Out of ‘West Wing,’ and into ‘The Office’

A certain class of viewer, the data always showed, watched “The West Wing” in droves. They watched even after series creator Aaron Sorkin left and the show’s viewership dwindled.

In wonky ratings-speak, they are adults 18 to 49 living in homes with incomes of $75,000-plus. Advertisers like them for obvious reasons. TV executives call these people “upscale,” conjuring a constituency with leased Audis and Paul Smith designer belts and subscriptions to the New Yorker piling up on the Crate & Barrel sea grass rug, next to the Mission-style chair found in the La Brea boutique.

Like-minded limousine liberals, no doubt. “West Wing” was a show by, for and about the people, but also undeniably wish-fulfillment (Democrats functioning, Democrats owning the courage of their convictions) brought to you by what the right still gets mileage out of calling “the Hollywood crowd.”

That “West Wing,” which ends its seven-year run Sunday, did well among the upscalers helped more than it hurt, particularly as the show dropped off other radars, like Emmys and total audience and general believability.

Sorkin’s departure (along with collaborator Thomas Schlamme) coincided with the fourth-season-ending cliffhanger in which President Bartlet’s daughter was kidnapped by terrorists and Speaker of the House John Goodman took over as president.

“West Wing,” it seemed, had gone around the bend, wandering into a Harrison Ford movie.

The production, under John Wells, seemed to have found itself again this season in an election year face-off between two mavericks, Democrat Matt Santos (Jimmy Smits) and moderate Republican Arnie Vinick (Alan Alda), vying to succeed President Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen). The resolution? Bipartisan wish-fulfillment, Santos asking Vinick to become his secretary of state after the live televised debate in which they -- oh, come on -- debated.

It’s been fun to watch, but without Sorkin “West Wing” seemed doomed only ever to echo his renaissance interests and beliefs, personal peccadilloes and passions.

Sorkin’s process, on the lot (all-nighters, Shakespearian aspirations) and off (palliative trip to Vegas with potpourri of controlled substances), delayed filming, caused headaches and drove up costs, but Warner Bros. and NBC were getting his unvarnished TV truth -- what sounded like somebody’s writing, as opposed to the usual, more streamlined process that grinds it down to nobody’s writing at all.

For NBC, which used to claim something of a standing reservation among the upscale, the heir apparent to “West Wing” is not a workplace drama but a workplace comedy, “The Office.” It too has trended well among people with Mission-style furniture, and it too is a left-alone show about a fictional administration -- in this case, the Scranton, Pa., office of the paper company Dunder-Mifflin run by regional manager Michael Scott (Steve Carell).

“The Office” is a punch-drunk “West Wing” for these punch-drunk times, the characters, instead of walking and talking, sitting and staring at their states of nothingness. You can see why a “West Wing” lover would find psychic refuge in “The Office”: Here the leader is not so much Camelot-ish and flawed as sociopathic and entitled, governing his drones with a belief in nothing so much as his own immutability as boss, no matter what reality is saying about his performance.

“Conflict Resolution” was the name of last week’s episode, in which Michael resolves a simmering dispute between two employees by suggesting a cage match. “Cage matches? Yeah, they work, how could they not work?” he says to the camera. It’s “The Office’s” version of the Bush/Rumsfeld certainty about democracy in the Middle East: Freedom? How could freedom not work?

On “West Wing,” a fantasy atmosphere of debate and inclusiveness crackled in the souls of men and in the hallways. Everybody on the show had a serious case of the smarts, from President Bartlet on down to the assistant to the deputy chief of staff; in this way, Sorkin’s White House, as much as anything, was about an all-access pass to a culture of brainiac misfits who just happened to have the fate of the free world in their hands, and who compensated with gallows humor. President If Only.

“We are just a little rococo, aren’t we?” Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) says to his assistant Donna (Janel Moloney) in an episode from the third season in which Donna questions the relevance of a presidential proclamation “to modify the quantitative limitations applicable to the imports of wheat gluten.”

In the same episode, deputy communications director Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) walks the halls making an impassioned case for why sumo wrestlers would make good hockey goalies.

There is something at once lively and passive aggressive in this hyper-articulate approach, the you-go/now-I-go rhythmic banter, which Sorkin grafted onto his first attempt at a TV show, ABC’s “Sportsnight,” and which will no doubt characterize his upcoming NBC series “Studio 60,” set behind the scenes of a “Saturday Night Live”-type show.

It could all make “West Wing” as exciting as a symphony, clever asides made on different points of the musical scale, from Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff) to Charlie Young (Dule Hill) to Leo McGarry (the late John Spencer).

They were all, of course, harried (the most relatable aspect of “West Wing” was feeling the pressure of the place), but the only one I’ll seriously miss is C.J. Cregg (Allison Janney), mostly for the way she condescended to the White House press corps at the daily briefings known as gaggles, blithely spinning the room while winking at our knowingness, though never so much as to completely disrespect the traditional role of the media as conduit to the public’s right to know.

The character was apparently based loosely on former Clinton spokesperson and “West Wing” consultant Dee Dee Myers, among those who migrated from the Hill to Burbank for a fictional do-over (Lawrence O’Donnell Jr., current executive producer, was formerly an advisor to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan).

Like everybody on the show, C.J. had a tendency to break protocol and wax eloquently -- as when, just after hearing of a fire in which 17 Saudi Arabian schoolgirls perished, she’s asked if she’s outraged.

“Seventeen schoolgirls were forced to burn alive because they weren’t wearing the proper clothing. Am I outraged? No, Steve, no Chris, no Mark. That is Saudi Arabia. Our partners in peace.”

It doesn’t go this way on C-SPAN, where it’s usually much quieter and less revealing. “West Wing” spoke in a language both of confrontation and bitter irony about what was happening in the world and within its own halls of power.

Now NBC’s “The Office” takes the 18 to 49, $75K-and-up baton, bringing its own kind of irony, this one much more downbeat, about a culture of avoidance, where mostly it’s just you staring at a computer.