SAM: The White House, as you know, was built several years ago, mostly, if I’m not mistaken, out of cement. The room we’re in right now, the Roosevelt Room, is very famous. It is named after our… eighteenth president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Strange change made at this point — in the pilot script, Sam pinpoints FDR as our sixteenth president instead of eighteenth. Likewise:
RETURNING Verbal Tic: How ya doin’
Running count: 17
SAM: How ya doin’?
MALLORY: I’m sorry to be rude, but are you a moron?
SAM: In this particular area, yes.
MALLORY: The eighteenth president was Ulysses S. Grant, and the Roosevelt Room was named for Theodore.
In the pilot script, Mallory corrects Sam by saying the sixteenth president was Andrew Johnson. Oops! She was one president off — that should have been Abraham Lincoln. Strange that the choice of president was changed altogether rather than just correcting the mistake made, but it’s not like it makes that big of a difference.
SAM: Could you tell me which one of those kids is Leo McGarry’s daughter?
MALLORY: Why?
SAM: Well, if I could make eye contact with her, make her laugh, you know, just see that she’s having a good time, it might go a long way toward making my life easier.
MALLORY: These children worked hard — all of them — and I’m not inclined at this moment to make your life easier.
SAM: Ms. O’Brien, I understand your feelings, but please believe me when I tell you that I’m a nice guy having a bad day. I just found out the Times is publishing a poll that says a considerable portion of Americans feel that the White House has lost energy and focus — a perception that’s not likely to be altered by the video footage of the President riding his bicycle into a tree. As we speak, the Coast Guard are fishing Cubans out of the Atlantic Ocean while the Governor of Florida wants to blockade the Port of Miami; a good friend of mine’s about to get fired for going on television and making sense; and it turns out that I accidentally slept with a prostitute last night. Now, would you please, in the name of compassion, tell me which one of those kids is my boss’s daughter.
MALLORY: (beat) That would be me.
Uh oh.
SAM: Leo’s daughter’s fourth grade class.
Ayup — ain’t that a fine dangling modifier!
SAM: Well, this is bad on so many levels.
Sure is! Let’s review:
- Sam somehow thought Leo would have a daughter young enough to be in fourth grade.
- Sam revealed to said daughter that he was basically only doing this to get into her parents’ good graces.
- Sam revealed to his boss’s daughter that he slept with a prostitute.
This last one frankly would have been bad either way, considering he essentially assumed he was telling a total stranger that he slept with a prostitute. My word, he is having a bad day, indeed…
C.J.: She’s gonna try and [sic] bait you, Josh…
No, C.J., she’s going to try to bait him, but it’s not going to succeed, right?
… Right?
CALDWELL: The goals and spirit of Christian and family-oriented organizations, while embraced by a great and growing number of Americans —
Cap.
CALDWELL: — have been met with hostility and contempt by their government.
Gee, I wonder why?sarcasm detected
CALDWELL: I was surprised at you, Josh. I always counted you as a friend.
You have?
JOSH: And I’m honored by that, Reverend.
You are?! What happened to all the (correct) stuff you’ve been spouting about the Christian Right being morally suspect?
JOSH: First, let me say that when I spoke on the program yesterday, I was not speaking for the President or this administration, that’s important to know. Second, please allow me to apologize — my remarks were glib and insulting, I was going for the cheap laugh, and anybody willing to step up and debate ideas deserves better than a political punch line. Mary, I apologize.
Oh, damn, he actually knows how to make a good apology. Dan Rydell has some competition.
MARY: Good then — let’s deal.
Aaaaand Mary shits all over the apology like Luther Sachs did. Brilliant…
MARY: Condoms in the schools.
TOBY: What?
MARY: Condoms in the schools.
TOBY: Well, that’s a problem.
MARY: What?
TOBY: We have a Surgeon General who says they dramatically reduce the risk of teen pregnancy and AIDS.
MARY: So does abstinence.
So does castration, Mary, but you don’t hear anyone advocating for that… anymore.
VAN DYKE: Show the average American teenage male a condom and his mind will turn to thoughts of lust.
TOBY: Show the average American teenage male a lug wrench and his mind’ll turn…
Damn, and C.J. was worried about Josh getting baited…
MARY: It was only a matter of time with you, Josh.
JOSH: Yeah.
MARY: That New York sense of humor was just [a little bit —]
CALDWELL: [Mary, there’s no need —]
MARY: [Reverend, please!] They think they’re so much smarter, they think it’s smart talk — but nobody else does.
JOSH: I’m actually from Connecticut, but that’s neither here nor there. The, uh, the point is, Mary, I should —
TOBY: She meant Jewish.
Oh, good, I’m not the only one whose antisemitism meter went off.
TOBY: When she said “New York sense of humor”, she was talking about you and me.
JOSH: You know what, Toby, let’s not even go there.
