Martin and Anders and I all watched the last episode of the last season of The West Wing tonight before he and the kids went off to the gym to work out.
I was tucked into the end of the couch (my spot, much like Sheldon’s) where I get good support from the back and side. Martin was snuggled up against my left, hunkered down in the pillows, with a throw over his legs. He came home tired but wouldn’t admit to grumpy. I can’t believe we are done with 7 seasons, 22 episodes each, of my favorite show. I had tears in my eyes, and when I asked Martin if he was crying yet, when Jed Bartlet opened the box that Leo’s daughter gave him and it was that napkin Leo had written “Bartlet for America” on back when he convinced him to run for President, he told me to shut up. A sure sign that he had tears in his eyes, too. Heh.
Yesterday, after the second to last episode, Martin got really upset. He told me he was having a crisis. “What do you mean?” I asked, “Because you’re in an existential fugue over the fact that The West Wing is ending?”
“YES!” he cried. “How can I go on? What am I going to do with my life?!”
I know the feeling. This is the second time I’ve gotten addicted to this particular set of characters and their dramas and I’ll miss my daily dose of Josh and C.J., too.
This is the most I think I’ve ever talked about or cared about a TV show since Little House on the Prairie. I had a fling with ER for a few years, until Sherry Stringfield left the show, but nothing has ever captured my heart like The West Wing did.
We’ve had lots of recommendations for what we should watch next. Firefly, The Newsroom, Battlestar Galactica, Dr. Who, Borgen, Pushing Daisies, Veronica Mars. None of which I’ve ever watched (except for a few episodes of BG a million years ago back when Dirk Benedict was a hot young thing…did you know he’s 68!?), but we haven’t made any decisions. We have 2 sets of Sherlock Holmes (the one with Benedict Cumberbatch) and still half of season 2 of Dead Like Me, which we stopped watching abruptly…probably because it only ran for 2 seasons and we knew the end was near and couldn’t face it.
Maybe we’ll take a break from box set gobbling for a bit and just let the lessons we’ve learned and the joy we’ve had from The West Wing percolate for awhile before we turn to something new.