Tag: Studio 60

OK, so Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip ended last week. Did I like the show? I did enough to watch every episode; I may have even liked it enough to buy it on DVD if I see it cheap (like the fact that at Target you can get Firefly for under twenty bucks right now). But it was never as good as it could have been, and it never came anywhere near the heights that Aaron Sorkin can reach when he’s really on his game. A Few Good Men? The American President? The first two-and-a-half seasons of The West Wing? All were far better than this show. Random thoughts abound:

:: Lance Mannion mocks it, but I consider it a cosmic injustice that I’ll never again hear Ed Asner growl the word “Macao” again. I loved the way he said “Macao”. In fact, I’d like to have Ed Asner record the word “Macao” for the outgoing message on my answering machine. And I loved Asner’s pep-talk for Jack Rudolph, Action Executive during the Macao deal: “I took the ball ninety-nine yards, now take it the last one. Get us the touchdown. Take it to the damn house!” I just get all giggly when I say that line in my head. “Take it to the damn house!” I’ll be getting some mileage out of that over the next few months, let me tell you.

:: I’ll also miss the Studio 60 set. I loved the little world-within-a-world they created there, and I was always a bit disappointed when the show left it.

:: I enjoyed the last story arc, although it went on way too long what with yet more boring crap about Matt-and-Harriet, the worst couple in television history. And I do not buy for one second that they’re “back together”, whatever the hell that means. I don’t know how good or bad an actress Sarah Paulson is, but I do know that she and Matthew Perry had as little chemistry as any two people I’ve ever seen on teevee.

:: Matthew Perry finally gets his chance to strut his acting stuff after Friends, gets the lead on a Sorkin show, and then has to play the guy who basically stays in his office looking conflicted the whole time. Perry got screwed.

:: There must be an interesting “inside baseball” story about this show’s cancellation. Few shows that get yanked from the schedule at mid-season get a chance to end on a full-stop the way Studio 60 did; the show’s last-aired episode was also a decent final episode. Did NBC go to Sorkin and tell him something along the lines of, “Look, you’re highly unlikely to last the year, to say nothing of coming back next year, so if you’ve got any storyline stuff in the pipeline that you won’t be able to live with yourself unless you get to write the endings, you’d better start thinking about that now.”

:: Sorkin’s biggest flaws on this show were twofold. The first? His hubris: the entire show’s run reeked of his apparent “I am Writer, and verily I shall save thee from Bad TeeVee!” attitude. It’s amazing, really; the entirety of Studio 60 basically turned out to be a giant Mary Sue story. If I write a Mary Sue story and submit it somewhere, it’ll get rejected. Aaron Sorkin got big money to actually make his Mary Sue story into a show. Wow.

:: And what’s with Sorkin’s constant beef that TeeVee sucks across the board? Sure, if all you ever watch is stuff like Are You Smarter Than Your Kids or that sitcom with Jim Belushi, but really, isn’t there some just plain great stuff on TeeVee nowadays? Sorkin’s preaching against TeeVee on Studio 60 often seemed not unlike if a present-day clergyman were to devote sermon after sermon to denouncing Copernican theory.

:: Sorkin’s other problem? His laziness. He’s the James Horner of screenwriting. He has plenty of good ideas, but he has all these other ideas that he keeps using, over and over and over again. The glaring examples from the final episode? Well, the episode was titled “What Kind of Day Has It Been”. That was also the title of the final episode of The West Wing‘s first season. On that episode of the earlier show, a major subplot is that an American Air Force pilot crashes in Iraq and has to be rescued before the Iraqis get him. On Studio 60‘s episode of the same name, a major subplot is an American military officer getting captured in Afghanistan (he’s the brother of Tom Jarrett, one of the regulars). On TWW, there’s a scene where a black military officer comes into the Oval Office and tells the President that he’ll receive an update on the pilot’s rescue by phone soon. On Studio 60, there’s a scene where a black military officer receives an update on the military officer’s fate by phone. On TWW, said black officer hands the President the phone and says, “I have the pilot on the phone. We got him out a few minutes ago.” On Studio 60, said black officer hands Tom the phone and says, “I have your brother on the phone. We got him out a few minutes ago.” Seriously, how lazy is that?! Especially to do the same thing again in the same episode, when he very carefully constructs Jordan McDeere’s death only to say, “Yay, she’s fine!”

