Studio 60 on the sunset strip redux

The following has been on my mind for quite a while. I know that others have tackled the subject better than I have and in a much more timely manner but sometimes things just need to be said. Even if they are almost a year too late.

The other day I noticed that Studio 60 on the sunset strip, Aaron Sorkin's follow up to The West Wing is out on dvd. Trawling the dvd section at Border's I noticed a clerk come up followed by an older man she was assisting. She led him right to the box set of Studio 60. He commented that it was his wife's favorite show. In one fell moment it had been shown to me that not only was the greatest train wreck of the previous t.v. season not being given a well earned burial on the bottom of the local Hollywood landfill, it actually had fans. Inconceivable.

For a show that had all the right elements for a being a big hit Studio 60 is an intriguing failure. Sorkin took Bradley Whitford from West Wing and Mathew Perry from Friends, both seasoned professionals and put them at the center of his new drama. He filled out the rest of the cast with similar high quality performers. The dialog would be his own highly crafted fast paced brew that had served him well in the past. As a subject he chose the medium of television itself and the late night variety show in the Saturday Night Live tradition in particular. This was probably his first mis-step.

The world of television, even behind the scenes television really has no bearing on the average persons life. Its fun to watch the trials and tribulations of the collision between the creative types and their corporate overlords. But, really, it does not have any effect on the quality of the bread on my t.v. tray. This goes right to the heart of why this show just did not work. In The West Wing even if the issues weren't real there was the conceit that this was high stakes in the highest office of the land of the most powerful nation on earth. When Sorkin's Walk and Talk™ dialogs took place in this setting political discussions were natural and expected. On Studio 60 they were just weird. (John Goodman reprises his performance as the conservative with the heart of gold that he did on West Wing in a two episode shaggy dog story with the punchline that one of the characters has a brother who's a soldier in Iraq.)

Studio 60 also seemed to exist in a world that had never seen the Dick Van Dyke show since it was assumed that Mathew Perry's character could write an entire sketch comedy each week by himself. Granted Sorkin was able to write much of West Wing himself but comedy with its strange requirement that it be actually funny usually is created by a group that can throw things off of each other. This lack of knowledge about the workings of comedy writing shows whenever a sketch from the show is performed as these are usually embarrassing to watch and painfully unfunny. It can't be an accident that on one show a character's mid-western parents are shown to have never heard of Abbott and Costello's Who's On First routine. Its a lot easier to take stuff like this if you pretend that Sorkin was writing a SciFi drama about a world that had only just discovered comedy... ok not really but it would explain a lot.