Prime-time politics

As the interim president of the United States in the first two episodes of this season’s “The West Wing,” John Goodman seized control of the White House like a bull in a china shop -- and ratings surged.

Large and in charge, Goodman’s Glenallen Walken bombed terrorist training camps, verbally shot back at a press corps that questioned the government-ordered assassination of a foreign leader and humiliated White House staffers, before handing the presidency back to Martin Sheen’s Jed Bartlet. “West Wing” leaped to No. 11, up from 24th place for all of last season.

As recently as six months ago, almost no one would’ve predicted the series would enjoy resurgent ratings -- to say nothing of the fourth straight Emmy for best prime-time drama. Where once it was precisely the kind of hit drama, skewing toward affluent viewers, that networks crave, it and the whole sub-genre of political dramas that it spawned have been in what many thought was fatal decline.

Just as such progeny as “First Monday” (set in the world of the Supreme Court), “Citizen Baines” and “Mister Sterling” (both about U.S. senators) fizzled quickly, so too did “The West Wing” lose its momentum. Starting with a revived GOP that put George W. Bush into the White House, followed by the emergence of younger-focused reality shows like “The Bachelor” that were scheduled against it, by the end of last season the drama seemed as relevant as Michael Dukakis’ candidacy. When creator and creative driving force Aaron Sorkin left in early May, people began writing obituaries for “The West Wing” and the whole idea of politics as a centerpiece of prime-time dramas.

Yet politics is proving to be surprisingly resilient in prime-time dramas. Credit the much-hyped blurring of politics and entertainment that came with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s victory in California’s gubernatorial recall election and an earlier-than-usual start to the next presidential election season.

Whatever the reason, more shows featuring political conflict have been developed in the last two years than ever before, estimate some industry executives and observers. Politicians now often appear, contributing dramatic tension, in shows from other genres.

NBC, which might’ve been scared off by the struggles it had with “The West Wing,” instead cast “Wing” refugee Rob Lowe in D.C.-set “The Lyon’s Den,” while HBO gave its coveted Sunday-night spot to “K Street,” set in the world of Washington lobbyists. Even though neither show has made much of a dent with viewers, they nonetheless are but the most visible of an active development process with politically tinged shows that suggest at least some networks think politics can compete with cops, docs and courts for viewers’ loyalties.

“Suddenly, politics is no longer just the stuff of C-SPAN,” says Robert J. Thompson, a professor of popular culture at the University of Syracuse. “It’s become the stuff of soap operas.”

“There is a tremendous change” with “West Wing” and HBO movies, such as “The Gathering Storm,” about Winston Churchill, agrees Robert Caro, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and biographer. “The level at which politics is portrayed is much higher than it’s been before.”

This evolution has been part of an aggressive campaign by the networks to lure upscale viewers, says David Poltrack, CBS’ executive vice president for research and planning. In an era of fragmented audiences, the big networks are responding to advertisers’ willingness to pay more to reach the growing percentage of the population that is affluent and educated, especially since that target has become easier to zero in on with increasingly refined audience measurement techniques.

“It’s becoming more who you reach than how many people you reach,” says Poltrack. “There are more intelligent dramas on the air now. That includes more political dramas.”

“This is good,” says Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television. “Part of our national entertainment should include telling stories about our national and civic political life. It’s not always going to be done well, but what else is new?”

Until “The West Wing,” serious political conflict was generally taboo on prime-time dramas. “Everybody was scared to death to do much in Washington,” says Jeff Zucker, NBC’s entertainment head. “Everybody thought people would be turned off.”

The belief was that viewers would never tune in to shows they thought dealt with legislation and bureaucracy. To succeed, so they thought, dramas must unfold in police stations, hospitals or courtrooms. Bluntly put, drama works “anyplace that somebody can actually die,” says Scott Sassa, former NBC president, West Coast.

Besides, no one wanted to risk offending Congress, which could harm business interests of network and studio parent companies. “They just don’t want to make trouble,” says Newton Minow, the former Federal Communications Commission chairman.

Now, however, fictional politicians appear ready to extend their spheres of influence even further.

“Power is a seductive commodity, which makes for great drama, especially if you put it in a pretty package,” says Carolyn Strauss, HBO’s executive vice president of original programming, who was instrumental in getting “K Street” on the schedule. “The Sopranos,” she says, is about power and emotion.

“K Street” is a semi-fictional inside look at Washington lobbyists and consultants, starring, among others, James Carville, one of former President Bill Clinton’s chief political strategists, and his wife, Mary Matalin, until recently a senior aide to Vice President Dick Cheney. The couple play themselves.

For its part, NBC has pegged some of its highest hopes on “The Lyon’s Den,” a new law series featuring Lowe as Jack Turner, a John Kennedy Jr.-esque figure who finds himself reluctantly drawn into Washington power games and ultimately politics. Lowe and show runner Kevin Falls come from “West Wing.”

“In terms of drama, Washington is the most important city in the world,” asserts Carville. “There’s more to exercising power than how a bill become law, how influence happens.”