Of course, this may not be laziness, so much as some pretty extravagant narcissism on Sorkin’s part. It could be that he’s really thinking, “This was such a great idea the first time, that I’m gonna do it again! And again! And again!” This is why Sorkin’s stuff starts to sound the same, the more you watch it. It’s not that he writes the same type of stuff every time (rapid-fire dialogue that goes by way faster than anyone would normally talk, “walk-and-talk” scenes, flashbacks galore), but that a lot of the time he actually writes the same stuff over again. So ultimately that’s my disappointment with Studio 60: rather than come up with something new, Sorkin just wallowed in himself. And dammit, he can do better.

So, bon voyage, Studio 60. As Rossini said of Wagner: you had great moments, but awful quarters of an hour.

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The title of this post will make sense once you watch tonight’s episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which I of course watched last night courtesy of the good Canadians who show it on Sundays.

I was starting to have hopes for this show, but having seen this episode, I’m thinking that Aaron Sorkin is this close to completely blowing it. (You can’t see me, but I’m holding my thumb and forefinger really close together.) Why? Because Sorkin just can’t keep beating Matt and Harriet to death.

Let me back up a bit. Last week, Buffalo News TV critic Alan Pergament launched this column about Studio 60 thusly:

I’m still trying to understand why more of Buffalo and America hasn’t fallen in love with Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

It is one of the smartest, funniest and more romantic shows of the new season. It also has one of the season’s more appealing and unassuming stars, Sarah Paulson. Paulson, who plays born-again sketch performer Harriet Hayes, conceded during an interview on the show’s set in Hollywood last month that she stood out like a born-again Christian in Hollywood in a cast that includes Matthew Perry, Bradley Whitford, Amanda Peet, Timothy Busfield and D.L. Hughley.

The article proceeds to give a nice profile of Sarah Paulson, whom I actually do think does a good job on the show as Harriet Hayes. The whole problem with the show, so far as I see it, isn’t the fact that Sorkin can’t help but fall in love with his own turns of phrase and therefore keep using them over and over and over again from one show to the next; nor is it Sorkin’s apparent Gilbert-and-Sullivan fetish that also crops up in everything he writes (not the weirdest fetish out there, as fetishes go, but it’s certainly unusual and hard to work into shows constantly). The problem is that Sorkin won’t write the interesting stuff for his interesting characters because he’s freaking obsessed with his two least-interesting characters.

Harriet Hayes doesn’t get to be interesting just because she’s a born-again Christian. Born-again Christians can be interesting, and yet, Harriet is not. And why isn’t she? Because there’s no struggle involved. She just flits about the show, with her faith never really being challenged in any serious way. There’s no evidence that she ever struggles with her faith in the way that, say, President Bartlet did in The West Wing. Remember when Jed Bartlet cursed God? Can anyone see Harriet Hayes ever cursing God? There’s no conflict in Harriet, and conflict is what makes characters interesting. Why is Peter Parker more interesting than Clark Kent? Because Parker’s internal conflict is a lot more interesting than Kent’s. We never see any internal conflict in Harriet. Sure, there’s lots of external conflict — non-religious groups think she’s a bigot, religious groups think she isn’t religious enough — and yet we never get any real idea how this all affects her. Her faith remains as it is, totally unchanged.

Matt Albie doesn’t have any internal conflict either. He’s the mirror-image of Harriet, and it shows every time they get together, and Matt almost immediately goes into some uber-clever indictment of religion that sounds pre-rehearsed in his brain. (In tonight’s episode, he actually cites the percentage of the American people who believe in angels. Who goes around knowing that stuff?) Sorkin’s approach to writing these two characters is to say that “Person X believes this and Person Y believes that, and all I gotta do now is have them argue about it at length.”

