Shed no tears for Aaron Sorkin, but let us mourn now famous live-blogging

Shakespeare's Sister passed on the news to me yesterday.  Aaron's Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip isn't on NBC's schedule for the coming fall.

Sad news for me because it means there won't be any more Studio 60 live-blogging. I had a great time with all of you who took part in our Monday night Snark on Sorkin parties.  But it's possibly good news for Sorkin himself because it frees him from a show his heart was apparently never in.

The premise of the show, the backstage drama of putting on a cutting edge sketch comedy show very much like Saturday Night Live, was promising---what would Sorkin do with a Belushi or a Chris Farley or a young Sarah Silverman?  The answer, it turned out, was ignore the fact they ever existed or that any larger than life or difficult and brilliant and creative people had anything to do with putting on a show like Saturday Night Live.

August J. Pollak, some guy with a website, quotes a poster at Television Without Pity who says in a paragraph what a lot of us were observing week in and week out here during the live-blogs.

Sorkin has no clue how Saturday Night Live was and is made. If you read the book Live From New York you can see there IS a story there. It's a fascinating one (and rarely a funny book, BTW), and a page turner: full of egos, battles with the network, fights and love amongst the cast, tragedy, redemption, comeback stories. For God's sake how do you make that boring? If you're Sorkin, you ignore how a weekly sketch show is written and performed so you can take out all the stress and tension that goes into making it. You cast bland and unfunny actors playing bland and unfunny actors, rather than actors playing out of control writers or young comedians straight off the improv stages at major cities getting their first taste of fame. Instead of the reality of a hard-ass creator/overlord who was the inspiration for Dr. Evil overseeing it all, you replace him with two smug, bland head writers who do nothing but mope. Instead of a shark-like network executive you turn a professional woman in a simpering little girl who has nothing better to do than pine about her sex life and take naps on her boyfriend's couch.

That last bit up there refers to the way Sorkin utterly wasted the talents of Amanda Peet, the only one of his two female leads who had a talent for comedy.  I'll get to his other, unfunny, female lead in a bit.

Not only did Sorkin seem to have no interest in the real history of Saturday Night Live, he didn't seem to have any interest in what made it funny either.  In fact, he wasn't at all interested in comedy either as something worth creating, or as an effect of someone's writing or acting, or as entertainment, something audiences might be tuning into his show in hopes of enjoying.

Sorkin didn't appear to care about television in general, period.  Not as a medium for art or communication, at least.  In fact, and this is something that impressed us live-bloggers every week, based on his ludicrously dated pop culture references, it was a good bet that Sorkin had given up watching television when he was in college and never gotten back into the habit.  As Tom Watson observed, Sorkin's idea of a celebrity was anyone who had been a regular guest on the Merv Griffin Show.  I think the only reason Tom tuned into Studio 60 week after week was that he was hoping to catch the inevitable Charro joke.  Other than what he'd watched when he was a kid, Sorkin didn't care what had gone on in television after about 1982, a bad year for him to have unplugged his TV set, something else I'll get to in a minute.

Sorkin was overly-fascinated with network television...as an asset, a cash cow a multi-national corporation could milk to fund billion dollar deals in Asia (and thank God I'll never have to hear Ed Asner growl the word "Macao" again, except in my nightmares) which gave him an excuse to treat us to long lectures cribbed from a college-level intro course in macroeconomics.  But the only fact about television that truly excited him was that it was the business that treated the world to that great literary and creative genius, Aaron Sorkin.

Sorkin loved writing about Sorkin.  Studio 60 was his autobiography.  The first half-dozen or so episodes had as their main theme what a brilliant writer Aaron Sorkin was and how badly television needed his brilliance to save it from itself.

The other main theme, the one that continued through all the episodes, unfortunately, was also autobiographical, and that was how foolish Sorkin's former girlfriend, Kristin Chenoweth, had been to give him up.

After the early critical lambasting the show took, most of it pointing out that Sorkin had created a show about comedy that wasn't funny, he began to describe Studio 60 as a romantic comedy.

The problem here was similar to the problem he was having with comedy.  His comedy wasn't funny and his romance wasn't romantic.

