'The West Wing': Lame Duck

By Lisa de Moraes
Monday, January 23, 2006

PASADENA, Calif., Jan. 22

NBC's fantasy White House drama "The West Wing" will end its seven-season run on May 14 with the inauguration of the new president, executive producer John Wells told television critics Sunday.

The election will be covered on April 2 and 9 and viewers will know by the end of the latter episode whether the presidential candidate played by Jimmy Smits or Alan Alda won the election -- a decision the producers "have only really in the last couple days made," at the end of "quite a brawl," Wells told critics at the very last session of Winter TV Press Tour 2006.

The show's declining ratings since its move to Sunday led producers to think that the peaceful passing of power from one leader to another would be a "really wonderful way to end the series" at its "natural place," he explained. So far this season, viewership has dropped by about a third compared with last season's numbers, which were already well below what the series had averaged in its heyday. These days it averages about 8 million viewers a week, but it remains the most upscale series on prime-time broadcast TV.

Earlier in the day the head of NBC's entertainment division, Kevin Reilly, had made it official that this season would be "West Wing's" last.

The sudden death of actor John Spencer in December has "changed a lot of the storytelling" for the final episodes, Wells said, sharing the stage with some of the writers and cast members.

The producers had shot five episodes, three of which Spencer was central to, at the time of his death. Wells said they talked about how to handle the situation over the holidays and decided the best homage they could pay Spencer was to change nothing and "let people see the last days of his work." He joked that Spencer would have been angry at him if he had changed the episodes -- "cutting his best scenes . . . so we left it."

Scrambling to deal with the reality of the actor's death, Wells said, the producers discovered there is no real provision for dealing with the death of a vice presidential candidate on the eve of an election.

We "are now dealing with the death of a character we loved after dealing with the death of a man we loved; it's a complicated and difficult time for us," he added.

Martin Sheen, who has played our fantasy president for seven seasons, was asked to reflect on what the show has meant to the country over the years.

"We can be very cynical about the people that lead us," he said, adding that he hoped the show managed "to make people realize that being a public servant is an honor . . . and that so many good and decent people do it and never get any credit.

"We were a fantasy but we had a parallel universe to reality," he continued. That changed radically, he said, when the Bush administration came into office and then 9/11 happened and "the country moved much further away from the center and we felt we were dead in the center and we gave everyone a fair shot."

The show has continued to "reflect a kind of hope that this was possible and we should aspire to this always," Sheen continued. "We were like a novel that -- the real world is like reality, but people were reading the novel and getting ideas and kind of having a hope and faith and trust in their leadership.

"If we can go out with that I don't think we can ask for much more -- all the rest was a gift."

* * *

"My Name Is Earl" and "The Office" have each snagged a 22-episode order for next season; prime-time game show "Deal or No Deal" -- a ratings hit for NBC during its nightly, one-week run in December -- will become a weekly series in March, Mondays at 8, followed by "The Apprentice," which is moving from Thursdays; the Monday drama "Las Vegas" is moving to Fridays at 9; and "West Wing" is calling it quits, Reilly told shocked critics Sunday morning.

Barely stopping for breath, Reilly also announced he'd ordered 13 episodes of a drama series for the fall from Paul Haggis ("Million Dollar Baby," "Crash") called "The Black Donnellys," about four young Irish brothers involved with organized crime in New York's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood; Luke Perry will star in a new summer drama, "Windfall," about a group of young adult friends who pool their cash to buy a lottery ticket, hit the $386 million jackpot and do not live happily ever after; and the stand-up competition "Last Comic Standing" is returning in the summer even though it got nuked in the ratings last fall.

Oh, and Jason Lee, star of "My Name Is Earl," has the chickenpox.

Critics were taken aback by the electrifying performance of the New Bucked-Up Reilly, having grown accustomed to seeing him at press tours honing his impression of a Washington lobbyist refusing to answer questions without the advice of his attorney.

"You guys helped make ["The West Wing"] a huge hit . . . We're going to give you DVDs . . . Watch the work, connect with it or reconnect with it and let's try to give it the send-off it truly deserves!," Reilly urged critics -- a calculated risk, given how testy they can sometimes get when someone hints they are perceived as an adjunct to a network's marketing and promo departments. But no one seemed to take it that way -- there was only "You betcha!" in their eyes.