And he does this for enough of each episode that it totally takes over everything else. The internal power struggles at the fictional TV network? The trials and tribulations of a young writing staff thrown into the deep end without a life preserver? The production problems inherent in a weekly sketch comedy show? The neuroses of comics who have to play multiple characters each week and keep them all straight? All of that is more inherently interesting than Matt-and-Harriet, and yet, Sorkin keeps the focus on Matt-and-Harriet.

Which brings me to tonight’s episode.

One of Sorkin’s favorite devices is the interwoven series of flashbacks, in which today’s events are presaged by what happened weeks, months, or years before. Here we keep flashing back to Matt’s early days with the show, when he meets for the first time — you guessed it — Harriet Hayes. And in their first extended conversation, Matt goes right into talking about religion as though he’s a professional pollster, of course offending Harriet. For the balance of the episode, their flashback banter revolves around tiny minutiae regarding that first conversation, long after we, the audience, have stopped caring.

There’s another big strike at work here, too: Matthew Perry and Sarah Paulson just don’t have the chemistry between them that might be able to make it all work, if Sorkin weren’t writing it so poorly.

(On chemistry: I’m not necessarily referring to romantic chemistry. On West Wing, Rob Lowe had terrific onscreen chemistry with Emily Procter, and their characters weren’t romantically linked in any way at all. Perry and Paulson don’t seem to even have that kind of chemistry. Not that they can’t appear onscreen together, but they can’t pull off what’s supposed to be the emotional center of a show together.)

We never, not once, buy the idea that these two are anything but doomed. I had hope of that in the previous couple of episodes, when Harriet suddenly realized that the relationship was utterly dead in the water, but now, here we are, beating it to death again. Now, maybe Aaron Sorkin is trying something more sophisticated here, in depicting Matt Albie as a guy who is hopelessly attached to a relationship that can’t possibly go anywhere, but the problem there is, it just doesn’t feel like Sorkin is writing that story. Instead it feels like Sorkin genuinely believes he can get these two together in the end, and right now he’s just working through it all. Well, I don’t want to see it. I want to see the other stuff.

Some of my favorite movies and TV shows are “backstage” stories set in show business. Shouldn’t it tell Aaron Sorkin something that he keeps dwelling on Matt Albie, a guy who almost never leaves his own office? There’s a reason why Captain Kirk was always leaving the bridge of the Enterprise, and it’s not because Kirk was some kind of grand adventurer. It’s because keeping him on the bridge would have made him a really boring character.

Ultimately, by having these two only ever talk about a single subject, we not only never see that Matt and Harriet could love each other, we end up with no clue why they ever would love each other. If Aaron Sorkin wants Studio 60 to succeed, he needs to put the Matt and Harriet relationship behind him. He can write about Matt, and he can write about Harriet. But constantly writing about Matt-and-Harriet is killing the show.

(No, I didn’t like tonight’s episode. Apparently Matt is now starting to lose it.)

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I think that Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip may be finding itself. The episode airing tonight in the US, which I watched last night thanks to my fine Canadian brethren, is the show’s third consecutive entry in which there is relatively little preaching. Sorkin seems to have finally remembered how to make points through drama, as opposed to the approach which dominated the show’s first bunch of episodes (i.e., making points by stopping the drama completely so characters could make speeches).

Also for the first time in the show’s run, Matt and Harriet seem like a plausible couple, if only because they actually interact in this episode, rather than simply bounce speeches off one another. The Steven Weber and Bradley Whitford characters also seem to be settling in, after too long a spell in which Weber seemed like a guy who was tending to be the show’s “heavy” even though he clearly wasn’t meant to be the heavy, and in which Whitford seemed to simply be not so much a character but a liaison between Matthew Perry and the rest of the cast.

The brief bits of sketches we see are actually amusing, the goings-on at the fictional TV show are actually interesting, and Sorkin does one of those extended music bits at the end that actually makes a point in an actually touching way.

So anyway, maybe the crisis is averted.

