A Quote by Stockard Channing
Oh, my only - if I had one frustration in being on 'West Wing' is I wasn't on it enough, because I was in and out.
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Oh, my only – if I had one frustration in being on “West Wing” is I wasn’t on it enough, because I was in and out.
Actually, if I had to do it over [leaving the show the West Wing], I'd do the same thing, because lost in the shuffle of it is that Aaron [Sorkin] left the same year I did. And I would not have wanted to be on The West Wing with somebody else writing it.
When we were doing 'The West Wing,' the hardest thing about doing 'The West Wing' was being compared to yourself. You go out there and want every episode to be as good as your best episode. I wrote 88 episodes of 'The West Wing,' and when you do that, one of them is going to be your 88th best, so your 88th best better be pretty good.
The universe works in mysterious ways and for me it worked out perfectly. With all respect to everybody else, Aaron Sorkin is and was The West Wing, full stop. There's no West Wing without him.
When I came on 'The West Wing,' I jumped onto something that was already a steaming locomotive of a hit. It was very exciting for me because I knew, the moment I got the 'West Wing' job, 'Well, hey, so now I'm on a hit show because it already is established and very popular.'
What we're doing on 'The West Wing' is fictional. It's not a place to learn about politics or government. Has there ever been a fundraiser on 'The West Wing?' No. So right there, you're in Disneyland.
Pretty much up until The West Wing, our leaders had always been portrayed in popular culture as either Machiavellian or dolts. But I thought, "What if we show a group of people who are highly competent, they're going to lose as much as they win, but we're going to understand that they wake up every morning wanting to do good?" That was really the spirit behind The West Wing.
Larry David called me and said, "You can never watch The West Wing again. Either the show is going to be great without you and you're going to be miserable, or the show is going to be less than great without you and you're going to be miserable." So I had them send a tape of the first episode that I didn't do. I put it in the VCR and I don't think I got 15 seconds in before I leapt up and slammed it off! It felt like I was watching somebody make out with my girlfriend. I've never seen a West Wing episode in seasons five, six or seven.
I'm an immigrant, a legal immigrant to the United States. I only became a citizen five years ago. Every day, for seven months, I pinched myself as I was walking in and out of the West Wing, so it's only in America, right? Only in America.
Working on The West Wing was similar in many ways to my experience on M*A*S*H, because you had people willing to work late at night to get it just right.
I'll never forget the first time Elisabeth Moss kissed me on screen. It was season one of the West Wing and she had to pin me up against a wall in the lobby of the White House. We didn't rehearse it at all and when we did it, she sure enough laid one on me, boy. I was like, "Well, ok, this is going to work out just fine."
I had no regrets when I did it, I have even less regret now because I can't imagine staying on the West Wing show and then, six weeks later, Aaron Sorkin leaving.
The fact of the matter is the West Wing never gets fully renovated because nobody wants to vacate it. And so you have basically patch-up jobs that are being done, but it's a tight and cramped environment.
I dreamed of being like Sam Seaborn on 'The West Wing'.
This terrible frustration that we so often feel in the West in not being able to articulate and express ourselves.
I've loved every minute I've spent in television. And I've had much more failure, as traditionally measured, than success in television. I've done four shows, and only one of them was the 'West Wing.'
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