walkingshadow | thanks for letting me be a part of the B-team!

so far i have been incredibly ambivalent about studio 60. i've seen widely varied reactions across the flist and my own impressions have been up and down, reflecting the unevenness of the show itself. so, because i have no one to talk about this stuff with, i hash it all out for myself here. AT GREAT LENGTH. you're welcome!

i haven't seen this week's episode yet (it's downloaded but unplayed) so please don't spoil me for that.

likes:

the final scene in the pilot. just the two of them together, double-checking with each other—the lighting, the camera circling and circling, under pressure and the way it was deployed, and we live here now. it was beautiful and brilliant and it psyched me for the series.

danny. he's my favorite, for serious. matt gets the best lines, but everything that comes near bradley whitford he hits out of the park. plus: READING GLASSES on his FOREHEAD. askdjflsjf.

on second thought, maybe jack's my favorite. everything he says and does is 100% consistent and understandable, and he's working it really well. it's one of those cases where you realize he's supposed to be The Bad Guy, but really he's just doing his job and making perfect sense. plus, the climate of the show is so hostile to the network and devoted to jordan and the show that jack is almost the sympathetic figure; you know there's no way he's going to come out on top.

[this space intentionally left blank.] it's on probation, but i'm pulling for it.

dislikes:

hey, you want to check out this show? they're talking about how much they hate the people who watch it. could you—could you be a little more snobbish? maybe dial it up to eleven? could you mispronounce "commedia dell'arte" one more time and look down your nose at your viewers just a little bit longer? because that totally makes me want to tune in every week: when you insult me for not getting your jokes. oh, wait, i do get your jokes—does that mean i can stay? you know, one of the reasons i liked both sports night and the west wing was because they were smart, because they used big words and made obscure references and treated their audiences like human beings and adults. i'm one of those people who think that a) there is an audience for that sort of thing, and b) raising the bar makes people rise to the occasion. but you can't have it both ways. you can't publicize your love-hate relationship with the masses who don't appreciate your genius but whose sheer numbers you need to stay on the air; you can't make erudite jokes and then turn around sneer at the people who didn't get them. i mean, you *can*—but who's going to stick around for that? who wants to watch that?

won't somebody think of the dead and dying frogs? this is probably the biggest, most perplexing problem with the whole damn show: it's not funny. it's not funny. the first couple of episodes had some good lines, and i *liked* the gilbert & sullivan routine, that was clever and well-done; but it's not funny. there are some good lines, some snatches of patter, but i laugh very infrequently, and i'm always surprised when i do—matt perry makes me laugh most often, and i'm on the record as always having been a total fan of his delivery; see: "okay, well, your teeth are pretty big," which cracked me up—also the bat through the window, that was AWESOME. but generally the pace drags and some scenes go on FOREVER. the thing with the boot? they weren't wrong: that was laaaame. it was so lame i couldn't believe a) he suggested it, b) matt followed through with it, or c) it took him so long to figure out HOW LAME IT WAS. they spent SIX MINUTES on THE BOOT. p.s., hanging a lantern on your lameness does not actually mitigate the lameness; it only underlines and highlights it and makes me wonder why, if you knew how lame it was, you put it in there in the first place.

and the show within the show is even less funny. it's negatively funny. it's the ANTI-FUNNY. this is a confluence of two things—well, many things, but first is the fact that talking about comedy is unnatural and tends to be dead boring (see: e. b. white); and secondly, it feels like sorkin et al. are so confident that everything they write is pure comedic gold, they forgot they actually have to write the comedy, and have skipped straight to congratulating themselves on how fucking hilarious they are. which they AREN'T. dear writers: how about, instead of trying to convince us that things that aren't funny are, in fact, funny? you just write funny things. see how that goes for a while. maybe steal some material from those old sports night DVDs, that's always worked in the past.