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So here I’ve been griping about Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip every week, and still tuning in every week, for who knows why…until my friends in Toronto aired the newest episode last night (airing tonight in the US). Titled “The Wrap Party”, this episode is the episode of Studio 60 I’ve been waiting for. To keep the Sorkinesque baseball metaphors going, I don’t know if this episode represents Sorkin finally emerging from a long slump or just a single bit of good hitting amidst a generally lousy season, but this was a very good episode.

And why? Well, without delving too deeply into spoiler territory, it’s because in this episode it’s not “All Matt-and-Harriet, all the time”. Yes, there is some of that here, but it takes a nice back seat to some other stuff, and we get some welcome insight into the DL Hughley, Timothy Busfield, and Nate Corddry characters. There’s a subplot that’s classic Sorkin in the way it starts out being kind of funny and goofy, but turns out in the fourth act to be a wonderful bit of storytelling, and this particular storyline also serves to put Studio 60 into the context of television’s long history, which is also something I’ve been wanting to see.

And best of all, Sorkin allows his stories to express what it is he has to say, instead of giving all of his characters soliloquies and monologues that bring the show to a grinding halt. Maybe someone reminded him of the old adage, “If you want to send a message, use Western Union.” Anyway, this episode was a very welcome change. I hope it augurs well for episodes to come.

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I didn’t blog last week’s episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip because I just started to feel like Comic Book Guy* a little bit, endlessly snarking on Aaron Sorkin for executing a show that I am increasingly feeling to be an exercise in self-indulgence. But last night I was thumbing through my copy of the Seasons Three and Four book of The West Wing: Shooting Scripts, and I quite by accident uncovered yet another example of Sorkin apparently using Studio 60 as a dumping ground for stuff from his own personal life.

The major subplot thus far in Studio 60‘s run is the romance between genius comedy writer Matt (Matthew Perry) and genius comedy actress Harriet (Sarah Paulson). This romance has led to all manner of preachy nonsense in the show, since Matt’s a staunch liberal and Harriet’s a Red-State baptist. They’re a metaphor for the Red States and the Blue States coming together once a week, for ninety minutes, to laugh together. And the healing power of laughter and so on. (I’m not making this up. The script for last week’s episode spelled all this out, via a visiting reporter played by Christine Lahti.)

Now, I generally find the Matt-Harriet romance irritating, because (a) I can’t stand the whole “You guys stand for half this country hating the other half!” stuff, and (b) I don’t think that these two leads have one iota of chemistry between them. Maybe we’re just supposed to buy into it because Sorkin’s telling us to, or maybe he’s got something more sophisticated up his sleeve and they’re one of those couples that everybody knows shouldn’t be together but them. (I frankly doubt the latter, but we’ll see.) But anyway, one interaction between Matt and Harriet that got a lot of screentime was Harriet’s gift to Matt of a baseball bat signed by “Darren Wells” of the Dodgers. That bat’s been all over the show ever since, never leaving Matt’s desk despite some shenanigans revolving around Darren Wells having written his phone number on the bat. OK? OK.

So now last night I’m reading the TWW script book, and in an introductory passage at the beginning, Sorkin writes of a time when someone proposed doing a Halloween-themed episode of The West Wing:

And he’d [Kevin Falls, an executive producer] wanted to do a Halloween show ever since SportsNight. I wasn’t wild about the idea — paper cutouts of ghosts and goblins at Margaret’s desk? — but lacking any ideas of my own, I turned to Kevin and the staff and said what I usually say when I have nothing at all, “Okay, that’s it for a while,” and went back to my office to play with my Darren Dreifort baseball bat. [Emphasis added.]

Now, he doesn’t tell us who gave him the Darren Dreifort bat in real life, but it clearly made its way into Studio 60, where all he did was change the last name of the player! Darren Dreifort, of course, was a pitcher for the Dodgers (now apparently retired after lots of injuries), as is Darren Wells on the show. And you might wonder why a pitcher is giving out a bat, a point which Sorkin made in the script.

