Netflix Watch Instantly is simultaneously the best and worst thing that has ever happened to me, allowing me as it does to spend hours parked on the couch in front of all manner of television I didn’t know I wanted to spend hours parked on the couch in front of. My most interesting project of late has been the first and only season of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Aaron Sorkin’s short-lived dramedy about a writer-producer team out to save an ailing late night sketch comedy show.
It’s actually sort of strange that I’d never gotten around to watching this one before now, since, full disclosure: I love the Sork. Love him. I love his sharp brain and sentimental streak and his long scenes of attractive people walking down hallways and saying clever things to one another. I love his speckled history and bad temper and that thing in the Times where he made Jed Bartlett give Obama a lecture. I love his weird habit of cannibalizing his own plot points, the incredibly lovely cadence of his writing, and the stunning monologue in the middle of Two Cathedrals. I was fully, fully expecting to love Studio 60.
And, I mean, I did, kind of. I mean, I definitely liked it. It’s got some really sweet elements: Matt Perry and Brad Whitford ably handle the signature Sorkin bromance at the heart of the show, with their banter and their manly I love yous; Amanda Peet, of all people, is surprisingly winning as network president Jordan McDeere; there is a great episode where Sting sexily plays the lute (also one with homeless musicians from New Orleans playing Christmas carols; WHAT, I have something in my eye). I for sure felt my Big Sorkin Feelings, and nothing about Studio 60 is an overt waste of time. Still, I’ve always had it in the back of my mind that this show got cancelled after only one season because America was stupid and didn’t watch it, but once I watched it myself it became pretty clear that this show got cancelled because…it was kind of a train wreck.
It’s hard to point to why this is, exactly–or, more accurately, there are so many reasons why this is that it’s hard to point to just one. While Sorkin does his damndest to raise the stakes here, after seven seasons of leading the free world on The West Wing it’s hard to get worked up over the artistic integrity of a couple of LA muckety mucks (however charming they might be–and they are extremely charming). The show’s central romance, the on again/off again relationship between Perry’s character and Sarah Paulson’s Harriet is tiresome and irritating (the problem isn’t that she’s a Christian nutbar; the problem is that they’re jerks to each other). And for a show about a bunch of comedians–from a writer who can be pretty hilarious–it’s not particularly funny.
The biggest, grossest problem with Studio 60, though, is that for any viewer with even a scintilla of knowledge about the Sork’s personal and professional life, the whole thing is uncomfortably navel-gazey and self-serving. The coke addiction! The blond lady friend! The show that fell apart without him, and the suits who only cared about the bottom line and not about creating quality programming for the intelligent viewer! Steven Weber’s NBS Chairman Jack Rudolph is a cardboard villain unworthy of Sorkin, who has said himself that he was”too angry” when he wrote the character. The anger shows–and honestly, so do most of the seams. Still, the Sork at his worst is still better than most other writers at their best, and spending a season with Studio 60 reminded me just how much I miss having him on my TV.
My first semester of college I had a writing professor who thought I was real smart because of this play I wrote that wasn’t personal to me in the slightest, and then I had him again two years later and I wrote another play about this fight I had with my best friend, and he found out I wasn’t that smart at all. “You don’t have enough space from this event yet to write about it,” he told me, not unkindly. “Show me what else you’ve got.”
Hey Sork: what else you got?
...Which Was Completely Delightful 