for the record and in the interests of full disclosure: i'm not a fan of SNL, i think 90% of the sketches are terrible, so perhaps i'm never going to like studio 60 either; but the skits are BORING. they're so fucking boring i feel like an idiot for sitting and watching them, and i feel insulted when the other characters laugh at their own flat jokes. it feels forced, like there are stage directions in the script—ALL LAUGH—and signs blinking on and off on set. so you can't make it funny by telling me it's funny, and you can't demonstrate it either, it falls outside of the show/tell domain; i have to experience it directly, personally, you have to deliver the line and have faith that i'll see the humor in it, and am i MISSING SOMETHING here? millions of people think SNL is brilliant, so i'm obviously missing something, but seriously: was the game show funny, were people rolling in the aisles? i have yet to find A SINGLE JOKE they've told on air to be even amusing, let alone laughing-my-ass-off hilarious. and that might make this the wankiest part of all, because it's a closed loop: they write their own jokes, they tell their own jokes to each other, and they laugh at them; i can't break in at any point in the process.

perfect case in point was the news monologue around which last week's episode ("the west coast delay") revolved. it sounded nine years old. it wasn't fresh, it wasn't funny, it didn't make me laugh any one of the eight times we heard it, so what am i supposed to think when this is their comedy standard?

the crackpots, i.e. these women. watching his female characters, watching harriet and jordan, i just get the feeling that aaron sorkin has never *met* a woman, that he's never worked with any women on equal terms or dated anyone who didn't run roughshod over him. i don't want to get all FREUDIAN on him, but it's like somebody—or a bunch of somebodies—left an impression that was so traumatic and so lasting that it's never been unseated, and he's based every female character he's ever written on that same template.

throughadoor said a lot of things on this subject that i never even thought of, but that are absolutely true; one thing she said is, "[sorkin] also seems to fundamentally believe that women are crazy, and that men are usually what made them that way"; and i think that's interesting, but i think it's even more significant that it goes the other way: women make men crazy. their relationships are always fraught and high-maintenance; men can't ever just be in love and also doing their job, it always makes them insane. basically, men do serious work and women distract them from it, which is horribly nineteenth-century. and on the one hand, i suppose that's a very classically romantic take on love, very courtly, with the pining and the collected pretentious works of august strindberg, but a) it's also very JUNIOR HIGH—be adults; be professionals^*—and b) it posits a fundamentally antagonistic relationship between men and women, which explains in part sorkin's passionate male friendships, whether you see them as slashy or not: a completely male realm for his characters to retreat into, where they can be themselves and at peace without constantly being nagged or off-balance.
1. harriet. i don't like the actress—her mouth, her voice, her delivery—and i loathe her character. first of all, there's a showing vs. telling problem: i don't think she's amazingly talented. i've been told at least once in every episode so far that she's amazingly talented, but i don't see it. her bear joke—when asked for a comment, the bear said, "rawrrrr!"— was a) as old as the practice of journalistic interviews itself, and b) PAINFULLY UNFUNNY. she did it twice, it was painfully unfunny twice, and twice we were explicitly assured that she would make it work in the show, because she's so amazingly talented. this, by the way, goes for the rest of the big three: nate corddry is adorable, but on the show he hasn't made it beyond "neurotic skinny white boy" for me; and d.l. hughley is gorgeous and hilarious—until he gets "on camera" on the show, and then it's all cardboard delivery and overenunciation.
  
