After Sept. 11, Aaron Sorkin felt moved to postpone The West Wing's third season premiere in favor of "Isaac and Ishmael," a stand-alone episode about a similar terrorist crisis. The show's creator still is taking heat for what critics bashed as a "preachy, pedantic" tribute. Nearly one year later, he responds with a sort of mea culpa.

"I didn't think it right," Sorkin says, "that [the premiere] just be a regular episode of The West Wing — that people be tearing around the [White House] corridors, flirting with each other and being glib. It just didn't seem right. Some sort of respect had to be paid to what just happened. You had to bow your head to it.

"I wasn't going for the cover of TV Guide," he adds, "or an Emmy nomination, or a bigger deal here at Warner Bros."

In the episode, WW's characters lectured students at the White House about terrorism. "I'm not even sure it was good television," Sorkin admits. "But what I do know for sure is that it was well intended. It was never meant to teach anything or be preachy. It was meant to imitate the sounds of the conversations that I'd been hearing since Sept. 11. Its heart was in the right place.

"I was not surprised that people didn't like it," the writer says. "I was hoping to do something that people would like, but it was clear to me that that wasn't going to happen — I wasn't able to do that.

"But what I was surprised about, to be honest, was the volume and the weight that [this episode] was given. [A major New York paper] carried their review on the front page... It felt like people thought I'd hit them over the head and taken their money, which wasn't my intention."