Week after week, the romantic leads, Matthew Perry and Sarah Paulson, struggled mightily to convince us that they were passionately in love with each other and week after week they barely managed to convey the sense that they liked each other enough that each one was glad the other one wasn't dead.

And now, here I am at last, at the points I promised to get to, Sorkin's unfunny leading lady and the importance 1982 should have played in the writing of Studio 60.

A big obstacle to Sorkin's making his romantic comedy romantic and funny was that Sarah Paulson was neither romantic nor funny.  This wasn't entirely her fault.  She was badly cast.  Good as she may have been in other things (and she had her fans among the live-bloggers here who remember her as Deadwood's proto-dominatrix, the duplicitous and sexually manipulative nanny, Miss Isringhausen), Paulson didn't have it in her to play the kind of character Sorkin needed his leading lady to be.

And that leading lady wasn't Kristin Chenoweth, although Paulson couldn't approximate her or her talents either.  Chenoweth is a Broadway musical star.  What Studio 60 needed, and what Matthew Perry's character would have fallen in love with, was a brilliant comedic actress like...

Shelley Long.

Long, remember, came out of Chicago's Second City.  If her career had taken a different turn, she could have wound up where a lot of Second City alums landed, on Saturday Night Live, where she'd have been terrific,  if the writers at the time happened to know how to use her talents (No guarantee of that.  See below.), or she could have wound up her generation's version of Elaine May.  I don't know if she'd have even needed her own generation's version of Mike Nichols.

What's more, Long's real life backstage paralleled her character's life on stage. Diane Chambers and Shelley Long had a lot in common, including the fact that when they both left Cheers, they left behind a lot of very mixed feelings.

Long occupied a place on the Cheers set very much like the place Paulson's character, Harriet Hayes, was supposed to occupy on the set of Studio 60.  Long was a brilliant comic actress, the star of her show---it took a little while for Ted Danson to come into his own and for the first two seasons, Long was carrying him.  Danson knew it, and didn't mind it, and went along with it, and learned from her.  But that's another post.  Long was an audience's favorite and an object of erotic fantasy as well as a great talent.  She was also, onstage and off, one of the gang yet not one of the gang.

Long was often temperamentally at odds with her castmates and with Cheers' writers and producers.  In her case the temperamental differences stemmed from Long's artistic perfectionism, while in Harriet's case the differences were supposed to be caused by Harriet's religious views, which Sorkin, true to form, treated as an excuse to lecture his audience and not as a part of Harriet's emotional make-up.

Now, the reason 1982 is important for Sorkin is that it's the year Cheers premiered.

It was also the year another romantic comedy about a pair of Can't Live With You/Can't Live Without You lovers went on the air, Remington Steele.

Another hit show in this vein, Moonlighting, premiered in 1985.  And Northern Exposure appeared in 1990.

From all their influences showed up in his writing for Matt and Harriet, Sorkin might as well have not watched a single episode of any of them, and like I said, based on his pop culture references, he very well may not have.

At any rate, the very first lesson Sorkin could have and should have learned from Cheers and the rest is that casting matters above all.  Writing is secondary.

I'm guessing he cast Matthew Perry first, so he had it somewhat easier than the creators of Cheers had it, because they had to find both their romantic leads.  Sorkin just needed someone who could spark off of Perry.

Once you have two leads who can start a fire together, then you need to give them interesting things to say to each other.

But this puts the formula exactly backwards in the Sorkin view of the universe where writing, particularly writing by Aaron Sorkin, is the be-all and end-all.

Sorkin could never let go of the idea that he could write Harriet and Matt into sexual combustibility.  In fact, he seemed to believe that the only reason we cared about their romance was all the great Sorkinisms they would spout at each other in their verbal foreplay.

This actually applies to all of Sorkin's characters on Studio 60 and the whole cast.  Sorkin was only interested in his actors and characters as mediums for channeling the voice of Aaron Sorkin.  Week after week the only reason any given character had to speak was that he or she needed to tell us what Aaron Sorkin was thinking or that he or she needed to prompt another character into telling us what Aaron Sorkin was thinking.

Instead of creating an entire television series, maybe Sorkin should have just started a blog.

Changing the channel:

Bill Nothstine sent me word last week that May 7 was the 20th anniversary of Shelley Long's last episode of Cheers.