Even the youth-obsessed WB is flirting with politics, despite the fact that such shows traditionally draw older audiences. By pairing executive producers from “West Wing” and “Everwood,” the WB hopes to launch in fall 2004 “Jack and Bobby,” a small-town coming-of-age drama showing the formation of values of a teenager who will go on to become president. One planned device: flash forward to the White House years. Simultaneously, Disney is developing, through youth-oriented Tollin/Robbins Productions, another Kennedy series. One planned device: flashbacks from the White House years.

Politicians now even populate what seem little more than souped-up cops-and-robbers shows. “Skin,” Fox’s new Romeo and Juliet drama that premiered last week, features as feuding parents a porn entrepreneur and the district attorney whose reelection campaign is repeatedly cited as a possible motivation for his preoccupation with nailing the indecency impresario.

There are other suggestions of a heightened popular interest in politics. Both the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times’ top 10 nonfiction bestseller lists are crowded with books focusing on politics or politicians. Also, the overall audience for all-news cable has been growing. Fox News and CNN are up sharply in the last couple of years, according to Nielsen Media Research.

“When enough copies of serious politics books are sold,” says Caro, “that infuses something into the American culture.... There’s a basis of political understanding that leaks into television shows, even if they’re not about politics, that did not exist 10 years ago.”

‘Vast wasteland’

In 1961, a New Frontier warrior delivered a message. Stepping in front of the nation’s broadcasters at their annual convention in Washington, Newton Minow, President John F. Kennedy’s new chief regulator for the industry, reported that watching the tube during his initial months in office had left him viewing little more than “a vast wasteland,” a phrase that has stuck as a defining label for the medium.

Broadcasters scrambled to add news, tried to improve children’s programming and floated a raft of what some later dubbed “the New Frontier dramas,” such as the grittily realistic “East Side/West Side,” starring George C. Scott as a social worker in New York City slums. “It’s like when you’re in really, really bad trouble with your parents,” says Thompson, “so you do a couple of things to be good for while.”

But Scott’s series quickly withered as audiences preferred light fantasy. Minow left office. And the assassinated Kennedy was replaced by Lyndon Johnson, then the richest man ever to become president, having made his fortune in broadcasting.

Over the next four decades, political content surfaced occasionally, such as during the social upheaval of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and then again in 1988 with Robert Altman’s “Tanner 88” on HBO, notes Tim Brooks, co-author of the authoritative “The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows” and a vice president for research at Lifetime.

The breakthrough came in 1999. John Wells, the “ER” producer and son of an anti-Vietnam War activist Episcopalian minister in Colorado, joined Aaron Sorkin, (“The American President”) and Thomas Schlamme to create “The West Wing,” about a center-liberal Democratic administration.

NBC resisted. Americans, the networks’ executives thought, were feeling flooded by Monica Lewinsky news. Prime time was for escape. But when NBC wanted another new Wells show, “Third Watch,” it commissioned “West Wing’s” pilot too, says Sassa, the former NBC executive. The network, however, nearly walked away again when Sorkin’s script depicted the president ejecting from the White House a Jerry Falwell look-alike.

“I don’t think [Sorkin] really knows to this day how close the show came to not being ordered to series,” Garth Ancier, then president of NBC Entertainment and a proponent of the show, wrote in a recent e-mail interview.

The field falters

Now that political dramas seem to have regained their footing, at least for the moment, the debate on whether politics will ever find its place among the staples of prime time programming continues.

Doubters point to the unimpressive ratings for the two new political dramas as proof there’s no real appetite for shows focusing on politicians and the political process. They note “The Lyon’s Den” is losing to ABC’s revamped “The Practice,” while “K Street” is attracting fewer than 2 million viewers per week, a fraction of what such other Sunday staples as “The Sopranos” and “Sex and the City” generated on Sunday nights.

“Nothing but ‘West Wing’ has worked,” one TV executive who spoke on condition of anonymity said flatly.

Others are more bullish.

Stuart Stevens, a “K Street” co-producer and Republican political consultant who made commercials for President Bush’s 2000 campaign, insists that the market for scripts about politicians remains the strongest he’s seen in his nine years of selling.

“It’s 9/11,” says Carville, the Clinton aide turned producer and star of “K Street,” rattling off the factors contributing to politics in prime-time’s enduring appeal. “It’s the economy. It’s the [California] recall. It’s everything cropping up.”

“People perceive that the stakes are much higher now than they’ve ever been,” agrees former U.S. Sen. Fred Dalton Thompson, previously chairman of the Senate’s Governmental Affairs Committee and a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who now plays “Law & Order’s” district attorney, Arthur Branch.

“Isn’t Shakespeare all about politics?” asks Thompson’s friend Rip Torn, the actor who in “Lyon’s Den” portrays Lowe’s father, the powerful, corrupt chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Torn has played several presidents and was raised attending political conventions in a family brimming with elected officials. “What is ‘Hamlet?’ ” he challenges. “What is ‘Richard III’? Aren’t they all about people in power and political office?”