The West Wing

2. Politics of Storytelling and the TV Auteur: Authorship, Performance, and Narrative

Chapter 2 Politics of Storytelling and the TV Auteur Authorship, Performance, and Narrative 31 Bringing new levels of stylish wit and intelligence to primetime television defined The West Wing as exceptional. Credit for its complex plots, intense characterizations, and linguistically dense dialogue went, more often than not, to series creator Aaron Sorkin. In a medium like television, where the producer traditionally reigns supreme, writers are rarely so esteemed ; but recognition “transformed . . . Sorkin from a wunderkind into an institution” (Downing 2005, 135). His proficiency at scripting dialogue with such striking narrative rhythm hardly ever heard before on network TV and the way he “carefully crafted and jealously guarded each word” (Garron 2006, 188) was endlessly recycled in the press and critical literature (see Fahy 2005). Sorkin may have ushered in an original kind of rhetorical style, but he did so, as this chapter asserts, using language and narrative forms deeply implicated in concerns regarding American national and cultural identity. This fundamental link between discourse and identity led to a sense that The West Wing was somehow alive to something in the political air but also determined why the series became so privileged within contemporary U.S. popular culture—and survived even after Sorkin left the show. 01 McCabe text.indd 31 9/12/12 9:22 AM 32 Chapter 2 La politique des auteurs: Sorkin as TV Auteur “I love writing but hate starting,” Sorkin writes. “The page is awfully white and it says, ‘You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, giftless. . . . I’m a white piece of paper, you wanna dance with me?’ and I really, really don’t” (2003a, 3). Still, start writing he did. Putting in seventeen-hour days. Seventy pages of dialogue per week. Crafting, rewriting, and polishing each line. Eight-six episodes. Four seasons. Or so the story goes. Long before Sorkin severed his connections with the series , the popular perception was that he dominated “the writing process in a way unheard of on team-based shows such as Friends or The Sopranos” (Burkeman 2003, 2). As Thomas Fahy remarks, “We don’t think about the team of writers . . . or the staff generating story ideas for The West Wing; we think only of Sorkin” (2005, 2). Words like “brilliant,” “gifted,” “maestro ,” and “genius” were routinely used to describe him, while Adam Sternbergh called Sorkin “TV’s reigning savant of spitfire dialogue” (2006, 72). This idea of Sorkin as having ultimate authority over the script invests The West Wing in the kind of authorship long associated with other privileged cultural forms: theater, international art cinema, and literature. Authorship in these terms is a relatively simple idea, essentially referring to someone with an uncompromising personal vision. Just as Cahiers du cinéma bequeathed to film criticism “an essentially romantic conception of art and the artist . . . art [transcending] history, expressing man’s freedom over destiny” (Hillier 1985, 6), behind the authorial-based critiques is a similar logic applied to network television. “With references to Shakespeare and Graham Greene, visits to rare-book stores and oblique Latin episode titles like ‘Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc,’” writes Peter de Jonge, “the show is so achingly high end that you almost expect the warning ‘Qual01 McCabe text.indd 32 9/12/12 9:22 AM 33 Politics of Storytelling and the TV Auteur ity Television’ to start flashing below the picture” (2001, 46). This seeming encyclopedic engagement with literature and language grounded The West Wing’s bid for respectability within already established debates about creative worth, but it was in the constant assertion of Sorkin as sole arbiter of the script that compelled us to think that way. Privileging the writer in this way grants legitimacy based on hierarchies of cultural taste and value (Bourdieu 1984). Proclaimed through media profiles of Sorkin (see Sternbergh 2006) and pursued in aggressive marketing campaigns and ancillary publications like the script books with transcripts of selected episodes with commentaries by Sorkin (Sorkin 2003a, 2003b), authorial intent defined this primetime network drama as innovative and rewarding—justifying its status as appointment to view. The evocation of the TV auteur as having more or less a free hand to tell stories in whatever way he chooses also raises questions about the role of the head writer working in contemporary network television. Traditionally imagined as a “conveyor belt” system, writing for network television has long had the...