And up above where I speculated about how Shelley Long would have fared on Saturday Night Live and said it would have depended on whether or not the writers knew how to use her, I was thinking of Julia Louis-Dreyfus who was so wasted on SNL that I never suspected she had a tenth of the comic ability she showed on Seinfeld.

But when she was on SNL only one of the writers had an inkling of what she was capable of.  Unfortunately, that writer was kind of an odd man out on the writing staff.  The producer at the time, Dick Ebersol, never got any of his jokes or saw anything remotely humorous in any of his ideas.  He didn't last with the show long.

But one day he got a chance to create his own show and he remembered Julia and brought her aboard.

This guy.

Soon to be cross-posted over at newcritics, but not today because there's a whole of good new stuff by others up right now for your viewing pleasure.

Comments

[MBunge]

One of the things Sorkin fell victim to is believing that there was an audience just dying for him to do a new show, rather than him needing to put on a show that would satisfy an audience just looking for entertainment. The same thing happened with Joss Whedon and FIREFLY. It's as though instead of thinking of themselves as writers or entertainers, the two men thought of themselves as an established product that America was just demanding to have.

By the way, someone please get Kristin Chenoweth back on TV. She should be doing more than guesting on UGLY BETTY this week.

Mike

[Raymondo Magnifico]

You hit many nails on many heads, but Sorkin showed himself quite capable of handling the can't live with/without you dynamic on "Sports Night," the show that made me a fan. "Studio 60" fixed that. Mostly.

[Melissa McEwan]

But when she was on SNL only one of the writers had an inkling of what she was capable of.

There might have been one other SNL writer (and performer) who had some idea. ;-)

Great post, Mannion.

[Jaquandor]

You can still do some final Studio 60 liveblogging, as I've read that the remaining existing episodes will be aired in the ER timeslot as soon as the season's done for that show.

[Kevin Wolf]

I'm incapable of missing a show I never saw, but I do think another live blogging "victim" could be found...

[harry near indy]

damn, lance. still torching for shelley long. what else is new?

[Dan Coyle]

Jack Rudolph, Action Executive will live on... in our hearts and minds.

I do hope Weber is cast as the next villain in Spider-Man 4.

[Ralph Hitchens]

That was a long, thoughtful critique and everything you said was true. Still, bad Sorkin is better -- in a certain slant of light -- than most other shows. I watched a couple of episodes of (just renewed) 30 Rock and was bored when it settled straight into the conventional sitcom groove. Lately, my heart leapt when I read somewhere recently that Studio 60 would be back (for a few episodes, at least) on May 23rd. But maybe I was dreaming.

[Mike Schilling]

I still recall the first time I ever saw Ms. Louis-Dreyfus. It was an SNL skit where she was doing a sort of Valley Girl review of "Gone With the Wind" ("What is wrong with you, Scarlett? Ashley Wilkes is a dog! Rhett is gorgeous! Do whatever he wants!")

Two things stood out. First, she's gorgeous. Second, she's hilarious.

[Ken Houghton]

What Jaquandor Said. There are five more episodes, starting, I believe, The Day after Sweeps End.

Working title for the much-anticipated livebloggings: "Nothing is forgotten or Forgiven/When it's your Last Time Around," Parts I-V.

[Anita]

great post lance mannion.

shelley long. absolutely. she carried ted danson -- so true (for me, in hindsight, of course .. thanks for the reminder).

i haven't been visiting the blogs lately, maybe you've commented (maybe not) ... but what are you thinking about this last season of the soprano's? it's very unfortunate in my opinion. a lost opportunity to go out with a bang. why so bad?

[Greg]

One of the things that pissed me off the most about Studio 60 was how contemptuous it was of TV during a time when TV is better than it's ever been. In fact, this is a pivotal moment in the history of television, when the economic and creative trends are converging to create a brand new medium: the long-form visual narrative. Cable has already figured out the form that works there, and shows like Deadwood, The Sopranos, Battlestar Galactica and especially The Wire have mastered it (btw, I believe The Wire is to television as Birth of a Nation or Citizen Kane are to film). Even broadcast TV is beginning to work out the kinks with shows like Lost, Veronica Mars, Heroes, and Friday Night Lights.

