UPDATE: When we penned the story below back in November, we ended – as you can see – with the words ‘it’s all never likely to happen’. However, there’s been progress it seems, and for The West Wing, it looks like there’s a sporting chance of another run of the show.
The news has come from the show’s creator, Aaron Sorkin, who told The West Wing Weekly podcast that he had been asked by NBC boss Robert Greenblatt “to do The West Wing again in some form”. That form could be “9 episodes, 13 episodes. You do it with a different cast, the same cast”.
And it turns out that Sorkin is open to the idea.
“Incredibly, the show has a legacy. The last thing I would want to do is harm that, so if I can come up with an idea that doesn’t feel like A Very Brady Christmas, if I can come up with an idea that works, then yeah”.
That’s a long way from a definite yes, but it does at least sound as though Sorkin – and NBC – are very much warming to the idea…
Previously (November 30th 2017)
Few American network television shows have come close to catching The West Wing at its peak. Even though the last few seasons have more merit than they’re given credit for, the consistency and sheer brilliance of seasons one to four take some beating.
Aaron Sorkin headed up the show for those early seasons, before departing when personal problems took hold. More recently, though, Sorkin has been writing for the big screen, and has just made his feature directorial debut, Molly’s Game. It arrives in cinemas at the start of January.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter to promote the film, a small revelation is dropped. Namely, that Sorkin has a ‘standing offer’ to reboot The West Wing. And it’s a standing offer that he ‘considers on occasion’.
The problem is that not only is he busy, but that Sorkin has little urge to write something that reflects the Trump era. Instead, his outline would be “Sterling K Brown as the president, and there’s some kind of jam, an emergency, a very delicate situation involving the threat of war or something, and Bartlett [Martin Sheen], long since retired, is consulted in the way that Bill Clinton used to consult with Nixon”.
Sadly, it’s all never likely to happen. But we live in hope…