Studio 60: In the cold, clear light of day

In the cold, clear, light of day, I still don't believe that Sarah Paulson could have made the bear roaring joke work.

But I don't believe her character could make any joke work.

Welcome, Wolcott readers.  This is my morning after wrap-up.  The Studio 60 live-blogging happened in the post immediately below.  Make sure to check out the comments.

I liked this episode much better than last week's.  But I liked it for the same reasons I liked the little I liked last week---Bradley Whitford, Matthew Perry, Steven Weber, and Timothy Busfield.  Focusing on them made the show enjoyable for me.  I just hated it whenever they had to talk to the other characters.

Sarah Paulson's a serious liability.  It's not all her fault.  Aaron Sorkin has given her only a personals ad to play, "Good Christian girl with high standards but a bit of a naughty streak, likes to have fun but no smokers, drinkers, or drug abusers, please. Can sing a little.  Looking for serious relationship with tall, handsome Jewish man in need of reforming."

Harriet's not even a full-fledged type.  She comes close to being the Schoolmarm type, but that's not a good direction for Sorkin to go with any character because it tempts him to get in touch with his own school teacher side, and that's not a temptation he's good at resisting.

For Sorkin, all of life is a "lesson."

He's a bit of a prig, really.

The other problem with Harriet/Paulson is that there's nothing about Paulson that suggests she has the comedic and musical talents that Harriet supposedly possses in spades.  Our belief in her star quality is going to be based on what the other characters tell us about her.

So she presents Sorkin with another kind of temptation he has trouble resisting---the temptation to tell us everything.

Jaquandor's dealt with this one.

Sorkin likes to write.  That's good.  He thinks that smart people watch television to admire the writing, though, and that's not good.

I'm sure he admires Martin Sheen no end, but I suspect that deep inside he thinks that President Jed Bartlett was all his doing and Sheen was good at not getting in the way of the words that made the character.

He doesn't write for his actors, which may be why all his characters sound alike.

Deadwood creator David Milch learned something else from Shakespeare besides how to sell blank verse and how to structure a scene.  He learned to give his actors characters that suited their strengths and allowed them to use their idiosyncratic bodies and voices.

Sorkin's thinking seems to go:  Sarah Paulson is a good actress; I give her good lines; therefore, Harriet will be a good character.

I hate to keep picking on Paulson, but she's also a problem because Harriet's real purpose in the show is to be the love interest.

I don't believe that she's carrying a torch for Matthew Perry's character.  I don't believe she's the least bit jealous that he's sleeping with her pal, the sexy chick, whose real name and character name I will look up as soon as I'm done with this post so that I don't have to keep calling her the sexy chick.

Except that calling her the sexy chick is unfortunately accurate.  She is the sexy chick.  Amanda Peet is the spunky chick and Sarah Paulson is the good girl and the bitchy woman who follows Steven Weber's character around and snipes at Amanda Peet is the bitchy woman.

So far, Sorkin's given them only attitudes to play.

Paulson, though, doesn't give off any body heat.  She doesn't seem heartbroken, jealous, or even perversely titilated by the fact that her ex-boyfriend and best friend are fooling around.  What she seems is disapproving, as if what bothers her most is that they aren't serious.  If he and the sexy chick were engaged, she might even be happy for them.  Except that she's also peeved.

She's reacting to their affair as if it's something fun she wants to be part of, and I don't mean she's thinking threesome.  She's put out in the way she'd be put out to learn that they'd gone to a movie she wanted to see without her.

Last night I got to wishing that he had cast Amanda Peet as Harriet.

Peet has a comedic face.  She looks like she can be funny, and she can be funny.  She has sex appeal to bottle and sell.  With her in the part, Harriet's Christianity would be a problem for Harriet.  As it is, it's a problem for the other characters.  If Peet was playing the part, you could believe that being true to her Christian values would be a struggle for her.  She would be constantly slamming down the lid on various Unchristian sides of herself, and not just on her sexual desires or an urge to party.   Anger, spite, pride, ambition, vanity, and just her intelligence would be constantly sending her to the mourner's bench.

Peet could make the character a sinner determined to sin no more.  Paulson just makes her a saint, bordering on angel.

And it would have been no loss to Peet if she weren't cast as Jordan, since Sorkin seems completely uncommitted to the character as what she is, the president of the network.  I think Sorkin set her two rungs too high on the corporate ladder for dramatic purposes, anyway, but so far at least he's not given her any scenes in which she is doing the job she supposedly has.  And the fact that the first real problem he's introduced for her is a sex scandal doesn't bode well.