Now, obviously very few people are going to notice stuff like this, but even if we can’t put our finger on it so directly, this is a big way in which the air of falsity that I’m detecting all through Studio 60 creeps into the show. I have no problem with Sorkin using his life experiences in television to tell stories — it’s part of that whole “Write what you know” thing, and roman a clef tales have a long lineage. But every detail like this that crops up makes it feel more and more like Studio 60 is one giant wish-fulfillment fantasy for Aaron Sorkin. It’s like he’s trying to achieve through writing what he’s not allowed to achieve through mushrooms anymore, and I find that sad because the guy is a gifted writer. A Few Good Men is a really good movie (and its lead character also was a guy who did his best thinking whilst toting a baseball bat!), The American President is one of my favorite movies, and the first two seasons of The West Wing are obviously great, with the third and fourth being less good but still having frequent moments of greatness. I hope he finds that stroke again, if not with Studio 60, then maybe with something else.

(John likes Harriet and Matt just fine, for what it’s worth. Also, for those who think that Sorkin’s trend towards preachiness is a new development, check out the script to The American President, which contains some very preachy material that thankfully didn’t make it into the final cut of the movie.)

* Did you know that Comic Book Guy’s real name was revealed at some point? I didn’t! Click through that link above to find out. The things you learn!

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Some notes on the new episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, airing tonight in the US but last night in Toronto — thanks, Canadians!

[SPOILERS]

So OK, this episode is a mixed bag. Shortly after the halfway mark, the episode launches into what might be the most interesting story about the making of a comedy TV show that Studio 60 has yet uncorked — basically, after the live telecast, someone realizes that ninety seconds of comedic material for the show was plagiarized. After that moment, the episode is first-rate. How they deal with the aftermath of plagiarism, how Matt deals with the staff writers, the technical stuff with the show’s live East Coast telecast being over but the West Coast tape delay having not aired yet — it’s all great stuff. I’ve made the West Wing comparison before, and not favorably, but here it works: this is like when TWW would have a big political crisis and everyone would just work. So yeah, the second half of this episode is good.

Before that, however, it’s boring tripe.

I’m sorry, but the whole subplot with Matt the writer and Harriet the Christian comedian has got to end, and it’s got to end soon. It’s just painful to watch unfold. I don’t know if it’s the lack of chemistry between Matthew Perry and that actress or what, but as a couple they’re uninspiring, as a fighting couple they’re uninteresting, and as a former couple who can’t decide if they’re in love or completely over one another they’re exasperating. There’s a whole bit about a baseball bat that Harriet’s giving to Matt, but the bat turns out to be a come-on from the baseball player, who turns out to be possibly dating Harriet, who…oh, screw it.

Aaron Sorkin milks this storyline for half the episode, to the point where it seems that the only reason for it is for him to be able to inject as much “Inside Baseball” talk into his dialogue as possible. But Matt and Harriet are so unconvincing as a couple that I want to scream, “Get to the TV stuff!”

This episode’s Standout Sorkinism: When Harriet is complaining loudly about how Matt has been sleeping with a woman in her own workplace, with that woman in the room, the woman says: “You know I’m sitting right here, right?”

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Yup, time for my obligatory Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip post, which I watched last night again courtesy of the wonderful people of Toronto’s CTV! I wasn’t sure I was going to blog about the third episode of the show, given that I might start to seem like an obsessive about it, but I see that Lance Mannion is getting ready to liveblog the episode. So here are my thoughts on the show that Lance is about to liveblog.

[SPOILERS for tonights Studio 60!]

Lance mentions something someone else said last week about the show:

“Notice when people talk about STUDIO 60 they don’t start the conversation by saying, ‘I really liked it’ or ‘I hated it’? Instead it’s always, What did you think?’ I suspect no one really knows what to make of it.”

Well, I’m getting closer to knowing what to make of it, and while I now know that it’s pretty much what I’ve come close to saying in the previous weeks, I haven’t been able to phrase it so starkly. Here it is: Studio 60 bears too strong a resemblance to The West Wing.

