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Studio 60th in the Nielsens

This couch potato officially gave up on Aaron Sorkin's latest effort last night. A show has to be pretty bad if it turns me away from looking at Amanda Peet in favor of the comedy stylings of Tony Kornheiser and Joe Theismann.

More ominously for Studio 60, my teenaged daughter, a HUUGE West Wing fan, didn't watch either. It's Tivoed, and she said she'll catch up to the episode on the weekend, but I know she won't.

She won't miss anything. The fifth episode of Sorkin's latest foray into "quality" television failed in so many different ways listing them all might take until the show's next episode two weeks from yesterday. Turning the great Eli Wallach into a lame cliche is an almost impossible feat of anti-entertainment. Sorkin managed.

There were four separate story arcs in the show, all built around a cast party none of the protagonists spent much time attending. All four were hokey to the point of physical pain. Far more lethally, all were so predictable you didn't just know how they'd come out, you could recite the dialogue before it took place. Did any member of the millions in the audience not know the Dodger pitcher would put his phone number on Peet's autographed baseball?

Well, a lot of prime time TV sucks. Studio 60s primo rival in its time slot, CSI Miami, is a comical catastrophe, a head-on collision between impossible plots as they collide with tactical nuclear overacting. All Sorkin shows have talented and attractive casts doing their best with occasionally sparkling scripts. The man has talent. That's why Studio 60 is worth criticizing. When a Sorkin show tanks, there's less excuse for it.

Might as well get to the heresy and be done with it. The hallowed SportsNight left me cold. Great cast, snappy cross-talk, and a complete lack of versimilitude. Sports journalism is a topic I know something about, and Sorkin's show about it left out one kind of important ingredient-none of the characters cared about sports very much. Sex, their careers, their professional integrity, yes. The scores? Not so much.

For all the rip jobs public and private I've laid on Chris Berman and Stuart Scott, I know both of them love sports as much or more than myself. They wouldn't be in sports TV if they didn't. SportsNight almost never conveyed the idea its characters were interested in the topic of their working lives. Professionally speaking, they were earnest liberals obsessed with integrity's battle with the corporate meat-grinder.

West Wing was also a show about earnest liberals. Since they were in the White House, a place where earnest liberals occasionally can be found, this worked just fine. Sorkin's best and subtlest work in West Wing was his exploration of the limits of earnestness in politics, policy, and life itself. Jeb Bartlet's transformation from the garrulous know-it-all economist of the show's first season to the grimly confident leader who won a second term was both excellent acting by Martin Sheen and superb writing from Sorkin. Bradley Whitford's Josh Lyman was the most earnest of all the West Wingers, and as often as not, this made him the butt of the show's jokes. Earnestness, unchecked, made Lyman a buffoon.

Studio 60 is yet another show about earnest liberals. It's also a show about comedians and comedy. And that's why it has seemed so false to me since the pilot.

There aren't nearly enough laughs in Studio 60. The cross-talk between Whitford and Matthew Perry is the wittiest part of it, and there's not even enough of that. But comedy is serious business. Off-stage, few comics are barrels of laughs. Many are miserable people. The very funniest, as often as not, are spectacularly self-destructive. Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, John Belushi, Jonathan Winters, the honor roll of laughter is full of human beings ripped apart by their overacute perception of the absurdity of life.

That's a high-falutin' way of saying that comedians, whatever they may be, are seldom earnest liberals obsessed with the integrity of network television. Not on the job anyway. Lots or comics are liberals in private life, but when working, they're anarchists. If they're not, they don't get any laughs.

Do we see a pattern here? Sorkin has created three shows. One was about something besides the TV business, and it was a hit. For all its cult status, SportsNight was a flop. So far, Studio 60 is an even bigger flop. If it weren't for all the money NBC gave Sorkin, it might've already been canceled. Each of the shows about TV were basically about how heroic stand-ins for Aaron Sorkin fought for truth, justice, and the earnest liberal way of TV. That's entertainment!

In time, Sorkin will create another hour-long episodic drama for television. If it's not ABOUT television, I promise him I'll watch.

As for Sorkin's enablers at NBC, may I suggest to the fourth-place network it's comedy priorities are exactly ass-backwards? The network now has not one but two shows that are backstage comedy/dramas about what's obviously Saturday Night Live. Nobody in the world's vast comedy audience needed either one.

What we need and want from Rockefeller Center is for the real Saturday Night Live not to suck so very, very much.

posted by Michael Gee @ 8:03 AM