Tonight is the season finale of “The West Wing” and apparently marks the last episode written by creator Aaron Sorkin. This is bad news for a show which has been taking a hit in the ratings this year. Sorkin, hallucinogenic mushrooms and all, is undeniably one of the most talented writers in Hollywood and, reportedly, he was intensely involved in the preparation of each and every episode from its inception.

Yet, when it eventually goes off the air, “The West Wing” will actually be missed, even, to some degree, by me.

I must admit that, despite the fact that it often airs between two shows I like, “The West Wing” has always annoyed me enough to keep me from watching it on any kind of regular basis. This is primarily for two reasons: the continuing tendency to portray conservative types either as cartoonishly-scheming, mustache-twirling villains or as vapid, misguided morons (examples of each can also be seen in the Sorkin-written films “A Few Good Men” and “The American President”) and the opposing tendency to portray the fictional President, as well as other administration officials, as paragons of staggering, unmatched genius.

On the show, President Bartlett (Martin Sheen) spouts Latin, gives note-perfect history lessons about the ancient Greeks and routinely displays a photographic memory and grasp of minute policy details. He reminds me of a grown-up version of the kid in “Jerry Maguire” (“d'you know that the human head weighs 8 pounds?”) or the kind of people you see on Jeopardy’s “Tournament of Champions” week. He is not, however, particularly credible.

This is not to say that Presidents and world leaders are not highly intelligent; by and large, they are (yes, including our current President). However, they are generally not the type of people who would, or should, shut themselves up in rooms brushing up on their Latin and memorizing minutiae. Presidents are meant to be leaders, focusing, above all, on the Big Picture; Sorkin’s portrayal of Bartlett reveals his obvious preference for number-spewing, eggheads like Al Gore over less-detail oriented, but more decisive, leaders like President Bush. This is Sorkin’s right, of course, and the show by its very nature had to pick one ideological side of the fence to sit on in order to be taken at all seriously, but it has always been a private gripe of mine.

There are other problems on the "The West Wing" as well, such as the show’s use of fictional foreign countries, its over-reliance on assassination attempts and fake crises, and a tendency to simply talk the viewer into submission, but every show has its faults.

In the end though, the television landscape will be diminished the day “The West Wing” goes off the air. Unlike so many modern shows, “The West Wing” is never vulgar or gratuitously violent, probably to its significant detriment in the ratings. It is, instead, a consistently classy show which honors and glorifies idealism, intelligent rhetoric and devoted public service. For that, it is a welcome addition to the network television lineup, however wrong-headed its ideology may be.