As a character, Jordan seems to be nothing more than Sorkin's apology for having created a TV show about a Liberal President and his staff in which there was no woman with real power among the main characters.  CJ became Chief of Staff after Sorkin left the show.

I wonder if DL Hughley's character is going to be an apology for the only black main character on West Wing being essentially a valet.

Jordan has a lot in common with CJ Craig.  CJ was a smart, talented, decent-hearted innocent who had risen high because someone had decided to reward her for being smart, talented, and decen-hearted.

This was believable in CJ's case because she worked for a hero-king, Jed Bartlett.

I don't think there are any hero-kings running TV networks.  What's Grant Tinker up to these days?

Unless it turns out that Steven Weber's boss, the owner of the network is Martin Sheen (or Alan Alda), it's highly unlikely that Jordan as she's written would be holding the job she holds...

Sorkin's given her power but so far he's shown no inclination to portray her using it.  Instead there's a Perils of a Corporate Pauline quality developing.  Every week a new metaphorical villain comes along to tie her to a metaphorical railroad track.  Last week it was the Christian Right.  This week, and presumably next week, it's her ex-husband the sex maniac.

And she escapes from every trap just by being so gosh darn spunky...

I didn't see The American President and never watched Sports Night regularly.  In A Few Good Men and West Wing one thing that was conspicuously absent from Sorkin's work was romance.

In Jed and Abby Bartlett Sorkin helped create a portrait of a great marriage. The Bartletts had transceneded romance and---even though Jed and Abby plainly got frisky from time to time, and I defy any man or woman married to Stockard Channing not to get frisky ---sex.

The only sexual heat ever generated on The West Wing came when Mary Louise Parker and Bradley Whitford squared off, and that was all Mary Louise Parker and Bradley Whitford. So I don't know if Sorkin can do romantic comedy.It wouldn't seem to be up his alley. He's not very interested in his characters' personal lives. He wants to watch them work.

That was fine with me.

You know how I feel about mush.

On The West Wing the characters didn't have time for a personal life and they didn't want  one.  The work the characters did was of earth-shaking importance so it was inherently dramatic.

For the characters on Studio 60?  Not so much.

There are people in showbiz, especially actors and actresses, who can't maintain the boundries between their personal lives and their work, but most people in the business are extremely dedicated and they work very hard.

Watch one of the How they made it featurettes on the next DVD you rent and you'll be in awe of how much time, effort, energy, and love the pros put into their crafts and their jobs.

But while it's fascinating to watch the model builders for the Lord of the Rings movies for 10 minutes, it's not quite so riveting to speand an hour watching Matthew Perry frown and type, actors rehearse, and suits worry about ratings.

It used to be said that with the Bartlett Administration Sorkin had created a kind of a parallel universe version of the Clinton White House, a universe where things were the way Liberals wish it had been in this one.  That wasn't true, it was simply a phony hip way of parroting the Media Elite's prejudices against Bill Clinton.

The real difference between Jed Bartlett and Bill Clinton wasn't that one was a principled man who had eyes for no other woman and his wife while the other was a slick trimmer with a weakness for pizza and plump, pretty girls who brought him it late at night.

The real difference was that Sorkin stacked the deck and made sure Bartlett could outmaneuver his Right Wing opponents just by spouting the words Aaron Sorkin wrote for him.

If only Bill Clinton had hired Sorkin as his speechwriter.  Ken Starr and Newt Gingrich wouldn't have stood a chance.

But with Studio 60 Sorkin has created a Looking Glass version of the original SNL cast and their writers.  He's collected a crowd of super-professionals who are all work and no play, even the weasely hacks Richie and Ron.

If Sorkin thinks these people are too much the pros to let their personal lives make serious incursions into their working lives, then he'd better get out of them out of the studio quick. Their work just isn't that dramatic.

Now there's a word for a TV show that isn't dramatic.

A comedy. Which is the direction I think Studio 60 ought to go.  But so far there haven't been many laughs.

And there's a word for a comedy that doesn't have many laughs.

Cancelled.
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Comments

[DanK]

This is his SECOND show about writing a TV show. And it sounds like it has many of the same ups and downs. The only thing is that the ongoing tension/romance/non-story on Sportsnight featured Felicity Huffman who IS capable of carrying that line.

Also, it sounds like the baseball/basketball Stuart Scott one-liners were easier to punch off and squeeze in the show than real quality SNL punch lines.

