re: The West Wing - does it still hold up, worth a first time watch?

It's really good. Certainly top 5 for me.

But a note -

I haven't tried a serious watch during the Trump era. I'm sure nothing would change for me. But I kind of wonder if it's too alien to our current political process to seem realistic for many. And not just the cordial/substantive ways the parties debate, but the absence of jadedness and doubt in the system.

I feel like someone watching it for the first time in the current environment might not only say "this isn't realistic based on today's politics" but worse, might say "this is a romanticized Sorkin version of a political system that never really existed." I'm not saying that's true, but we're way beyond "where have all the statesmen gone" to now "there were never any statesmen to begin with...all of this is controlled by deep state actors unaccountable to any of us, etc."