When the early 2000s hit collection “The West Wing” returned on Netflix in December 2025, it spurred dialog about how the idealistic political drama would play in Donald Trump’s moment time period.
The collection includes a Democratic presidential management led through President Josiah “Jed” Bartlet, performed through Martin Sheen, and his unswerving White Space personnel negotiating political demanding situations with persona, competence and a good bit of humor.
It sparked cultural remark lengthy after it ceased its unique run in 2005.
In 2016, The Mum or dad’s Brian Moylan asserted that the “The West Wing” was once interesting as it portrayed “a world where the political system works. It reminds us of a time, not too long ago, when people in political office took their jobs very seriously and wanted to actually govern this country rather than settle scores and appeal to their respective bases.”
In 2025, Vainness Honest’s Savannah Walsh mused that “The West Wing” may well be brushed aside through more youthful audiences as a “form of science fiction” or lauded through the demographic recently gazing “Jed Bartlet fancams scored to Taylor Swift’s ‘Father Figure’” on TikTok.
Audiences were comfort-streaming the “The West Wing” since Trump’s first time period. Passion within the collection spiked after Trump’s election in 2016, and it served as an get away from the contentious 2020 marketing campaign.
When the solid reunited on the 2024 Emmy awards, the Day-to-day Beast’s Catherine L. Hensley remarked that the collection’ “sense of optimism about how American government actually functions … rang hollow, almost like watching a show from another planet.”
Nevertheless, Collider’s Rachel LaBonte hailed its Netflix go back in overdue 2025 as a “balm for these confusing times.”
“The West Wing’s” transition from broadcast tv behemoth to “bittersweet comfort watch” in as of late’s streaming technology unearths so much about how a lot our media and political landscapes have modified prior to now 25 years.
As professors of media research and political conversation, we find out about the fracturing of our media and political environments.
The transferring enchantment of “The West Wing” throughout the previous quarter century raises a sobering query: Is political competence and an idealized appreciate for democratic norms shedding reputation in 2026? Or does the brand new political truth call for engagement with the seamier facet of politics?
The ethic of political cooperation introduced in “The West Wing” incorporated striking a die-hard Republican attorney at the president’s personnel.
‘The West Wing’s’ constructive large tent
“The West Wing” premiered on NBC within the fall of 1999, mixing political intrigue with place of work drama in a components audiences discovered impossible to resist. The display surged in viewership in its moment and 3rd seasons, because it imagined responses from a Democratic management to the values and beliefs of the newly put in Republican President George W. Bush.
However the collection was once undergirded through an ethic of political cooperation, reinforcing the concept, in step with Walsh, “we’re all a lot more aligned than we realize.” In 2020, Sheen noticed in an interview that author “Aaron Sorkin never trashed the opposition,” opting for as a substitute to depict “people with differences of opinion trying to serve.”
In 2019, The New York Occasions noticed that the “The West Wing” introduced “opposition Republicans, for the most part, as equally honorable,” and famous that the display earned fan mail from audience around the political spectrum.
At its peak of recognition, episodes of “The West Wing” garnered 25 million audience. Such numbers are reserved as of late just for are living, mass tradition occasions like Sunday night time soccer.
In fact, “The West Wing” aired in a radically other tv surroundings from as of late.
In spite of pageant from cable, that technology’s unfastened, over-the-airwaves broadcasters like NBC accounted for more or less part of all tv viewing within the 2001-02 season. These days, they account for handiest about 20%.
Long gone are the times of tv’s skill to create the “big tents” of various audiences. As a substitute, since “The West Wing’s” unique airing, tv gathers smaller segments of audience in accordance with political ideology and ultraspecific demographic markers.
Darker, extra polarized media surroundings
Allison Janney, ‘The West Wing’s’ earnest and scrupulous press secretary C.J. Cregg, now performs a duplicitous president in ‘The Diplomat.’
Jason Mendez/Stringer, Getty
The fracturing of the tv target market parallels the schisms in The us’s political tradition, with audience and electorate more and more sheltering in partisan echo chambers. Taylor Sheridan has changed Sorkin as this decade’s showrunner, pumping out conservatively aligned hits reminiscent of “Yellowstone” and “Landman.”
Liberals, conversely, now see “West Wing” alumni recast in dystopian evaluations of recent conservatism. Bradley Whitford morphed from President Bartlet’s political strategist to a calculating racist in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” and a commander in “The Handmaid’s Tale’s” misogynist military.
Allison Janney, who performed “The West Wing’s” earnest and scrupulous press secretary, is now a duplicitous and probably treasonous U.S. president in “The Diplomat,” whose author in reality were given her get started on “The West Wing.”
Even Sheen has been demoted from serving as The us’s favourite fictional president to enjoying J. Edgar Hoover within the movie “Judas and the Black Messiah,” whom Sheen described as “a wretched man” and “one of the worst villains imaginable.”
Tv as apparatus for dwelling
Thinker Kenneth Burke argued that tales serve as as “equipment for living.” Novels, motion pictures, songs, video video games and tv collection are necessary as a result of they now not handiest divulge our cultural predilections, they form them, offering us with methods for navigating the arena round us.
Movies and collection like “Get Out,” “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “The Diplomat” and “Judas and the Black Messiah” urge audiences to confront the racism and sexism ever-present in media and politics. That comes with, as some students and audience have famous, the continuously informal misogyny and second-string roles for some ladies and Black males in “The West Wing.”
As U.S. electorate protest authoritarianism within the streets from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine, a consolation binge of a sequence through which the White Space press secretary, as Vainness Honest mentioned, “dorkily performs ‘The Jackal’ and doesn’t dream of restricting West Wing access – even on the administration’s worst press days” is interesting.
However indulging an urge for food for what one critic has referred to as “junk-food nostalgia for a time that maybe never even existed” would possibly depart target market contributors much less supplied to construct the wholesome democracy for which the characters on “The West Wing” all the time strived. Or it is going to invigorate them.
