On the cold, wet day last January when George Bush was sworn in as president in Washington, I watched as two women unfurled a banner just before his motorcade passed along Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. The women seemed as sullen as the weather, and a group of nervous police moved quickly to check them out. But they read the banner and turned away with a grin and a wave. The message: "My president is Josiah Bartlet."
Josiah Bartlet, in case you don't know, is the fictional US president (and former Nobel economics prizewinner) played by Martin Sheen in the NBC television series The West Wing, which over the past two years has shouldered its way past mighty rivals such as ER, The Practice and even The Sopranos to become America's top drama of the moment.
But how long will that moment last? On Sunday night in Los Angeles, as The West Wing swept the boards at this year's twice-postponed Emmy awards ceremony, few asked that question. For the second year running, the show was voted America's best television drama series, while Thomas Schlamme won best director for the two-part episode in which a right-wing assassin opens fire on Bartlet and his entourage during a visit to Virginia. Allison Janney, who plays the White House press secretary CJ Cregg, and Bradley Whitford, who plays the deputy chief-of-staff Josh Lyman, won best supporting actress and actor.
But The West Wing has reached a crossroads - two of them, in fact - and the era of its irresistible progress looks at an end.
First, it has still to show how it can come to terms with Bush's presidency, and, second, it now has to cope with the different national mood since September 11th.
The first of these challenges was difficult enough. The show was conceived at the height of the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal. Its initial success owed everything to the combination of its tight imaginary plots and the drama of the real-life backdrop. The West Wing depicted the kind of Democratic US presidency that the Hollywood liberals who wrote the show wished Clinton could have provided. The Bartlet administration, with its hard-headed but idealistic staff, offered the American public a win-win world of Clintonism without Clinton.
But then reality came up with a story line that was far more improbable than Aaron Sorkin and his team of politically plugged-in scriptwriters could ever have devised. A year ago this week, US citizens voted in an election which produced the most controversial result in the nation's history. When the dust settled, the US discovered that, instead of being ruled by a president with Bartlet's liberal political views, it was ruled by a conservative president who was opposed to almost everything Bartlet (and Clinton) stood for. Suddenly, the show felt out of sync with the times.
That disjunction showed up in the final episodes of the last series. Though Sorkin has always been careful not to get his show too intertwined with reality - scriptwriters are advised to avoid specific historical references to any president since Eisenhower - he has gently steered the show towards an implicit cohabitation with the new Bush era.
A specifically Republican character, White House counsel Ainsley Hayes (played by Emily Procter), was introduced at the start of this year, and Bartlet grappled with one of Bush's keynote policies, missile defences.
The disjunction between the US off-screen Republican president and its on-screen Democratic pretender is as nothing, though, compared with the disjunction between reality and fantasy after September 11th. Less than four weeks after the real planes hit the real towers, Sorkin persuaded NBC to let him write a fictionalised episode entitled Isaac and Ishmael, in which the Bartlet White House was shown braced against a terrorist assault.
Commercially, the special episode was a success. It netted an estimated 25.2 million viewers, the highest for any West Wing showing. But it was a critical disaster. Tasteless, crass, puny and inconsequential was the widespread verdict. Others said it took itself too seriously. Critics said Sorkin had broken his own rules, allowing reality into what is only a television show, and the toothpaste could never be put back in the tube.
Sorkin disagrees. "We have these eight characters who have been our friends for two years and we want them to live," he told the New York Times last month. "In order to do that, they have to bow their heads for a moment to what concerns the rest of the world." Whether that will be possible has to be an open question, given the current mood. Sorkin's drugs arrest earlier this year has not helped the series' prospects. But everything is changing as television and movie companies battle to find themes and images in line with the tastes of a traumatised public. At the moment, the nation seems to need to believe in the president. And that is not good news for Sorkin, Bartlet and the fantasy world they inhabit.