Really?! You’re willing to let that casual antisemitism slide, Josh? You really value keeping your job that highly? What is going on here?
RETURNING Verbal Tic: Here we go
Running count: 2
MARY: I don’t like what I’ve just been accused of.
TOBY: I’m afraid that’s just tough, Mrs. Marsh.
VAN DYKE: The First Commandment says, “Honor thy Father.”
TOBY: No, it doesn’t.
JOSH: Toby —
TOBY: It doesn’t.
JOSH: Listen, the —
TOBY: No, if I’m gonna make you sit through this preposterous exercise, we’re gonna get the names of the damn commandments right.
MARY: Okay, here we go.
Having Toby get this thoroughly worked up is not how this scene went in the pilot script. As written originally, Mary evidently brushes off the antisemitism accusation and rolls straight into a gish gallop of right-wing dog whistles, at the end of which she asks what the problem is with school prayer. Toby (rightfully) responds with “the First Amendment”, which then prompts John Van Dyke and Mary to devolve into a debate amongst themselves about the order of the commandments — despite, as he points out, Toby’s saying “amendment” instead of “commandment”. Very apt rewrite, I’d say — it makes for a more natural progression given what happened just beforehand.
RETURNING Sorkin Player: Martin Sheen
Character: President Josiah Bartlet
Previous appearance: The American President
TOBY: “Honor thy Father” is the Third Commandment!
VAN DYKE: Then what’s the First Commandment?
BARTLET: “I am the Lord your God. Thou shalt worship no other god before me.” Boy, those were the days, huh?
No, they really weren’t, Mr. President.
By the way, interesting thing to note — in the pilot script, we get an explicit mention of another character in a stage direction: “To the right and two paces behind Bartlet is Charlie, holding a duffle bag and a briefcase. Nineteen years old, fresh-faced in a Brooks Brother suit, CHARLIE is taking a year off from Georgetown to work as the President’s personal aide.”
What could have been, eh? The character of Charlie would get cut from the pilot and not appear until two episodes later.
VAN DYKE: May I ask you a question, sir?
Oooh, he said “may” instead of “can” — those children’s schoolyard games paid off for him.
VAN DYKE: If our children can buy pornography on any street corner for five dollars, isn’t that too high a price to pay for free speech?
BARTLET: No.
VAN DYKE: Really?
BARTLET: On the other hand, I do think that five dollars is too high a price to pay for pornography.
Is it, though? We’re talking about a time before internet advertising was anywhere near as profitable as it is today, so these one-time payments for porn were basically the primary source of income for the stars of these porn productions. Anything less than five dollars a pop would probably constitute less than a living wage for them, would it not? … Okay, I’ll shut up, sir.
RETURNING Sorkin Name: Lewis
Previous instance: The American President
BARTLET: May I have some coffee, Mr. Lewis?
“Cut! Come on, Martin, you know how our writer feels about improvisation!”
BARTLET: Al, how many times have I asked you to denounce the practices of a fringe group that calls itself the Lambs of God?
“Cut! Martin, please, the script says ‘Lambs of Christ’!”
NEW Sorkin Name: Abb(e)y
BARTLET: You know, my wife, Abbey, she never wants me to do anything while I’m upset. (staffer hands him coffee) Thank you, Mr. Lewis.
“You know what, forget it, you do you, Martin.”
BARTLET: Abbey told me not to drive while I was upset and she was right. She was right yesterday when she told me not to get on that damn bicycle while I was upset, but I did it anyway, and I guess I was just about as angry as I’ve ever been in my life. Seems my granddaughter Annie had given an interview in one of those teen magazines, and somewhere between movie stars and makeup tips, she talked about her feelings on a woman’s right to choose. Now Annie, all of twelve, has always been precocious, but she’s got a good head on her shoulders and I like it when she uses it, so I couldn’t understand it when her mother called me in tears yesterday. I said, “Elizabeth, what’s wrong?” She said, “It’s Annie.” Now I love my family, and I’ve read my bible from cover to cover, so I want you to tell me, from what part of Holy Scripture do you suppose the Lambs of God drew their divine inspiration when they sent my twelve year old granddaughter a Raggedly Ann doll with a knife stuck through its throat?
Judges 19, maybe?
BARTLET: You’ll denounce these people, Al — you’ll do it publicly — and until you do, you can all get your fat asses out of my White House.
Alright, it’s time to talk about it — one of the main criticisms of this first episode of The West Wing is that President Bartlet’s bailing out Josh in the end amounts to a modern instance of deus ex machina. To that criticism I can say this: anyone who thinks this is an example of deus ex machina clearly has never seen an actual deus ex machina. In a proper deus ex machina, a third party that has been completely absent in every regard, physically or by spoken reference, from the story so far comes in to fix everything magically for no apparent prior reason as a bailout for a writer who’s written the story into a corner. President Bartlet has been physically absent up to this point, yes, but that’s about as far as the similarity goes — references to the man have been on the lips of our characters quite frequently, and the implication that the story had been written into a corner at this point betrays the implier’s lack of attention to the story so far.