Aaron Sorkin was given a tremendous gift with Studio 60. A star-studded cast, a network willing to commit to a full-season and heavy promotion, and complete creative control, and he completely blows it on a giant ego-trip. Why would someone so obviously contemptuous of TV and the people who watch it want to make a TV show in the first place, let alone a TV show about a TV show?

[travy]

one day when the history of blogging is written, we will look back on these important, world changing moments and say, "i was there." josh marshall's important work to preserve social security, firedoglake's unmatched coverage and analysis of plamegate, the netroots takeover of progressive politics and lance mannion's unmissable live blogging of studio 60 will live forever in the pantheons of bloggy greatness.

lance, your work has made the world a better place. studio 60 live blogging will be missed but never forgotten...

[Erin]

Dear Mike, commenter #1:

Kristin Chenoweth will be back on TV this fall in a new ABC show called Pushing Daises. It will air Wednesdays at 8:00 pm.

YAY for no more Sorkin!

[Lance]

travy,

Thank you very much, but this just underscores what Eric Boehlert was saying. The Washington Post still won't give me the credit I deserve because I'm a liberal blogger.

Well, ok, maybe Eric didn't mention me by name, but I'm sure that was just an oversight and he meant to include me along with Josh Marshall and the rest.

[Ken Houghton]

Chenoweth will be Pushing Daisies and Studio 60 will be Pushing Up Daisies.

I'll volunteer to live-blog the third show (7 June, I think) if others take 24 and 31 May. (and, no, I haven't checked IMDB for descriptions yet--which I may well regret).

[Jennifer]

I think it's only fitting that Lance himself do the live-blogging for the final show... no frolicking in the comments section while someone else drives the bus off the cliff. :)

[Jim Tourtelott]

Sorkin has one real talent, which he only intermittently recognizes. He can write dialogue that approximates the way smart and talented people like to imagine that they talk--though even smart and talented people, in the United States anyway, only can utter witty and charming sentences occasionally. (I still have a childish belief that Brits educated at Oxbridge can construct whole paragraphs as they speak them. I'm sure it's mere snobbery, but I can't get over it.)

Unhappily, Sorkin doesn't understand that being the Noel Coward or Cole Porter of late 20th and early 21st Century American television ought to be more than enough for any writer. Mannered dialogue can't be Important unless it has Something to Say. But all that Sorkin has to Say is the same sort of thing that every reasonably educated American liberal already agrees with, which is why The American President, for instance, is so god-awful, particularly Douglas's final speech.

Sorkin could get away with this ponderous nonsense on The West Wing partly thanks to a cast that did miraculously gel, but also because a significant part of his audience really, really needed an hour's worth of fantasy about what living in the world where Florida wasn't stolen would be like. He could not get away with it on Studio 60 largely because that cast, though immensely talented, did not come together, and because whatever there is to Say in standard liberal about television was already said long ago either in A Face in the Crowd or in Network. (In fact, the acknowledged Paddy Chayefsky homage cum rip-off that opened the series may have told us everything we needed to know about what was going to happen.)

Only once in his writing career has Sorkin played to his strength and minimized his tendency to Say Things (or at least had the sense to let one of the most sly comic performers of the last thirty years, Robert Guillaume, undercut them when they Got Said.) That was on Sports Night, the only Aaron Sorkin project anybody ever wanted more of.

[ed]

Sorkin sucks. He's always sucked. His dialog is stilted and annoying and every character speaks in that manner.

Big problem with Studio 60's casting was putting Perry and Whitford together. It's kind of hard (for me anyway) to tell them apart.

[Victoria]

Always late to this party, that’s me. I will miss live-blogging Studio 60, which I found engaging and fun, in no small measure due to LM’s combination of commentary and artful performance.

But, Lance, Lance, Lance… You force me to go out arguing, even though it seems silly in a space where the snark meme has become rooted in the notion that “Sorkin sucks.”

Yes, the series never hit its creative stride, but I agree with Ralph and virtually every actor who ever worked with Sorkin: “bad Sorkin is better -- in a certain slant of light -- than most other shows.”