  . . . but i digress! harriet! i've never had quite the problem with sorkin women as everyone else did, because while, yes, they were all high-maintenance, emotional, capricious, and stupid when it came to relationships, i liked almost all of them, because they also happened to be awesome—strong, funny, competent, intelligent (see: dana, natalie, CJ CREGG omg); but harriet is all of the bad and none of the good. she's a comedic actress that i haven't found to be particularly good at her job, let alone worthy of her reputation; she's a fundamentalist christian (which i'm just not going to be able to get behind without some serious effort at selling it, and i've yet to see any put forth) in sorkin's most bizarre and least heartfelt characterization yet; she called her ex-boyfriend mean for dating someone after they broke up. "that's just mean!" that was the first point at which i almost wrote off the entire show.
2. jordan. this is almost 100% amanda peet, who as far as i can tell has a) one facial expression: blank, and b) one vocal inflection: monotone. SHE IS BORING. plus she has no personality, she's written as stupid (how did they get your expunged police record? give me a fucking break), and, um. i don't like amanda peet. she's going to be given a romantic storyline with danny one day, and i'm going to have the same obstacle to overcome as i do with matt and harriet right now, i.e. constantly asking myself what the hell he sees in her.
* it drives me crazy that matt can't write when harriet's around—or even when she isn't—and the whole thing has the potential to be a problem for the show, because matt is a PROFESSIONAL WRITER. likewise, i couldn't believe that danny had the nerve to take her to task for kissing her own boyfriend in her own dressing room—and don't even get me started on the way she hung her head in acknowledgment—because matt fell to pieces over it. matt can SUCK IT UP or work somewhere else. and you can tell me this is realistic—and the same goes for comedians who are assholes or scientists who are prima donnas—but i have zero patience for this shit in real life too. you're not twelve: you suck it up, or you bow out graciously.

the meta. i know, right? but i like meta when it's a person or a group of people making fun of themselves and their genre—it's self-deprecating, it's clever, it's giving the audience a peek behind the curtain, and it's funny; when you write a show about yourself consisting of all the characters congratulating you on how great you are, that's maturbatory.

if the show isn't funny at the textual level, at the super-text level, it has zero sense of humor. it's snide and it's petulant and it's vicious, and it's nice for aaron sorkin that he has the clout and the cash to create an entire primetime network television series redressing his failures, his addictions, and his slights—real and perceived—at the hands of the industry and his audience, but the rest of us just go to THERAPY. and you know, if this *were* aaron sorkin's therapy session, that might be awesome, that might even work. but it's not him working through everything, it's him getting back at everyone through a thin curtain of barely-fictional mouthpieces, where he can simultaneously give his own version of events and a rebuttal to them.

and this makes me wonder how much of a factor previous exposure to aaron sorkin is. i'm not bitter about sports night or the west wing; they were great shows, they a) got canceled and b) went downhill, aaron sorkin moved on, whatever. i'll always have the DVDs. he's not my ex-boyfriend who burned me before and will burn me again, i'm not leery of giving my heart away; before i met fandom i never knew who directors or writers or producers were anyway, and in the absence of fandom i still never would. it's not personal for me. so i thought i came to studio 60 neutral-to-positive: i wanted it to succeed, it would be nice to have another quality show to fall in love with, even if i didn't have all my hopes and dreams riding on it. but still, i know about everything that came before; what about people on the other side? people who never watched SN or TWW, or who saw them but never much cared for them? they're as close to tabula rasa as you can get (taking into account the collective unconscious, which i think goes quadruple for anyone involved in online fandom). if you don't know that this is aaron sorkin's life and career, if you don't have the other shows to compare this one to—not just in terms of quality or laughs-per-episode, but in terms of tone, theme, attitude—does it come across as bitter? if you didn't know about his disastrous run-in with bloggers and the way he lashed back onscreen, does that scene in "the cold open" mean anything to you, let alone anything particularly negative? hey, maybe it's just me! i know long-time sorkin fans who adore studio 60, and i know people who never liked him who still don't like him; and vice-versa, and vice-versa.

i'm thinking about it especially because gjstruthseeker emailed me asking why people don't like the show (she loves it), saying, "the issue might be that Sorkin did better when he was high, but man, if that's true, I don't know how anyone watched The West Wing without spontaneously combusting." and, well, a) i frequently did spontaneously combust when i watched the west wing, at least that's what it felt like: i danced around the house during commercial breaks. i was manic on wednesdays in anticipation and on thursdays with squee. i watched each episode over and over, i laughed until i was sick, and i loved every single fucking character. i walked around delirious, saying, "this is the best show on television." and b) i honestly don't think studio 60 is a terrifically good show, not yet, not right now; and maybe even though i want to say that i'm not comparing studio 60 to what went before it, maybe i am; maybe i can't help it. maybe i just know you, aaron sorkin, and hey, fuck you too.

