Phil W. Bayles

Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying About Optimism

We’re in the middle of a golden age of television, and here I am watching The West Wing for the fourth time.

Every time I watch it I’m a little older, a little wiser and a little fatter, and because of two of those things I see the show in a different light every time.

Each time, I find it easier to understand the theatre and backhanded dealings that make up US politics. Each time, I find new depth in Aaron Sorkin’s writing, even as some of it makes me want to cringe until I turn inside out. Each time, I get a greater sense of just how much we lost with the passing of John Spencer, the actor who played White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry (go watch his ‘guy falls in a hole’ speech, if you need a reminder). 

This time, I find myself thinking more and more about the music. 

So much of the dialogue in the show feels like music. “Words,” says President Josiah Bartlet, “when spoken out loud for the sake of performance, are music… and music has the ability to find us and move us and lift us up in ways that literal meaning can’t.” But it’s easy to forget that music is integral to so many moments in The West Wing.

There are references to Gilbert and Sullivan and guest appearances by Yo-Yo Ma. There’s some wonderful lip-syncing from Allison Janney. ‘Two Cathedrals’, the show’s finest episode (and, by extension, perhaps one of the best in television history), ends with a sequence set to ‘Brothers in Arms’ by Dire Straits. And yet the music that I find myself thinking about the most is the show’s main theme, composed by WG ‘Snuffy’ Walden – a name so cool I have genuinely thought about giving it to my first-born child.

I’ve been listening to that theme tune for most of my life. When the show first ran in the early 2000s I was barely 10 years old, but my parents watched it religiously. I have distinct memories of lying in bed at night,  hearing the soaring strings and bombastic brass drifting up the stairs. In a way it’s a perfect microcosm of the show itself: it’s iconic, it’s stirring, and it’s incredibly silly. 

It almost feels like a parody of itself – a piece of music so chest-thumpingly patriotic that every time I hear it, I half expect a bald eagle to fly out of the television flanked by Fourth of July fireworks. And yet it works because, like the show itself, there isn’t a shred of irony to be found anywhere. It’s a show about a world in which everyone in government, from the lowliest office worker right up to the leader of the free world, is is a paragon of decency, virtue and civility. They’re the kind of people who get up every morning determined to make the world better place than it was the day before.

In other words, they’re exactly the kind of people who would be genuinely moved by the theme tune to The West Wing.

As silly as it is, it’s undeniably effective. An entire generation of political operators in America went to work for the Obama administration because of how Washington politics looked in The West Wing. In fact, that Sorkinese spirit of well-meaning compromise still exists in the Democratic party, even as it seems more and more detached from the reality of what’s lurking on the other side of the aisle.

And yet every time I start a new episode, that music is enough to make me buy the fantasy for another 40 minutes or so. To think that maybe all we can create a better world where those in charge genuinely try to serve the people, and nobody ever says the word ‘um’.

Now, more than ever, it’s nice to pretend – even just for a little while.

Say hello to Rosie – my new flatmate and writing partner. Her ideas are a little derivative, but she’s bloody adorable.