Director Aaron Sorkin said he has some ideas for a reboot of “The West Wing” following a visit to the White House this weekend.
The 63-year-old Hollywood exec also said he was open to revisiting the series again, per Variety. “If I had an idea, sure,” Sorkin said. “I didn’t think about it seriously, frankly, until today… We’ll see what happens when I wake up tomorrow. But, if you’re asking me now, this is how I feel.”
“I just got a couple of ideas for episodes just walking around the White House,” he added. “Like, ‘why didn’t we ever do this? Why didn’t we ever do that?’”
“The West Wing” is an American political drama that aired on NBC from 1999 until 2006. It’s widely regarded as one of the greatest television shows of all time, winning numerous accolades including two Peabody Awards, three Golden Globes, and 26 Primetime Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Drama Series four consecutive times from 2000 to 2003.
The series creator told the outlet he had resisted a reboot in the past because he was afraid viewers wouldn’t respond well to new cast members.
“I suspect that a new president would have a hard time living up to people’s memories of Martin [Sheen],” he said, referring to the actor who played President Jed Bartlet on the series. “But maybe enough time has gone by and it’s a whole new generation. A generation which, by the way, thanks to streaming, thinks we’re making the show today!”
Sorkin insisted that the show wouldn’t have a political agenda. “I just thought it was a great workplace against which to set,” he told Variety. “There are all kinds of stories that come over the transom that you can tell, and that aspirational, idealistic, romantic style of writing suits me.”
“We couldn’t possibly come up with stories in the room that are crazier than the actual stories that we see,” he added.
Sorkin also said it would be “very hard” to do the same kind of storytelling in today’s political climate. “Because part of it is being idealistic, it does need to feel like it’s taking place in the world that we live in for it to work,” he said.
The showrunner said Donal Trump winning in November wouldn’t affect his decision to reboot the show. “It would certainly present incentives to do it, but also headaches,” Sorkin told Variety. “The worry would be that everything we did on the show would be seen as a rebuttal to the world of Donald Trump.”
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