Hardly news, but I'll miss it

[dianeduane]

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 story goes on to say that the producers are doing something I rather hoped they'd do: both killing John Spencer's character, Leo, and keeping in the continuity the last work he did before he died. It just somehow seems...more right this way, to me at least.

(sigh) It was great TV. Less so when Aaron Sorkin wasn't working on it: but great TV nonetheless.

Comments

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Has John Spencer actually died? Oh gods, I didn't know.

As far as I was concerned the series pretty much ended when Sorkin left. I watched the odd episode after that, but they were so obviously shoehorning Bartlet's White House into Bush's messed-up America so the real President wouldn't look quite so bad (um, sorry guys...) that I lost interest. Besides, the music was gone. Nobody wrote it like Sorkin, and very few even tried. I'm glad they've had enough integrity finally to give it its quietus. And it says something about the series that even with its creator and main voice gone it was still as good as it was.

[janeway216.livejournal.com]

Spencer passed away in December. Heart attack.