For those that didn't watch, Sportsnight also fell into the trap of too much hokum (although when it was Robert Guillame delivering the hokum you could almost excuse it).

[Ken Muldrew]

I missed the first show but saw it this week. Lance, you are entirely correct about the mystery of having these super-serious, not-even-slightly-funny people write and star in what is alleged to be a hilarious comedy. It just doesn't wash.

I started to get the feeling that it was an allegory that was intended to illustrate the quote from the Bush advisor, "...members of the reality-based community believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality...That's not the way the world really works anymore, We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." In today's world, we don't need funny people to write or act comedy, it's all created through second order manipulations of peoples' emotions. We use psychology to game the system, and here the system is someone's state of mind once they're mesmerized by the glowing tube.

That thought quickly evolved into the idea that the show was designed to show where Rover and his minions got the notion to "create reality" in the first place, which was from television, where non-funny people are clever enough to make everyone believe that they're funny.

Then again, maybe the show just needs some time to grow on me.

[Ralph Hitchens]

Lance, your comments are fair and balanced. (!) I concur fully re. Sarah Paulson; there's no "there" there. The main problem I have with Amanda Peet is that she appears too young to have risen to that level; the show needs someone about Steven Weber's age, or even older -- where's Stockard Channing these days? I thought this week's show was interesting because we got glimpses of some of the comedy sketches, so the conceit of an SNL-type show now has some flesh on the bones -- I'd love to see more of the Tom Cruise impersonation. And as an aside, your right that the only day in/day out black character on The West Wing was a glorified valet, but I did yearn, in the early years, for Admiral Fitzwallace to have a meatier, longer-term presence. Alas, it was not to be; damn that Mideast crisis!

[John Carney]

Unless it turns out that Steven Weber's boss, the owner of the network is Martin Sheen (or Alan Alda), it's highly unlikely that Jordan as she's written would be holding the job she holds.

I thought that Ed Asner, from the dinner party scene in the pilot, was the owner of the network.

[harry near indy]

hey lance -- nbc will be showing soon, if not already, a sitcom about a snl-like show. btw, i dont' remember the name.

it'll star tina fey, alec baldwin, and tracy morgan. and since it's a sitcom, i bet it'll be funnier than sorkin's show.

i just wonder, in the spirit of curiousity, you're going to comment on that.

[monkyboy]

I just sat through the first (only?) season of Huff.

It had the same problem as Studio 60.

The only interesting character, Oliver Platt's, wasn't on the screen nearly enough.

Studio 60 will probably be a great show to watch on DVD so you can fast forward through the generic crap to get to the couple minutes from each episode worth watching.

[Laura Petrie]

A comedy or whatever this is about writing a comedy or whatever that is has been done before. And far better. I may have a slight bias on this, may be engaging in black and white thinking. Got to go now. Putting away the capri pants for fall. Toodles.

[Greg]

I don't know if Harriet Hayes could have made that joke work, but I know Tina Fey could have. She had a thing where she'd make a slightly lame joke like that one, but then sell it with a slight smirk that said "Hey, I know the joke is lame, but I'm going all the way for it." Kind of like Sideshow Bob and the rakes.

[esposito]

I like all the Sarah Paulson talk. During this show, I am reminded of her largely forgetable friend character in Down with Love. However, Studio 60's lack of romantic sizzle cannot be blamed on her. I am thinking of that just because you mentioned another show, Deadwood, which made me really like her (in ways one doesn't pine for christians with a sense of humor). As Alma Garrett's nanny with Pinkerton ulterior motives, she was a great character. And the scenes with Adams were sexy hot too.

[Frank Weaver]

Great to read a serious thought on Studio60 - I also agree with most of your post - watched the program afterwards. Change Peet and Paulson, yes, why not. The joke could have worked that Paulson plays Peets character in an ongoing sketch about the network.

I think that its strengths are going to be in the 'asides' and ripostes between Perry and his partner. Not the Sorkin-speeches. Perry's ability to react as if slowly thinking somewhere deep down and recognizing an idea - sometimes five scenes later. His partner being already two steps ahead, and knowing what it takes for Perry to work. Good setups. Dialog is best because its in the back and forth, with such small gestures that add up because of the pacing.

Its good that side characters are developing, more clear roles. But the story with the blonde girl at the party? Awful scene, dumb dialog, just flat.

The Amanda Peet character is getting even more unbelievable - I married a husband who wanted to take me to sex clubs and.. I was innocent of course, and... Sure. President of a television network. AND were so stupid to imagine this guy won't be on your back forever and ever. SSUUURRE. And the Network did no background check for an EXECUTIVE of her rank.