"I don't think this was a news flash to anybody," Reilly said of the decision to pull the plug on the seven-season-old series, which he denied had anything to do with the death of Spencer. "There is a point where you want to send the show off with dignity and some semblance of success."

He did a handspring over one critic's request to divulge information about the series's finale story line, deferring to the cast and crew who, he noted, would do a Q&A session later in the day, at which, he said, "I'm sure they will tell you really little."

Another critic tried to confuse him with a question about the move of "Las Vegas" to the "death zone" on Fridays. (On its new night, "Las Vegas" will be followed by a new, non-"Law & Order" Dick Wolf series called "Conviction," about a bunch of hot young assistant DAs.) "The death zone has been created by the shows we put on [Friday]," Reilly shot back confidently, noting that Friday used to be home to "SVU, " "CSI" and "X-Files."

"That was the era where there were great shows on Friday. . . . The networks, for the most part, have put leftovers [there] and frankly, not marketed them and not told America it was important," he said. Shows now doing well on Fridays are "winning by default," he said. "We're going to stop giving the competition a free pass."

He leapt over another critic's suggestion that he should be worried about the the state of his boss Jeff Zucker's "immortal soul" for having sworn NBC would air a series finale on canceled "American Dreams" many months ago.

"Another pact with the devil for Zucker," Reilly noted, adding that corporately, they never made any such promise.

Again and again, critics tried to trip up Bucked-Up Reilly. But he was so full of vim, there was no stopping him.

One critic thought he had Reilly for sure, over the whole move of "Law & Order" to 9 p.m. Wednesday. (NBC will debut the new drama "Heist" in "L&O's" old 10 p.m. hour; it's about a group of professional thieves plotting to simultaneously rob three Beverly Hills jewelry stories during Oscar week, and will debut about two weeks after the Oscars.) "So how happy was Dick Wolf when you told him ["Law & Order"] was going up against 'Lost' " on Wednesdays at 9?

"Was he his usual cheerful self?" the critic asked smugly of TV's Greatest Living Grump.

"You know Dick; he's a pushover -- always smiling," Reilly responded with a smile.

"Would he prefer that it not move? Probably. But . . . 'Law' has been here for a long time," and it will stay around for a long time, he noted. "And we're asking it to do a job right now, and Dick's with us on it."

Yet another critic went after him with a question about the strange coincidence in which NBC announced that "The Office" would be available through iTunes the same week the show's episode featured an iPod in a major plot point, adding that there had been similar hanky-panky recently on other NBC series, like "Medium."

Reilly swore the iPod thing was a coincidence. "This has been confirmed by NBC," the network said later in the day. That said, Reilly acknowledged that "this is a fact of life now, and producers of television . . . know where their paychecks come from, they come from us, and our income comes from advertising."

"Everybody's trying to embrace the new world and you've got to find the line. . . . If it's organic we'll do it," he said.

So full of beans is New Kevin Reilly that he even told them about one instance of product placement they'd missed, where Chili's, the restaurant, appeared in "The Office," the show:

"I don't know if you saw the episode . . . but it was very funny. It was tricky to pull off, but it was just funny."

One critic thought sure a "Book of Daniel" question would give Reilly the willies. "The Book of Daniel" is the new series starring Aidan Quinn, about a Vicodin-popping priest who talks to Jesus regularly about his son who is gay, his daughter who is selling pot to finance a manga habit, whose adopted son is a skirt-chaser, and whose wife has liquid lunches to help ease the pain of losing yet another of her children.

"I was watching 'Book of Daniel' the other night; it was virtually a sustaining program," the critic said, meaning "run without advertising."

"Your commercial breaks were a festival of NBC promos; I think you had maybe one national ad in the whole show. Can you afford to keep putting that show on, or have these pressure groups . . . driven off literally all the advertisers?"

"The Mattress King has stepped up and he's going to sponsor the entire hour. And God bless him," Reilly responded.

It was breathtaking, but best quip of the day went to Greg Garcia. With a pox on Lee, Garcia appeared at an "Earl" session without his star and told critics, "Well, we think it's chickenpox. I saw him shake hands with Charlie Sheen at the Golden Globes, and [Lee] woke up the next morning with bumps all over him. So it could be anything."