Recall now, the President had ordered his Chief of Staff to fire his deputy, but was talked into reconsidering the matter. That level of reticence indicates the man is ruminating on something that up to this point was not explicitly shown to the audience, as is the wont of the story’s writer. That the realization happens off-screen certainly doesn’t help Mr. Sorkin’s case in this department, but it nonetheless should be stated: the President calls off the firing because he sees the parallel between Josh’s anger on television and his own anger that precipitated his bicycle crash. This is not a matter of a deity coming in and going, “shit, everything’s fucked up, lemme fix it.” It’s a man realizing who’s actually in the wrong and coming to the defense of someone fighting that wrong — as this whole speech from the President demonstrates for those who are listening. +100 to audience awareness
AL: We’ll fix this, Leo.
LEO: See that you do.
Fuck yeah, Leo, stick it to ‘em!
JOSH: I thought you were going to take a swing at her there, Vanna.
TOBY: She was calling us New York Jews, Josh.
JOSH: Yeah, but being from Connecticut, I didn’t mind so much.
(sigh) Well, at least his modifier isn’t dangling…
C.J.: All I could really think about was Lloyd Russell and your girlfriend.
SAM: Mandy and Lloyd Russell?
JOSH: I’ll be puttin’ an end to that.
BARTLET: “Hello, Mr. President. Did you have a nice trip, sir? How’s the ankle, sir?”
Very interesting cut made here: somewhere in the preceding sequence, the pilot script has Donna enter the Oval along with the others and at this point she asks after Annie — to which the President responds that “Annie’s upset” after a beat and thanks her for asking. I’m honestly quite confused as to why that got cut — it would have made a nice touch to provide the juxtaposition of the assistant class’s being more interested in greeting the President than the senior staff were in the moment. Budget cut not to call Ms. Moloney, perhaps?
BARTLET: There was this time that Annie came to me with this press clipping. Seems these theologians down in South America were all excited because this little girl from Chile had sliced open a tomato, and the inside flesh of the tomato had actually formed a perfect rosary. The theologians commented that they thought this was a very impressive girl. Annie commented that she thought it was a very impressive tomato. (beat) Don’t know what made me think of that.
Me neither, that was very random…
Side note: as written in the pilot script, the tomato’s innards were made to spell out the Lord’s Prayer rather than form a perfect rosary. That would have bordered the line of believability had that not changed.
BARTLET: (reading) Naval Intelligence reports approximately twelve hundred Cubans left Havana this morning. Approximately 700 turned back due to severe weather; some 350 are missing and presumed dead; 137 have been taken into custody in Miami and are seeking asylum.
Oh, okay, I guess we’re getting the Cuban subplot wrapped up in a neat little bow. I suppose there technically wasn’t anything our team of heroes could do about the event, anyway, they were only in a position to monitor.
BARTLET: With the clothes on their back, they came through a storm — and the ones that [sic] didn’t die want a better life, and they want it here. Talk about impressive.
Wait, is that why you brought up the tomato story? That’s a tenuous connection, at best…
BARTLET: Josh.
(JOSH turns to face him)
BARTLET: “Too busy being indicted for tax fraud”?
(JOSH exhales to accept his fate)
BARTLET: Don’t ever do it again.
This is where the pilot script ends — no, really. Thankfully for everyone involved, Mr. Schlamme managed to plant a seed into Mr. Sorkin’s mind that we need things to continue:
BARTLET: Mrs. Landingham! What’s next?
“He said the thing!”
It should be no surprise to anyone who’s been reading what I’ve written up to this point that I consider this pilot episode considerably better than the pilot to Sports Night. Where most of the rewrites to the pilot of Sports Night were done in the service of leaning into the half-hour comedy format, the rewrites to the pilot of The West Wing were done in the service of tightening up the story. The motivation behind Josh’s and the President’s love-hate relationship with the Christian Right is given more context, and the outsider character of Mandy is given a more believable characterization of foil to the senior staff’s guiding idealism. The only thing that really gives me pause about this pilot is Sam’s storyline, which frankly comes off as rather silly considering the show was supposedly originally intended primarily as a Sam Seaborn vehicle. Despite that, this pilot establishes very well the energy and motivation of this White House and its senior staff we will see in episodes to come, and plants the seeds for having the audience cheer for these characters going forward.
Whether you blithely skipped everything I’ve written before this entry and started here or not, I would highly recommend that you beef up your RSS feed with a subscription to this blog to see just how far this project will go. Coming up next: we’re starting a bakery, I suppose?
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