I also think it’s worth at least considering Amanda Peet “on the train wreck of “Studio 60”: “It could have been an unknown writer-director, unknown cast, and we would have had a chance to find our groove and become a hit show, but that’s not what happened.”

As someone who has made a certain amount of my living as a script doctor for network projects, here’s my experience of script development: I get a script that does not in any way work. That’s why they hired me, but they can’t explain to me why it doesn’t work. Instead, they ask me to tell them why and if what I say sounds plausible, they hand me some money and say, “Yeah. Do that, what you just said.” After I hand in my first draft, I go to a script conference in which as many as six or seven “producers” show up with copies of my draft, all thick at one corner with dog ears on the pages for which they have notes. Over the course of three or more grueling hours, we go through the script page by page by page by page as these six+ people - who read in two hours what I spent six weeks laboring over - give me wildly contradictory notes (something they rarely notice by the way). I return to my hotel room with a throbbing headache. The aspirin I packed doesn’t begin to touch what is fast growing into a migraine, but as I wait in vain for relief I stare catatonically into space and eat everything in the complimentary fruit basket. Then I throw up what I just ate…finally fall into a deep sleep with the covers over my head… wake up around three in the morning and go spelunking for the real notes beneath the expressed notes, which Walter Murch rightly points out are usually the equivalent of deferred pain. My job is to figure out “deferred from where” and hope to god some workable direction coalesces. I might as well be working with a divining rod.

I have the same sense of deferred pain as I review the litany of complaints about Studio 60: (1) “cast bland and unfunny actors playing bland and unfunny actors” – D.L. Hughley, bland and unfunny? In what universe? Nate Corddry, unfunny? Did you see him on The Daily Show? He’s absolutely fearless in his funny. (2)(Jordan) “has nothing better to do than pine about her sex life and take naps on her boyfriend’s couch” – When did she pine about her sex life? And once she napped on a couch late at night. (3) Speaking of contradictory, he had “no clue how SNL was made” even though he could have read it in a book; on the other, he was lifting straight from Jay Mohr’s book. (4) The beef about Matt Albie being a too-brilliant writer as a reflection of Sorkin’s ego – Sorkin should write a lead character brought in to save a show who is not a good writer? Gee, I really want to tune in for that. And by the way, Albie was failing as a writer in at least three episodes.

Was I off at a meditation retreat when Sorkin did the terrible thing that was in all the papers that makes people hostile to him?

I have no idea what all went into keeping Studio 60 from hitting its stride. I believe Sorkin had a movie (Charlie Wilson’s War) shooting abroad and a new play premiering at La Jolla all at the same time, so maybe he was understandably distracted by a combination of projects coming together in a scheduling nightmare that was out of his control. Perhaps Amanda Peet’s unexpected pregnancy shifted the story development in ways that blew holes in things he had planned and cost some momentum. Who knows?

For me, the ongoing frustration was a sense that interesting potentials hovered but never quite landed. One example: the idea that Harriet could have been Matt’s muse and that that got confused with love. Luke suggests the dynamic: “She would be so grateful for the part I wrote that it would feel almost like love.” I think it would be interesting to have two characters who have to navigate such a profound creative bond and the tension that creates in their other relationships… say, for instance, as Matt starts to date the glorious sex discrimination attorney. It would beat the heck out of the done-to-death “Can’t Live With You/Can’t Live Without You.”

I’ll miss Studio 60 because I take this world seriously and these days that can burn a person out, and sometimes it’s a comfort to spend a diverting, well-played hour with characters who aren’t criminals, or emergency room doctors, or street thugs, or dumb-ass mafia types. Hold the adrenaline. A little style + rhythm is not a bad thing.

[ar]

I couldn't disagree more with all of you. I am glad we have gotten to see Studio 60, and I am very disappointed that there are so many people that can't recognize good television.

[Andy Moran]

I know it's a little after the fact to be posting this now, but now is when I ran across it. In regard to Sorkin attempting to make Chenoweth seem foolish for leaving him, it seems unlikely to me. Sokrin made himself look like a drugged and obsessed ex boyfriend. He seemed more faithful to what he believed to be the truth to me. After all, Chenoweth did remark that much of what was on the show was verbatim to had it had recurred in reality.