Never has America needed the leadership of an attractive, levelheaded, objectively perfect human more than the present, and Aaron Sorkin knows just the man for the job. Speaking to THR about how he’d plot a West Wing reboot, for which he says he has a standing offer at NBC, this is his vision: “Sterling K. Brown as the president, and there’s some kind of jam, an emergency, a very delicate situation involving the threat of war or something, and [President] Bartlett [played by Martin Sheen], long since retired, is consulted in the way that Bill Clinton used to consult with Nixon.†Yes, Sterling K. Brown, already the new king of NBC, would be our sexy, shirtless TV president if Sorkin gets his wish. Sure, he makes no mention of Brown’s abs, but by now it has to be in the man’s contract.
Richard Schiff previously mentioned his own pitch for the reboot, saying it couldn’t take place in the current White House given the state of it. Sorkin seems to agree because he has no intention of writing Trump, or someone like Trump, into the show. “Trump is exactly what he looks like: a really dumb guy with an observable psychiatric disorder,†he says. Though Sorkin has been mulling West Wing reboot ideas, it’ll be a long road ahead; he says he keeps hitting a wall when figuring out how to fit in Allison Janney’s C.J. Cregg or Bradley Whitford’s Josh Lyman in Sterling K. Brown’s America. Meanwhile, NBC Entertainment chairman Bob Greenblatt won’t stop coaxing him.
Sorkin also says in the interview that he’s hitting the brakes on his live adaptation of A Few Good Men for NBC, starring Alec Baldwin, because he’s struggling to update his original play. He’s now pushing it from spring 2018 to sometime in 2019. “What does it look like on TV? The fact that I can’t give you an answer yet is one of the reasons I want to [push it to next season],†he says. As for his big Lucille Ball biopic starring Cate Blanchett for Amazon, he’s already got that one all mapped out in the Sorkin-est way possible: It’ll take place during only a single production week at I Love Lucy, from table read to audience taping. One week, but a life’s worth of dialogue!
Update: Sterling happily awaits his inauguration! Someone schedule an emergency general election pronto.