Instead of her spending all her time transfixed on Studio60s numbers and as an all around developing Angel - Sorkin should have divided her character into a few people, who come in and out of the storyline, allowing competition, intra-managment fights and jealousies and devious planning, backstabbing, all that office stuff that goes with the territory, rather than her angelic life story and ultimate romance.

Sara Paulson - please, be quiet, character I mean. The bear joke - stupid. To show she substituted something workeable with something childish - maybe intended to be naive, innocent christian, healthy humor but was...whats the word, oh yes: infantile. ROOOARR.

It sums up the bad part of Studio60 with her: it wasnt the clearest punchline (huh? bears SHOULD be shot...or we can't understand what bears say? or the newscaster is stupid?) and it wasnt the most creative punchline for that setup. She is laughing at how cute she thinks SHE IS doing that roar - that is all - and she thinks that is the reason for audiences to laugh as well.

So when does she stop doing jokes to save small towns - when they exist in other countries? non-christians? is she studying on world politics to understand each jokes contexts. A dead end.

The best lines are the asides - when Perry is walking and asked why are they throwing out that sketch he says "something about making bread". Or when Amanda Peet goes into his office to insist that he makes fun of her (DUI event) and treat her like anyone else that week (although they didnt make fun of the pilot episode meltdown either for that matter) he said something like "you have big teeth?". His partner plays the facilitator/reactor, always able to play the straight man when necessary. Thats really enough, they dont need to introduce a bunch of extra romance and triangles and "tension" in that way that West Wing or TV does, but could find some fresh angles. Its an ensemble that has enough characters to be busy.

I will say that don't think this third episode had fire in it like the first two, and I think its because the romances are being setup, and they insist on keeping Sara Paulson and Amanda Peet as they are, both UNBELIEVABLE and 2D flat (just compare to Perry and his partner). What options are there - they surprise by playing against type in fact? They have some quandry that challenges their beliefs? Sorkin should just get on with the main characters.

Finally, I really think the best casting has been the Chairman of the network (forgot the actors name -oops). He just delivers perfectly, with a face that can express five different ways all at once. More material his way would overdo a good thing, but he just does what is needed, and controls the situation as soon as he enters.

[Bumps]

Interesting you should mention an actor switching parts in the same post you mention Deadwood, because that show has done it (more than once, I think) to great effect. Garrett Dillahunt played the guy who shot Wild Bill, and later played Francis Wolcott (Hearst's advance man).

Deadwood and Studio 60 make for an interesting comparison. Both feature incredibly detailed sets and large ensemble casts. But whereas the pacing of Studio 60 is frenetic (I fully expect at some point to see a scene in which all of the actors just shout all of their lines at the same time so that we can move on to the next one faster), Deadwood is almost all planning, triangulating, considering possibilities -- even Bullock and Swearengen, for all their impatience, spend an awful lot of time standing around, or sitting at a table waiting for the Russian guy to read a telegraph. Sorkin can't even make his writer's-block scene from episode 2 last more than 90 seconds (of course he couldn't; the guy's clearly never had writer's block). Matthew Perry pulls his hair a few times, he and Whitford have a little ESP, and the next thing you know -- poof! A mock operetta!

I guess it's pointless to note that Studio 60 has a serious reality problem. First of all, the "funny" stuff isn't funny at all. I don't like Paulson's character, but I'm not ready to blame her. Has DL Hughley been funny yet? Nate Corddry? Corddry, I know, has funny in him.

Second, in what universe does a network exec make national news for anything, much less an old DUI? Since when do throngs of teenagers linger outside wrap parties to get the head writer's autograph?

I think I'm giving up on this show.

[Lisa]

I'm happy to see I'm not the only one who finds Paulson not funny. She is my biggest problem with the show. She may be a fine actress otherwise, but she is not right for this character.

I do believe Peet's character is based on a real woman exec who was that young when she got the job. Part of the problem may be that Peet looks even younger than she really is. Still, I don't think she's a liability to the necessary suspension of disbelief in the same way Paulson is.

Perry is the best reason to watch the show so far. And, yes, it doesn't help that the show within the show does not appear to be funny and no one recognizes this.

For anyone who hasn't watched Sports Night, I highly recommend getting it on DVD. It is excellent and watching this show only makes me want to watch Sports Night again instead.

[Fly on wall]

Actually, there's a more accurate name for a comedy that doesn't have many laughs. Saturday Night Live 2006. Compared to this dreck, the bear joke is hilarious.