Maybe this is only my problem, given how many times I’ve watched various episodes of TWW, but once again, I couldn’t watch this show and hear that dialogue without picking out small bits, and larger themes, from the earlier show. Yes, Studio 60 is about a TV show as opposed to TWW‘s White House. But Sorkin is still saying exactly the same things. He’s talking about how good people can come together and work hard for a greater purpose. He’s talking about how people of very high standards have to wrestle against dumbing down their work (here it’s ratings; on TWW it was polling results). We have people who have spent their lives in a given business (TV or politics), rising to great success and working at a very high level, being caught completely by surprise by developments they should have seen coming a mile away.

Stripping aside the particulars because Studio 60 happens in a TV studio, nothing ever happens to a character here that didn’t happen in a similar way to someone on The West Wing.

Lance notes that he thinks the show has to show some actual sketches, sooner or later. This episode comes close: one sketch is seen extensively, in rehearsal. The sketch, a comedy bit about the contemporary ignorance of and lack of respect for science, is frankly kind of painful to watch, but the crutch here, obviously, is that we’re only seeing a rehearsal. And then, in the episode’s fourth act, there is a montage of bits from the actual taping of the show. This consists of tiny bits of various sketches broken up by shots of the directors directing, the cast members changing costumes after their bits, et cetera. We hear tiny portions of sketches (“Pimp your trike”), but mainly the sketches that get the most “talk-time” in Sorkin’s teleplay, the “Weekend Update” analogue and some sketch involving Commedia dell’arte, exist only in that very talk-time where “Crazy Christians” also resides.

In three episodes thus far, Aaron Sorkin’s done a lot of telling. He tells us that Jordan Whatshername is brilliant. He tells us that Matt is an amazing writer, that Danny is a brilliant director, and that the blonde on the cast is howlingly funny. But he has yet, so far as I can tell, actually shown us any of that. This is the biggest problem with Studio 60, and it’s a big one. Sorkin was able to show us, many times, that Jed Bartlet was a good President, that CJ Cregg could handle the press brilliantly, that Toby was despite his outward cynicism more idealistic than anyone else in the senior staff combined. Sorkin’s gotta start showing us this stuff, or Studio 60 is doomed to be what it already feels like: a show on which a lot of good actors portray people who constantly tell us how brilliant they are without ever actually seeming to do anything brilliant.

Studio 60 really needs to get out of the gate, and soon. Three episodes in, and I still feel like I’m watching an unending pilot episode. The show needs to go somewhere, and this is where I’m worried a bit about the subject matter hampering things. What can we see here, other than each episode being about the preparation of one more episode of Friday Night Live or whatever it is?

One final note: I’ve written before of how much I admire the work of filmmaker Cameron Crowe. I always feel like Crowe’s work displays lots of wonderful insight, but his most recent film, Elizabethtown, was widely panned by critics. When I finally saw it, I enjoyed it, but I had to concede a point to the critics: Elizabethtown was stunningly self-indulgent, as if Crowe had basically gone with every instinct in his head with nobody to tell him otherwise. I’m afraid that Studio 60 is going to become Aaron Sorkin’s Elizabethtown.

And yet, what will I be doing this coming Sunday at 10:00? Tuning into CTV from Toronto. O Canada!

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Thanks to the good folks at CTV in Toronto, I saw tonight’s episode of Studio 60 last night. I, for one, welcome my new Canadian overlords!

Folks, if ever a TV show is going to make my head explode, Studio 60 is going to be the one. I love watching it, basking in Aaron Sorkin’s wordplay and noting his ever-apparent mastery of the four-act structure. But at the same time, man, does it piss me off.

(Spoilers below for Episode II, “The Cold Open”.)

First off, I’m just not sold on the Amanda Peet character. She seems, frankly, rather lacking in gravitas.

Secondly, this episode falls right in line with what I said about the pilot episode: this show is shaping up as Aaron Sorkin’s major descent into self-indulgence. Granted, one has to have already been a pretty studious observer of Sorkin’s writing over the years to pick up on a lot of it, but Sorkin recycles so many tropes from his own writing, over and over and over again, that the effect is increasingly jarring. And it’s not just phrases repeated verbatim from one series to the next, but entire rhythms of scenes and conversations mirrored almost exactly from one series to the next, and even entire themes. A constant refrain on The West Wing was the idea of how much nicer things would be in this country if people acted the way that Aaron Sorkin depicts them acting as opposed to the way they really do act, and sure enough, that crops up in a big way in the first half of “The Cold Open” (especially in a press conference).

