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When Aaron Sorkin – the screenwriting dynamo known for his snappy dialogue and witty humour, and the pen behind such films as A Few Good Men, The American President and The Social Network – stopped writing for his most famous television creation, The West Wing, the show went to hell. Characters started sounding out of tune, close and loyal friends started betraying one another, and the once charismatic President Josiah ‘Jed’ Bartlet degenerated into the grandfather from King of the Hill. Thus, the program which once inspired legions of politics students (and, much more worryingly, real adult politicians) disappeared up its own brass ring. What did Sorkin do with all that banterous energy and witty social criticism? He turned it into Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.
Studio 60 is the name of a fictional comedy sketch show, on the model of Saturday Night Live, that provides the high-pressure workplace setting for the show’s various heroes and villains. The pilot episode began with Studio 60 founder and creative godfather, Wes Mendell, launching an enraged on-air rant about the degraded and brainless state of American national television – one which soon costs him his job. And that’s the last we see of good old Wes. Brought in to fill his shoes by the network are his two one-time protégées, Matt Albie (Matthew Perry) and his best friend and creative partner Danny Tripp (Bradley Whitford), charged with turning around a flailing franchise.
Accompanying the two are Jordan McDeere, head of creative programming at the fictional NBS network, who pains for quality TV amidst an ocean of derivative hospital dramas and reality shows; her executive boss, Jack Rudolph, who forced Matt and Danny from the show years ago for refusing to cancel a inflammatory sketch, and whom they both heavily resent; a variety of comedians and writers (most of whom quit halfway through the series, leaving the show with only three writers, including Matt); and an enormous digital clock, which counts down to the time of the next show, and is inscribed with the Marx brothers’ line: ‘time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana’.
Over the course of the series, characters got arrested, got pregnant, got depressed, and finally got together for a bittersweet ending. The finale features, in typical Sorkin style, multiple crises happening simultaneously: a cast members’ brother is kidnapped by the Taliban while serving in Afghanistan, Jordan goes into labour but with life-threatening complications, and another cast member’s job is threatened after a televised emotional outburst, criticizing the craven nature of the media and the short attention-span of TV-watching Americans, echoing the previous unseen dismissal of Matt and Danny. Without revealing the ending, however, after a genuinely tense climax all the series’ loose ends are tied together, leaving only Danny to turn off the set’s lights and Matt returning to work in his office, issuing a challenge to the countdown clock.
Studio 60, then, proved too intelligent and acerbic for its own good – getting cancelled after a single season, in favour of the same low-brow and undemanding programs which it regularly chastised. Although some may criticize the show for being too close to its creator’s reality – basically Sorkin’s fictionalised ranting about his treatment at the hands of the show-business executives – this is too superficial. While Studio 60’s premise and characters may have been grounded in the personal, that was a price worth paying for an eminently watchable comedy-drama, which explored issues surrounding modern censorship and creative integrity, as well as the state of modern culture, in a way which very few had dared to before, and, probably, very few will ever rise to.
I was pretty disappointed. Even bad Sorkin is better than 80% of TV.
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