Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is, never mind its awkward, too-long title, a good show that frustrates because it ought to be better. There’s the pedigree, for one thing: the Aaron Sorkin-Thomas Schlamme pairing that gave us Sports Night and West Wing. Now this show clearly owes more to Sports Night than it does to West Wing, focusing as it does on the backstage shenanigans of a sketch-comedy show; but the feel of it all is more like West Wing, and that’s a problem right there. I find myself wondering whether maybe Studio 60 should have been a half-hour program, like Sports Night was. It would force Sorkin to write tighter and leaner, and there would be less of a tendency to try and fill time with storylines like the one last night, where the studio president (Amanda Peet’s character) walked into a dressing room and declared “I don’t have any friends.”
(For the record, I think Sorkin has written himself into a corner with that character: a studio president simply would not spend that much time with the people from any one show, she just doesn’t have that kind of time. People come to her, not the other way around, otherwise she undercuts her power and fritters away her energy--not to mention becoming so attached to the creators that she might not be able to judge their work dispassionately. So increasingly, Sorkin is going to have invent excuses for her to be there if Jordan McDeere is to be anything more than a recurring character; but if last night’s episode is any indication, that situation is already getting desperate.)
Obviously, the quality of the sketches-within-a-show is the biggest problem. I finally realized: Sorkin simply doesn’t have the skill set required to write sketch comedy. What he writes is often very funny, but it’s always situational and character-driven; sketch comedy is the opposite, it’s concept-driven. A good sketch takes a crazy idea and wrings it dry, preferably in less than three minutes. There’s no time for character development, no time to set up where people are and why they’re there. “Two goofballs in their basement doing a cable-access show” is about as complicated as you can get in a sketch; even better if you’ve got something extremely high-concept, like “Julia Child cuts her hand and can’t stop the bleeding.” But high-concept has never been Sorkin’s strength, and that’s fine--except when he creates a show that depends on it. I’ve read that he brought on Mark McKinney, from Kids in the Hall, to help with the sketches, but that was the wrong choice: McKinney himself readily admits that he likes to write more character-driven, actor-y comedy, so all Sorkin has accomplished is to bring on someone who approaches comedy like he does. He needs to buckle down and steal someone from the real SNL, that’s really all there is to it--then get out of that guy’s way and let him write sketches.
But with the exception of the Amanda Peet problem, last night’s episode was the first one all season that I’ve really liked. I think Sorkin may have stumbled at last into what the show is about, its reason for being: why is comedy important? On the one hand, there was Simon (D.L. Hughley), desperate to rescue people from the same kinds of dire circumstances he grew up in, dragging Matt (Matthew Perry) to a comedy club to see a black comic, only to find that the comic was regurgitating the same sort of self-hating stereotypes that perpetuate narrow racial stereotypes. On the other hand, there was Nate Corddry’s character, showing his sheltered parents around the studio when clearly they don’t share any of the same references he does, and don’t revere anything that he reveres. They’ve never even heard of “Who’s on First,” perhaps the most famous sketch of all time. I’ve seen a lot of people online complaining that this storyline seemed far-fetched to them, but believe me, I’ve had just that conversation many times, both with family and friends. Now granted, it’s usually someone who hasn’t heard of, say, John Gielgud, but the principle is the same: someone whose work seems like bedrock to me is almost unknown in our fast-moving culture: Gielgud has been dead for years now, and if he hadn’t done Arthur, he would probably be almost entirely forgotten except for high-culture aesthetes like me. But in the context of the scene and the show, it was the disconnect itself that mattered: Nate Corddry loves what he does, but his father shuts him up cold by firing back that his younger brother is fighting in Afghanistan. And then on the third hand, there was the completely welcome appearance of Eli Wallach, playing a writer on a Studio 60-like show from the 1950s who got blacklisted after writing only one sketch--a clear reminder that not so long ago, comedy was considered so subversive that the government got people blackballed for it.
This, I think, is what the show wants to be about. And certainly Sorkin’s been talking around the question since the first episode, beginning with the Judd Hirsch Network-style tirade on the struggle between art and commerce in which “commerce is kicking art’s ass.” But here’s where his problems with writing sketch comedy are actively interfering with his ability to tell the story he wants to tell: the value of comedy, which here stands in for the value of art, should speak for itself. We shouldn’t need a character to tell us why comedy is important, we should be able to watch something carefully crafted that demonstrates exactly why it matters.
Personally, I think stories are an essential need for mankind; on the Maslow hierarchy of needs they may come behind food and shelter and sex, but not far behind at all; personally, I’d put our need for stories fourth on that list. And Sorkin could certainly have a character actually say something like that in an episode, but then he’s just lecturing us, he’s just writing an essay; he needs to find a way to show us, and since his sketches aren’t very good, the crucial part of the puzzle isn’t working.
That’s a great big howling problem, and that, I submit, is why so many people are finding this show unsatisfying.
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