Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t yet watched last Sunday’s episode of The West Wing, then you may want to read no further.
It doesn’t come as too much of a surprise to me, but apparently the results of the election in last Sunday’s West Wing episode were not as writers had originally planned:
Lawrence O’Donnell, an executive producer of the show, said he and his fellow writers had declared Santos the winner only after the death, in mid-December, of John Spencer, who portrayed Santos’s running mate, Leo McGarry. At the time of Mr. Spencer’s death, the plot for last night’s episode had been set: the election was to be won by Alan Alda’s Arnold Vinick, a maverick Republican (modeled a bit on Senator John McCain), whom many Democrats (including the Democrats who write the show) could learn to love.
But after Mr. Spencer died, Mr. O’Donnell said in a recent interview, he and his colleagues began to confront a creative dilemma: would viewers be saddened to see Mr. Smits’s character lose both his running mate and the election? The writers decided that such an outcome would prove too lopsided, in terms of taxing viewers’ emotions, so a script with the new, bittersweet ending — including the election-night death of Mr. Spencer’s character — was undertaken by John Wells, executive producer of The West Wing and E.R.
I was sad to hear of John Spencer’s death, but I’m torn about the writers’ decision to change the storyline so dramatically. I suppose it was unavoidable, but I think I tend to side with the Airbag Industries post where I found this article, which contends that this was too formulaic an outcome. Now if they go and somehow make Josh Vice President, then the show will truly have Jumped The Shark, albeit just before its cancellation…
