We’ll never quite get over the events of the seventh series.
It aired almost 10 years ago, so we’re going to crack on and assume that you’ve seen The West Wing (if you’re reading this).
Ah, Toby… Toby, Toby, Toby.
Why did you do it?
The fallen hero of The West Wing, forced to spend the final season fighting off federal charges for revealing classified details of a military space shuttle to the press.
Actor Richard Schiff was not happy with his character’s downfall, and said of his final storyline, “I think he would more likely have become a mass-murdering terrorist than to do what they had him do. I think somebody had what they thought was a really good idea and didn’t ask me. Aaron would have asked me. Aaron Sorkin (who left during the fifth season) would’ve talked it over to see how it bounced off of the character I was creating with him, but these people didn’t consider that important. I don’t blame them at all; I’m not angry at them.”
He was clearly angry with them. Up until that final betrayal, Toby had been the unshakable moral centre of Sorkin’s Washington, a sarcastic, grumpy, unsmiling genius that you still admired like that teacher in school you always wanted to impress.
Arguably the single character among the senior staff – John Spencer’s Leo McGarry aside – who had no problem telling truth to Jed Bartlet’s power.
In three words, he’s… stubborn, sarcastic, tempestuous.
Why he’s a TV great: You still cared deeply for him despite the fact that he never gave the love back. He was the most tightly coiled character on the show, rarely showing positive emotion but loyal to the bone.
Toby took defeats harder than anyone else and could be hard on Josh, Sam, CJ and even his superiors, but he was simply the one who cared the most about making the world a better place.
His estranged wife, Andrea, refused to remarry him with the absolute killer of a line, “You’re just too sad for me, Toby,” and you could feel his turmoil bleed through the screen. He lost as much as he won, but he wasn’t always so serious and he could nail a comic put-down with the best of them.
His best quote: “It’s Fozzie Bear, not Fuzzy Bear.” Said with far more derision than the sentence deserved.
Comedy gold.
If we could put him in any other show: Toby never played well with others, but his is the one character from The West Wing that you’d love to see try to make an actual human being out of Frank Underwood. He’d enjoy the challenge.
His best scene: This, where he figures out Bartlet’s massive, massive secret. We still get the goosebumps.
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