When The West Wing began airing 21 years ago, in 1999, Aaron Sorkin’s brand of earnest civic mindedness took to the cultural mood and political moment like a duck to water. That lake has since been blown up.

Still, you see the shrapnel in the opinions of armchair politicos whose hearts sing the ballad of both-sidesism, and in the professional pundits who treat the Emmy-winning show as some agent that poisoned the well of political discourse entirely. Of course those are grossly extreme takes reflecting the real toxins: the country’s collective jadedness and the superiority complex of those with access.

All of this is to say that it is a fascinating exercise to see the soothing relic of The West Wing’s idealistic lens dusted off to meet the dark chaos of a crisis moment in the Trump era; a political fairy tale in the midst of a real-world horror story.

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