But the really self-indulgent stuff comes in the show’s second half, when writer Matt (Matthew Perry) can’t figure out how to start his show off. He’s struggling with ideas on what his opening sketch should be — and then, suddenly, someone says something in an offhand fashion that jars him into his idea, which turns out to be a re-writing of “The Very Model of a Modern Major General” from The Pirates of Penzance.

I think I actually let out a groan when I realized that Sorkin was yet again going to mine his obsession with Gilbert and Sullivan, which he employed a number of times in various West Wing episodes, most notably “And It’s Surely To Their Credit”, which indicated that Jed Bartlet staffed his White House exclusively with people who had encyclopedic knowledge of G&S. (And the title of that episode was itself an allusion to Pinafore.)

So my reaction, as noted, continues to be wildly mixed. On the one hand, I could listen to Sorkin’s stuff all day. On the other, I just want to slap Sorkin and say, “Yeah, we get it already. Say something else!”

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Last night, courtesy of Toronto’s CTV station that my apartment complex’s antenna receives, I got to see Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. The official premiere of the pilot episode in the US is tonight, so there are spoilers below. (Unless, of course, you’ve already seen the pilot via any of the various online distribution schemes NBC employed over the summer to create buzz for this show. Here I’ve seen it a day before its official US premiere, and I’m still behind the curve.)

It’s a very, very, very good show. The production values are amazing, and the acting is first-rate across the board. This was a big worry of mine, but take it from me: you’ll be able to watch Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford without once thinking of Chandler Bing or Josh Lyman.

But.

Yes, I said “but”.

If you’ve read any buzz about Studio 60 at all, you know that its basic concept is that it’s a backstage show, set in and around the production of a Saturday Night Live-type sketch comedy show that’s been on for twenty years, produced groundbreaking comedy and satire in its early years, but has since become safe and boring and — the ultimate comedy crime — unfunny. The producer-creator, played by Judd Hirsch (an actor I always love), finally snaps and walks right onto the stage during the live broadcast, whereupon he gives a long, rambling diatribe to the live national audience about the stunning wasteland that is television today. Network execs explode, exit the old producer, and the mess is dumped into the lap of the new network president (Amanda Peet), who decides to rehire the show’s old head writer (Matthew Perry) and director (Bradley Whitford), who apparently quit or were fired from the show four years earlier.

The show features all the features you’d expect from a Sorkin/Schlamme show: dialogue that happens so fast you miss it if you so much as sip your beverage, long tracking shots that follow the actors through the winding corridors of a very complex set while they recite said dialogue that happens so fast yada yada yada, name-dropping galore to create a sense that this show actually is taking place in the real world, and so on. And yes, it’s wonderful to have all that Sorkin/Schlamme goodness back again, four years after their departure from The West Wing (and, frankly, five years after their best TWW work was already behind them).

But here’s the thing: it’s almost too Sorkinesque, if that makes any sense. Watching Studio 60, I got the same sensation that I felt when I caught a couple of episodes of SportsNight on syndication a few years back. I’d never seen SportsNight in its original run, so I saw an episode of it after I’d seen three or four years’ worth of West Wing. And the feeling I got was that I was hearing TWW dialogue, but not about TWW stuff. Same thing here: the tone of the dialogue is exactly the same, but the topic is TV and not politics. It may take me an episode or two to fully recalibrate myself to Studio 60.

