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 second time period.
The collection includes a Democratic presidential administration led by President Josiah “Jed” Bartlet, performed by Martin Sheen, and his loyal White House workers negotiating political challenges with character, competence and a good bit of humor.
It sparked cultural commentary lengthy after it ceased its unique run in 2005.
In 2016, The Guardian’s Brian Moylan asserted that the “The West Wing” was interesting as a result of 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, Vanity Fair’s Savannah Walsh mused that “The West Wing” is perhaps dismissed by youthful audiences as a “form of science fiction” or lauded by the demographic presently watching “Jed Bartlet fancams scored to Taylor Swift’s ‘Father Figure’” on TikTok.
Audiences have been comfort-streaming the “The West Wing” since Trump’s first time period. Interest within the collection spiked after Trump’s election in 2016, and it served as an escape from the contentious 2020 marketing campaign.
When the forged reunited on the 2024 Emmy awards, the Daily 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.”
Nonetheless, Collider’s Rachel LaBonte hailed its Netflix return in late 2025 as a “balm for these confusing times.”
“The West Wing’s” transition from broadcast tv behemoth to “bittersweet comfort watch” in at the moment’s streaming period reveals loads about how a lot our media and political landscapes have modified prior to now 25 years.
As professors of media research and political communication, we examine the fracturing of our media and political environments.
The shifting enchantment of “The West Wing” through the previous quarter century raises a sobering query: Is political competence and an idealized respect for democratic norms dropping reputation in 2026? Or does the brand new political actuality demand engagement with the seamier facet of politics?
‘The West Wing’s’ optimistic huge tent
“The West Wing” premiered on NBC within the fall of 1999, mixing political intrigue with office drama in a formulation audiences discovered irresistible. The present surged in viewership in its second and third seasons, because it imagined responses from a Democratic administration to the values and beliefs of the newly put in Republican President George W Bush.
But the collection was undergirded by an ethic of political cooperation, reinforcing the concept, in keeping 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,” selecting as a substitute to depict “people with differences of opinion trying to serve.”
In 2019, The New York Times noticed that the “The West Wing” offered “opposition Republicans, for the most part, as equally honorable,” and famous that the present earned fan mail from viewers throughout the political spectrum.
At its top of recognition, episodes of “The West Wing” garnered 25 million viewers. Such numbers are reserved at the moment just for stay, mass tradition occasions like Sunday evening soccer.
Of course, “The West Wing” aired in a radically totally different tv atmosphere from at the moment.
Despite competitors from cable, that period’s free, over-the-airwaves broadcasters like NBC accounted for roughly half of all tv viewing within the 2001-02 season. Currently, they account for less than about 20%.
Gone are the times of tv’s capacity to create the “big tents” of various audiences. Instead, since “The West Wing’s” unique airing, tv gathers smaller segments of viewers primarily based on political ideology and ultraspecific demographic markers.
Darker, extra polarized media atmosphere
The fracturing of the tv viewers parallels the schisms in America’s political tradition, with viewers and voters more and more sheltering in partisan echo chambers. Taylor Sheridan has changed Sorkin as this decade’s showrunner, pumping out conservatively aligned hits equivalent to “Yellowstone” and “Landman.”
Liberals, conversely, now see “West Wing” alumni recast in dystopian critiques of latest 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 creator in reality received her begin on “The West Wing.”
Even Sheen has been demoted from serving as America’s favourite fictional president to taking part in 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.”
Television as gear for residing
Philosopher Kenneth Burke argued that tales perform as “equipment for living.” Novels, movies, songs, video video games and tv collection are vital as a result of they not solely reveal our cultural predilections, they form them, offering us with methods for navigating the world round us.
Films 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 contains, as some students and viewers have famous, the customarily informal misogyny and second-string roles for some ladies and Black males in “The West Wing.”
As U.S. residents protest authoritarianism within the streets from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine, a consolation binge of a collection during which the White House press secretary, as Vanity Fair stated, “dorkily performs ‘The Jackal’ and doesn’t dream of restricting West Wing access – even on the administration’s worst press days” is interesting.
But indulging an urge for food for what one critic has known as “junk-food nostalgia for a time that maybe never even existed” might go away viewers members much less geared up to construct the wholesome democracy for which the characters on “The West Wing” at all times strived. Or it might invigorate them.
Karrin Vasby Anderson is Professor of Communication Studies, Colorado State University. Nick Marx is Professor of Film and Media Studies, Colorado State University.
The Conversation is an impartial and nonprofit supply of news, evaluation and commentary from educational consultants.
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