Halloween
Yesterday was Halloween, which has been celebrated in the White House since the Eisenhower Administration, and it is now common for local school children to be invited to the White House to trick or treat. Although The West Wing has episodes celebrating many other holidays, like Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July, there is no Halloween episode of The West Wing.
But Aaron Sorkin was planning to write a Halloween episode. Although he didn’t want to originally, Kevin Falls and Dee Dee Myers gained up on him, with Dee Dee telling him that on Halloween the press corps got to bring their kids in to trick or treat. The premise of the episode was going to be that President Bartlet didn’t like Halloween, seeing the kids who came trick or treating as thieves looking to steal candy. The President would then lecture the kids about the true meaning of All Hallows' Eve. Besides getting to know the plot of a Halloween episode, it would have been really cool to get to see what the set and costume designers would have done for a Halloween episode. The year Season 3 aired was going to be a great year for a Halloween episode because Halloween fell on a Wednesday, the day The West Wing aired. According to Aaron Sorkin, the day he was given the pitch he decided that the next morning he would start to write the Halloween episode. But the next day was September 11th, 2001.
Instead of a Halloween episode, “On the Day Before” aired, an episode that included a suicide bomber in Jeruselum, the estate tax and possible veto override, Charlie being offered immunity, Donna dating Cliff, and not a single mention of Halloween. It can be assumed that the Halloween episode had to be cut due to time because of the special episode “Isaac and Ishmael” which was a non-canonical episode inspired by 9/11 that aired on October 3rd, 2001. The West Wing isn’t the only television show that was affected by 9/11, The Sopranos, Friends, Law & Order: SVU, and Sex in the City all altered their shows following the attacks.
Although Aaron Sorkin claims that he never started writing the Halloween episode Eli Attie claims that the script was started, saying that somewhere in his garage he has around 12 pages of what was written of the episode
"Not that I want to invite West Wing fans to stalk my home, but I'm pretty sure that in my garage in a binder somewhere, I'm 100% sure that I have what was written of it. But it wasn't much, probably like 12 pages or something."
-Eli Attie, on Wingin' It (a West Wing Podcast) in 2017
"There was an idea that Kevin Falls had, five times. He pitched this idea to me five times. Really, so important to him, it was sweet, and I love Kevin, and would do anything for him, but I just couldn't do this. I couldn’t come up – it was Halloween, and Kevin would always come in and remind me, “Just so you know, this episode, episode four, it's going to air the week of Halloween. Don't you think we should do a Halloween show?” And I was thinking, “I'm just not seeing, like, pumpkins and spider webs all over things. Like I'm just, I don’t – I don't have the idea for it yet. I just don't, I'm sorry.” And so, Kevin sicked Dee Dee Myers on me, season three. Dee Dee Myers was one of our consultants; Halloween was coming around again. Kevin was going to make his annual pitch, and so he had Dee Dee call me and say – and this is usually how ideas would begin to happen with a consultant. She said, “Listen, I just want to let you know that on Halloween, the White House Press Corps, they get to bring their kids to the White House to trick or treat.” And I thought, “All right, well, there's something in that. Like, what if Bartlet is just Scrooge about Halloween? Like he doesn't get it. He thinks these kids are little thieves coming in for candy, and he's going to lecture them about like the true meaning of All Hallows' Eve, and Ichabod Crane or something like, that'll be a funny cold opening, and that's all I’d need to start if I can just – if I could just hand these guys eight pages tomorrow, I'll be happy. I don't have to know what's going to happen in the rest of the episode.” But I thought that was a really good teaser, and that was the first time that Kevin lit me up, and that day, that was September 10th, 2001. And I woke up the next morning and prepared to write this Halloween thing, and the world changed."
-Aaron Sorkin, on The West Wing Weekly in 2020