And, of course, people like me who are pretty intimately familiar with Sorkin’s writing will recognize those little “Sorkinisms” when they pop up. Phrases like “I hate your breathing guts”. Someone telling a higher-up at length about this great idea they have, and when the higher-up says, “Great, when do we start?”, being told something like “I already did.” Characters not batting an eye when told bluntly by someone else about their own character flaws, or even seeming proud of them. Every affirmative answer to an interrogative being “Yeah”. Never “yes”, “uh-huh”, “mmm-hmmm”, “you bet your bippy”, but “yeah”. It’s only a matter of time, I suppose, before someone on Studio 60 relates a bad experience with the metaphor, “I got screwed with my pants on”, or until someone rigidly insists: “No, I didn’t do that. I would never do that. It would be unthinkable for me to do that. [beat] But yes, I did that.”

I once read a scathing critique of Aaron Sorkin’s writing (don’t remember where, or I’d look for a link) that pointed out how just about every character in his shows talks the same, with the same phrasings, the same long-winded sentences that occasionally become exercises in recursion. I can’t totally deny the point, but when Sorkin’s on his game, I’m left thinking, “Yeah, isn’t it great!” On this pilot episode, at least, Sorkin’s had time to hone this script to the typical sharpness that one expects from a Sorkin script when he’s had time to hone it thusly. We’ll see what happens later in the season.

And there’s where some of my skepticism about this show comes into play: later in the season. The West Wing, being set in the political world of the White House, offered tremendous dramatic potential. The canvas on Studio 60, though, seems at my first glance to be substantially more limited. I’m just not sure how many stories there are to tell with a show like this, and I’m not sure how long it can go on before it starts feeling a bit stale. I’m sure we’ll have stories about actor difficulties, and problems with the writing staff, and clashes with network executives, and cost overruns, and so on. There’s no reason why that kind of thing can’t remain interesting for a long time, but to do so, Sorkin may need to vary his writing style a bit. As much as I love to see the old Sorkin/Schlamme magic at work again, that can’t be the sole thing keeping Studio 60 going.

And I’m already a little unsure of the degree to which Sorkin appears to be mining from his own personal experiences for this project: a show set in TV land about a writer-director team that left their old project under less-than-ideal circumstances, one of whom has a recurring addiction problem. There’s a very definite feeling that Studio 60 is Sorkin’s roman a clef, and it’s very hard not to look at the show’s constant indication that the fictional sketch comedy show sucked hard in the absence of its brilliant writer/director team as a slap at the three seasons of The West Wing that followed the Sorkin/Schlamme exit from that series.

But at the same time, I’m glad that Sorkin and Schlamme appear to be openly embracing the fact that show business is seedy as hell, that it really is populated with people who look for dead bodies so they can steal the coins off their eyes, and that it is a business of metaphorical incest where everybody knows everybody else and has slept with a good number of them. The West Wing somehow managed to blend a romanticized notion of politics, where public service is honorable and so are most of the people in it, with the old adage about how you shouldn’t inquire too closely into the makings of laws and sausages. That same blend of tropes can’t work with Studio 60; nobody really romanticizes Hollywood anymore, and certainly nobody really romanticizes television.

And there’s the rub: I suspect Studio 60 will be a show that’s much admired for its sheer quality. But I doubt that it’ll be loved as its politically-themed predecessor was. So don’t watch Studio 60 with The West Wing in mind. Instead, think of a seedy Hollywood tell-all book. Think You’ll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again. And don’t look for a Jed Bartlet in this show. There isn’t one.

CLARIFICATION: I didn’t dislike SportsNight on the limited basis in which I saw it. But what I did see made me wonder (along with movies like The American President and A Few Good Men, also written by Sorkin) if Sorkin might not be a one-trick pony, albeit with a really amazing trick. His output is excellent, no doubt about that, but his dialogue really does sound the same from one thing to the next.

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Just for my Buffalo and Southern Ontario readers: tomorrow night (Monday) is when NBC will be premiering Aaron Sorkin’s new show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. But if you want to see it one night early, Channel Nine out of Hamilton, Ontario will be showing it tonight at 10:00. I don’t know if that channel is available on local cable, but we get that channel on the broadcast antenna that our apartment complex uses, so if you’ve got some good rabbit-ears, this is a good time to use them.

UPDATE: Crap! It’s CTV out of Toronto, not whatever station’s out of Hamilton. But it is Channel Nine on my dial, here in Buffalo.

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