Production of Wednesday night’s episode of The West Wing, the first TV drama to deal with a terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks, is on such a tight schedule that network executives will be unable to see the finished program until the air date, the Wall Street Journal reported today. (Today’s Los Angeles Times noted that the final scenes of the drama were shot on Monday and that two staffs of editors have been working 16 hours a day on the episode.)
While in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11th events, television executives were reported to be busily engaged in culling any reference to terrorism from their scheduled programs, West Wing executive producer John Wells indicated in an interview with the WSJ that he thought it mandatory to take the opposite tack — to participate in the national dialogue about how the country should move ahead. The special episode, written by series creator Aaron Sorkin, is being provided to NBC without any extra charge and will be in addition to the 22 episodes that the network had contracted for, the WSJ said.
