The tale of Rob Lowe’s wild ride

Rob Lowe’s “The West Wing” character became so scarce this season the actor finally distributed a milk carton with his picture on it, instructing anyone who sees Sam Seaborn to contact his manager. Next week, Seaborn leaves Washington for good, with a plot line that apparently makes the White House aide an even more rarely sighted species: an office-holding Orange County Democrat.

The mini-drama behind Lowe’s exit, cobbled together through conversations with those who know the history, is the story of a wild ride on the prime-time roller coaster. Four years in the making, the tale involves a show with dubious commercial prospects becoming a major hit, a cameo role becoming its centerpiece, and a recognizable star soon to become a memory.

Lowe’s departure might partly account for why “West Wing’s” ratings have lost altitude, to the extent that the show’s vulnerability to the crude charms of “The Bachelor” and its progeny owes something to a lack of sex appeal. At a time when viewers find themselves buffeted by “terror alerts,” such trifles -- as opposed to weighty issues of morality and governance -- can seem a more palatable means of escape.

The opening credits, actually, tell much of the story: Lowe receives first billing, with others following alphabetically before the “and Martin Sheen” tag. That’s because Lowe was the biggest name going in, the handsome onetime movie star who would help NBC promote a concept that made network executives antsy.

Sheen’s president, by contrast, was to appear at most in six of the first 13 episodes. The producers, who, along with Lowe’s representatives, declined to publicly discuss the situation, have acknowledged before that the idea was to build a series around the president. Even the show’s title underscored the focus on underlings who ran the White House, with the president primarily an off-screen figure -- someone whose shoe you saw through a crack in the door.

Indeed, Sheen (Sidney Poitier and Hal Holbrook were among those also considered) had been signed only for the pilot, in which he turned up briefly at the end. Still, when research on that prototype came back, focus groups -- likely weary of Clinton administration scandals -- said they wanted to see a principled commander in chief as part of the show.

As a result, NBC made a production go-ahead contingent on the president being a central character, and Sheen’s contract had to be revised to accommodate his expanded presence and relocation from background to foreground.

Although series creator Aaron Sorkin envisioned the president’s staff as an ensemble, Lowe was easily the best known -- and best paid -- among them. Perhaps for that reason, Lowe kept waiting for the character to be fleshed out, including a love interest beyond a brief fling with a call girl.

Ratings were respectable the first year, as the show garnered critical acclaim and an armful of Emmys. The supporting cast began to break out, making Lowe something less than first among equals, though that was hardly obvious from the way NBC promoted the series. Allison Janney and Bradley Whitford are terrific actors, after all, but who living east of Beverly Hills knew of them in 1999?

With “West Wing” taking off beyond all rating expectations, four key cast members -- Janney, Whitford, Richard Schiff and John Spencer -- banded together in July 2001 to negotiate sizable raises, bringing them up to Lowe’s level.

Lowe reportedly became increasingly frustrated, and when the actor sought a sizable pay increase himself a year later, the producers balked.

The irony is that Lowe and Sheen have enjoyed a long relationship. The younger actor co-starred with Sheen’s son Emilio Estevez in the 1980s films “The Outsiders” and “St. Elmo’s Fire,” and hung out at the Sheen household growing up.

Yet Sheen’s popularity, and that of the other co-stars, ultimately marginalized Lowe, making him expendable enough for the producers to take a hard line. So Lowe opted to leave, with Sorkin agreeing over the summer to write him out by March.

At the time, many ridiculed the actor (including, come to think of it, yours truly) for walking away from the highest-quality project with which he’ll likely ever be associated. The producers, however, might have paid their own price for not using him more.

Although the program’s wonk-ish devotion to serious issues has won it well-deserved admiration, even NBC has lobbied for more in the way of character development and personal lives -- including a bit more romance to augment all the noble talk of public service and patriotic zeal.

For the most part, it’s an impulse Sorkin resisted. A few relationships have emerged -- including separate liaisons for Whitford’s character and Janel Moloney, who plays his assistant, Donna -- but they seemed to fizzle or simply disappear, as if the writer couldn’t get back fast enough to analyzing how much to spend on foreign aid.

Such choices have seemingly narrowed the show’s appeal, creating the soft underbelly -- particularly among younger viewers -- that other networks have exploited. It’s impossible to know for sure, but some of that audience might have been more engaged had Whitford broken down and planted one on Moloney, or Lowe removed his shirt and tie occasionally. He’s certainly done it before.

Not that anyone needs to tune up the violins. NBC has picked up “The West Wing” for future seasons under a lucrative deal. True, the ratings have receded to first-year levels, but the show still makes advertisers salivate by attracting TV’s most upscale audience in terms of income and education.

In hindsight, with seven prime-time hours devoted to Michael Jackson this week as well as something called “Are You Hot? The Search for America’s Sexiest People,” the real surprise might be that such an uncompromising series found a vast audience, even for a while.

As for Lowe, NBC snapped him up for his own series pilot, “Lyon’s Den,” which casts him as an attorney who is the son of a U.S. senator.

That means if all goes well, he’ll be walking and talking on TV again this fall, and even if the writing doesn’t equal Sorkin’s at-times operatic heights, at least you won’t need a milk carton to find him.

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Brian Lowry’s column appears Wednesdays. He can be reached at brian.lowry@latimes.com.