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The West Wing star Richard Schiff has confirmed that Aaron Sorkin is interested in possibly rebooting the beloved show.
Schiff says he has discussed a potential reboot with the series’s creator and even pitched him his own ideas.
“Aaron has said he wanted it to happen,” Schiff said on the Popcorn Talk Network’s online show I Could Never Be .
The actor, who won an Emmy for his portrayal of Ziegler, gave viewers a taste of what could come if a reboot does happen.
“He might go with a new administration,” Schiff said of Sorkin, ”in which case, you know, some of us might show up as consultants or whatever in that administration.
“It makes no sense [to bring back the full cast] – maybe one or two of us would be in the White House.”
For Schiff, the original cast of characters would have either moved on to other jobs by now or “be dead”, which explains why the entire team would presumably not return exactly as it was.
The actor discussed his vision for a potential reboot which, unlike the original show, wouldn’t focus heavily on the White House but on other aspects of politics such as the grassroots or state level.
“I have a great idea. I’ve pitched it to Aaron. He loved it,” Schiff said.
“I don’t think it should be in the White House. I think that’s overcooked. My image of a show in the White House now is something like House of Cards , which is more apropos for the current administration — and Veep .”
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Sign up Best TV of 2018Show all 10 Best TV of 2018 10) Save Me Lennie James's missing-child thriller Save Me looked as though it might be a paint-by-numbers affair. Instead it was a gripping start to Sky Atlantic's impressive run, with James taking the lead as Nelly, the womanising bum who gains a new lease of investigative energy when his estranged daughter Jody vanishes. A smart script kept us guessing right up to an ending that denied us the closure we had expected. A second series has been commissioned.
Sky
Best TV of 2018 9) Cunk on Britain How much you enjoyed Philomena Cunk's history of Britain depended on how funny you find Diane Morgan's resting confused face. I find it hilarious. Her interviewees are kind of in on the joke but clearly briefed to take it as seriously as possible. They’ll be mid-flow and she will cock her head and drain all the interest from her face. “What's the most political thing that's ever happened?” she asked Robert Peston, who did his best to answer with a straight face. Co-producer Charlie Brooker's fingerprints are everywhere in the way Morgan's vain, poorly informed, easily distracted Cunk operates within a ruthlessly satirical production, which sends up the tropes and cliches of every dodgy documentary and history programme. She might not be the comic creation we need, but she is the one we deserve right now.
BBC
Best TV of 2018 8) Sally4Ever You either love Julia Davis or think her sick filth ought to be banned. Sally4Ever proved yet again that there is nobody working today – or at least nobody with the same platform – with a blacker sense of humour. Sally (Catherine Shepherd) was already surrounded by monsters: her loser of a boyfriend (Alex MacQueen) and tricky colleagues played by Julian Barratt and Felicity Montagu. Then Emma (Davis herself) arrived, a tornado of sex and bad intentions. Beneath the shagging, drugs, excrement, manipulation and malice were pockets of tenderness, but you had to look pretty hard to see them. Luckily there were also gales of laughter. N.b. If you have yet to see it, please do not watch it with your parents or children on Boxing Day and then write in to complain.
Sky
Best TV of 2018 7) The Little Drummer Girl This was a spiritual successor rather than a sequel to The Night Manager. It was still a Le Carré adaptation on the BBC sprinkled with famous faces, but the differences were as pronounced as the similarities. Park Chan-Wook, the Korean auteur, directed with a high sense of style. Florence Pugh was dazzling as the ingenue actress Charlie, recruited for a dangerous mission across Europe, ably supported by Alexander Skarsgard and Michael Shannon as her spook handlers. Some viewers switched off after the first episodes, which took time to set the scene. They missed out on a vivid, beautifully told thriller.
BBC
Best TV of 2018 6) A Very English Scandal Hugh Grant… can act? That was the first surprise in this smooth, stylish BBC retelling of the Jeremy Thorpe scandal. He burst convincingly out of the charming fop mould he has slept in so comfortably for thirty years. What have we been missing all this time? The other shock was remembering how recent it all was. The government is still up to a lot of nonsense, but the days of this kind of cover-up, for these reasons, is surely over. Or is it?
BBC
Best TV of 2018 5) Patrick Melrose Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels have the kind of precisely drawn interiority that makes any kind of adaptation seem doomed to fail. Instead, the Sky Atlantic series brought them convincingly to life. It is not a happy tale. In flashback we saw Patrick's childhood in the shadow of his monstrous father David (Hugo Weaving), and the decades of self-loathing and substance abuse that followed. At the centre of all this was Benedict Cumberbatch, as good as he's ever been. His Patrick could be brilliant, witty, cruel and pitiful, sometimes in the same smack-addled sentence. Weaving, Jennifer Jason Leigh as David's wife Eleanor and Pip Torrens as his ghastly friend Nicholas Pratt all put in memorable performances, too.
Sky
Best TV of 2018 4) Dynasties At an age where most of us are long past doing anything, David Attenborough is still changing our expectations of what a nature documentary can do. Like The Rolling Stones, he has been on his farewell tour since about 1970, but unlike Jagger & Co, the returns are not diminishing. Is he fuelled by anger at the world's response to climate change? Or simply driven by some massive internal dynamo, a soul-quest to improve our ability to relate to penguins? Whatever the motivation, Dynasties was wonderful, telling complex stories of the animal kingdom with beautiful photography.
BBC
Best TV of 2018 3) Killing Eve It's unusual for a TV writer to attract more attention than the stars or director. Perhaps the world is changing. Or perhaps it's simply that the writer of Killing Eve was Phoebe Waller-Bridge, star of Fleabag, Star Wars and one of the country's outstanding new talents. Here she turned her hand to a spy thriller, an adaptation of Luke Jennings' novels about a beautiful assassin, Villanelle (Jodie Comer), and the MI6 agent given the task of hunting her down, Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh). Both leads demanded attention: Comer the magnetic murderer, Oh the harassed but brilliant spy. The script swerved between comedy, action and drama often enough to keep everyone guessing.
BBC
Best TV of 2018 2) England vs Colombia Yes, the national team have played on television in a World Cup before, but I'm including this because the outcome, an England penalty shoot-out victory, was so unusual as to count as a whole new format. At a time when we all watch things at different times, here was something unmistakably live. We watched Gareth Southgate's men knowing that the rest of the country was, too, poised in living rooms and pub gardens, ready to bury their heads in a sofa or throw their pints in the air. No other TV programme sold as many waistcoats.
Rex Features
Best TV of 2018 1) Succession The ageing patriarch and his scheming children. Not an original concept. Trust, the drama about the last days of Getty family, proved that it was possible for a series built on this premise to have actors, scenery, direction, script, etc etc, and still somehow fall short. Succession, by comparison, felt alive. If US production values and ambition gave it its scale, its heart was dark and British. We can thank Jesse Armstrong, co-creator of Peep Show, and his all-star line-up of British writers, including the Lucy Prebble, Tony Roche and Georgia Pritchett. They made the Roy family expats themselves, and you could hear the old aristocratic froideur in every withering put-down. But we cared for them, too. One of the many TV professionals I consulted for this list thought Succession was so much better than everything else this year that the top 10 should just have it listed in bold and then nine blank spaces. I wouldn't go that far but it's certainly at the top.
Alamy Stock Photo
The West Wing concluded in 2006 after seven seasons. Sorkin left the show after four seasons.
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"I had the best job in show business for four years and I'll never forget that," he said at the time in a statement.
While the reasons for his departure weren't clearly stated, people involved with the show told The New York Times back then that pressure, budget issues and decreasing ratings had all played a part.
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