The West Wing reboot rumors were given a new jolt of life on Wednesday.
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Josh Malina, who played Will Bailey on the show from 2002-06, posted a photo on Wednesday night to his Instagram with fellow West Wing Alum Bradley Whitford (Josh Lyman) and Janel Moloney (Donna Moss) and show creator/writer Aaron Sorkin.
“Talking reboot,” Malina wrote in the caption.
Fans of the original show were thrilled.
“Please God,” one commenter wrote.
“Oh. my. God. Have fun raising our kids, I’ll be too busy with this dream,” wrote another.
“This needs to happen !!!!!” a third excitedly wrote.
The post was just one of many occasions where Sorkin and the cast members have floated out the idea of bringing back the series, which ran for 156 episodes across seven seasons on NBC from 1999-2006.
“It was incredible, really, because it didn’t seem to be a commercial pitch that he was making,” Sorkin said in April in reference to a reported conversation he had with NBC chairman Bob Greenblatt. “He was just so bummed out by the world.”
“I want you to do The West Wing again in some form,” Sorkin recalled Greenblatt saying. “You can do it for nine episodes, 13 episodes. You do it with a different cast, the same cast.”
Sorkin said he told the NBC boss that he’d only do it if he had the right idea.
“Incredibly, the show has a legacy. The last thing I would want to do is harm that, so if I can come up with an idea that doesn’t feel like A Very Brady Christmas, if I can come up with an idea that works, then yeah.”
When asked if they’d come back to do the show, a number of cast members have emphatically said yes.
“I think I’m a little old for the White House at this point,” Martin Sheen (President Jed Bartlet) said in April. “[But] I still got the energy.”
“People have been saying, ‘Oh you should bring it back.’ I always say you want to go before your banana turns brown, and that’s great life advice,” Whitford said in an interview with The Boston Globe.
“Are you kidding? I’d be in!” Elisabeth Moss said in an interview with Entertainment Tonight. “That’s where I got my start. They just gotta call me.”
The only idea Sorkin has floated out in the past would be to have Sterling K. Brown (This is Us) play the role of President.
“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] Bartlet, long since retired, is consulted in the way that Bill Clinton used to consult with Nixon,” Sorkin told The Hollywood Reporter.
