I enjoyed The West Wing's first 3.5 seasons. The latter half of season 4 and onward didn't hit the mark of intelligent and thoughtful writing and directing. Understanding the show's creator, Aaron Sorkin, as well as another writer (I think), left the show at the end of season 4. Aaron Sorkin wrote the teleplays of majority, if not all of the episodes through the first three seasons, so there was going to be a decline in the writing quality and stories of each episode.
In the middle of season 4, the character Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) left, who was my favorite character. He brought the charm, and overall balance the show needed, and when he left, weaker characters were written in to try and replace him (e.g. Will Bailey played by Joshua Malina).
Seasons 4 and 5 were just were just littered with episodes that were constantly promoting Middle East stereotypes and biases, Islamic/Muslim terrorism, and the writing and dialogue of some of the characters was deplorable related to those topics. This is all under the understanding that the show was aired in the early 2000s, no long after 9/11/2001, when everyone in the West jumped on the "invade Iraq" and "get rid of Islam and all of the Muslims" and "carpet bomb Mecca" hay wagons that were fed to us.
There were sprinkles of this type of West's hate and bias in season 3 as well.
None of the show should obviously be taken realistically, because after all, it's a television show made for entertainment, drama, and theater.
In any case, the show's initial decline began when Aaron Sorkin decided to create an episode entitled "Isaac and Ishmael" to start season 3. Within season 3, a fictitious country called "Qumar", which of course had to be in West Asia somewhere and had to be an Arabic speaking nation, did terrible things to it's own people and was constantly plotting against the U.S., yet the country also had diplomatic ties with the U.S. and the Bartlet administration sold this "country" weapons and military equipment in exchange for an air base on their soil. Subsequently, the same administration assassinated a foreign leader from that "country" and tried to hide it, and when that "country" tried to investigate, the Bartlet administration tried to cover it up. Then you had mentioned of Pakistan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, etc....so basically a broad brush painted trying to show all of those countries are backward and the U.S., Israel, and perhaps Switzerland, are the only nations that are "peace brokers".
In my small opinion, all of the above contributed to the decline in quality of the show. I do agree, it was a show that far surpassed anything else that may have been on television at the time. However, if we just keep it compared to its own seasons, we'll see it started getting messy in the latter half of season 4, then tumbled when season 5 started, and just couldn't get back to par with its own prior seasons, characters, and story lines.
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