"Why do I hate the West Wing? Why do I wish intestinal parasites on everyone connected with it? ... What I really hate about it is the Speech. You’ve heard it. Sorkin works it into almost every conversation. Two staffers are talking about some smarty-pants topic involving lots of numbers – price supports, driving laws, Anna Nicole Smith measurements – and one of them suddenly throws the whole conversation into high gear with a ridiculous barrage of arcane stats ... Here’s what the Speech really means: We government folks are much smarter than you. While you stumble through your day catching toilet paper on your shoe, drinking milk from the bottle, licking the cancer-causing adhesives on the backs of stamps… we are racing around, desperately trying to protect you from stuff you don’t even know about. And if we let up for one moment, you’d probably be dead! ... I hate that show. I watch it every week."

"The West Wing" is a bustling White House-as-workplace drama filled with busy, passionate people having busy, passionate Sorkinesque conversations [surely no one is this cleverly articulate in real life] about political moves that could affect the well-being of the country, if not the entire free world, all the while sprinting through the maze-like corridors of the White House's West Wing. The characters on "West Wing" have important, meaningful jobs that preclude them from having personal lives, but, hey, ask not what your country can do for you. They are proud to serve first-term President Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen), a folksy New Hampshire Democrat of founding-father stock. Squeaky clean and decent, Bartlet respects the office, doesn't waffle on the issues and shows no inclination to engage in thong-snapping in windowless corridors.