It’s been 15 years since President Josiah Bartlet stood in a deserted cathedral and railed against his creator. The flawed hero of The West Wing was mired in grief so he bellowed at the One he loved the most. He lit a cigarette, stubbed it out contemptuously on the church floor, and called God a “feckless thug”.
The scene was painful to watch, but even in this shocking moment, with Bartlet behaving so terribly, at least we knew that his faith, however strained and wounded, was real. We also sensed that the programme makers had always taken Bartlet’s Catholicism seriously. His understanding of the faith was not to every Catholic’s taste, and the narrative devices were sometimes rather clumsy – far too much off-the-cuff Latin and scriptural citation, and all those predictable moral dilemmas – but, throughout, there was at least an attempt to portray Bartlet’s beliefs with something approaching sophistication. More was on offer than a character-rounding veneer or a cheap caricature. It all made a pleasant change from the troubled cop who only finds his conscience in the confessional or the streetwise priest who seems to spend most of his time consoling mobsters’ wives.