in fact, fuck you and the matching ten-piece set of baggage you flew in with. historically, sorkin shows are about idealists. see: the american president; see: sports night episodes "the hungry and the hunted," "mary pat shelby," "the six southern gentlemen of tennessee," et al.; see: the west wing's "a proportional response," "mr. willis of ohio," "the short list"—hell, all you really have to see is "in the shadow of two gunmen" because it comes out and tells us that the bartlet administration is made up entirely of idealists: those were everyone's defining moments in that episode, the reasons they didn't make it in their current jobs, and the reason they found a place in the bartlet campaign, i.e. they're good people who do the right thing even when it's suicidal for their show, their careers, or politics in general. they're the good guys, they're the underdogs, and they believe in what they're doing; they love what they're doing.

i have no idea what studio 60 is about. gjstruthseeker said she loved the show because (among many other reasons) "most of all . . . the good guys win," but i honestly haven't seen any evidence of that. who are the good guys? maybe we don't know yet. so far, people have been a) punished for idealism, and b) rewarded for talent when it was convenient. ricky and ron stood by their room, that was nice, i guess. personally, i think even ricky and ron should be worried if their writers are resorting to plagiarism just to win the respect of matt albie, because i can't think of anything more likely to LOSE IT.

are matt and danny the good guys? i think they're supposed to be, but our leads, the core of the show, they're too bitter to be the good guys right now. they've been burned too badly, they've been at it too long, and they're too pissed off to bother trying. and i don't like them very much for it, because all they have right now is anger, elitism, and a world of two—matt and danny contra mundum.^** because principles aren't enough; you also need kindness—a lesson matt learned from ricky and ron last week—and a sense of wonder, of humility, and maybe this will be the theme of the show, maybe it will be about getting that idealism back, matt and danny finding home again, belonging to a team and a family. studio 60 is supposed to be some kind of eden and this is supposed to be its renaissance, and it's going to heal all the wounds of time and the world that has beaten them down. and that story i think i could get behind. assuming they can just SHUT UP and tell it.

** matt and danny are so fucking weird about each other you're all just taking it as read, right? right.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I'd switch some of your early dislikes with your likes (I really hate Jack - he makes my skin crawl, while I'm fairly positive about Harriet, but then I loved the actress in Down With Love, so preconceptions), but you are SPOT ON about the meta and the baggage. I came to the show negative to dubious, but I was willing to give it a chance, and all I can see are AARON SORKIN'S ISSUES shouting at me and overwhelming the characters and the situations and making every other episode into something where I want to break my TV through half the scenes. Matt is the main thing drawing me back - I'm really liking Perry in this role, but each week I vacillate back and forth on whether or not I'll watch the next one. If the dropping ratings don't pull it from the air before I have to make a choice, I suspect I'll be gone for good very soon. There are too many other shows I'm enjoying without reservations. I don't need the aggravation.

i can see what you mean about jack, and the reaction to harriet has been generally positive, so maybe that's just me. but—the baggage! and like i said, if he brought his baggage and then did something interesting with it, that might be good television, but this is just so self-serving it makes me, yes, want to throw things through my television. or rather, through my computer monitor, since i watch pirated .avi's, but still! and i keep thinking, maybe if i didn't know it was the authorized autobiography of aaron sorkin, maybe it wouldn't feel so skeevy, but i still think the bitterness and the snobbishness are apparent even if you don't know the backstory.

and, oh, matthew perry is WONDERFUL here, but he really has to be, because otherwise i might hate his character. somehow matt albie's neuroses were a lot more attractive on dan rydell. hey, when do you think we're going to find out about matt's dead sibling?

i don't follow ratings, i get all my news from livejournal; obviously the show has potential to do great things, but it's not doing them yet, and i guess the rest of the world isn't falling for it either. i suppose i'll watch until i don't watch anymore.

thanks for letting me be a part of the B-team!

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