Studio 60

Aaron Sorkin believes in America and he's not going to let you forget it. He believes in entertainers, in sports fans, in the president, and writing, as he does, with incredibly jaunty, fast, ribald, theatrical rhythm, Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip premiered, a week ago, an apparent salve to television. It's irreverent! It bites the hand that feeds it! It shows that television must not be bereft of integrity and ideals and a modern pulse because it's about a TV show and network attempting fight to not be bereft of ingtegrity and ideals and a modern pulse!

Considering the ratings for the first two episodes of the series, it's likely that you've seen at least a few minutes of Studeio 60, but more likely you've heard about it in some respect. Sorkin being one of the very few household names in television writing, the show's been the "next big thing" of American drama probably since its pitch meeting, and it received all the pre-upfront press clippings and bidding wars that accompany these "next big things." It features a $3-million-per-episode price tag and boasts the largest set on network television, not to mention its A-list cast stuffed with names like Matthew Perry, Bradley Whitford, Stephen Weber, D.L. Hughley, Amanda Peet, and Timothy Busfield.

What it is, then, is a drama about creating comedy - the show is a fictional competitor of Saturday Night Live on a fictional competitor of NBC called NBS (National Broadcasting System, that is). You could call it brave of NBC to let its flagship show of the new season be so self-referential and self-effacing, and to an extent it is.

But more than that, it's a show whose largest purpose isn't necessarily even to be good, but to present the image that NBC is irreverent and self-referential, and that they are, above all, about quality and care little about image - that they are the network on the edge.

It occurs to me, after a ceremonial devotion to the first couple of episodes, that I don't actually like Studio 60. More than that, I actually don't like Studio 60, but I sort of believe in it. It's arrogant, it's too high-falootin', and I'm not certain if Amanda Peet's performance as NBS president Jordan McDeere (how a woman as young as Peet gets to be network president is a different topic, but one that, I imagine, will be addressed) is deadpan or just terrible, which is more than I can say for Steven Weber's chairman of NBS, who's just a cranky and stern-looking nothing on the show. For it, its much-hyped Sarah Paulson character Harriet - a Christian! and a great person! - is based on Sorkin's real life ex and former West Wing co-star Kristen Chenoweth, and I'd much prefer Kristen Chenoweth in the Kristen Chenoweth part - Paulson is sexy alright, but she doesn't seem to muster up the type of brash spunk Chenoweth brought to Annabeth, a part that barely even existed on The West Wing, but was still memorable. In any case, it's hard to even register my own thoughts on the matter what with constantly being reminded by NBC to compare how it's living up to expectations.

Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing, I recall, was greeted with similarly obtuse fanfare - back in 1999, NBC's pre-pilot ads boasted lines like, "Every era has a great drama - LA Law! ER! NBC now invites you to the next great American drama!" It's helpful too to remind myself I never saw those original episodes of The West Wing as they aired, that I became a fan at the end of the second season and worked my way backwards. Had I watched from the beginning, I surely would have actively disliked The West Wing too - its initial episodes are pretentious and ham-handed, ostentatious about its own importance, and written with one grandstanding bit of oration after another (this was, to be fair, also the case with the pilot of Sorkin's first network dramedy Sports Night). In fact, looking back at it, I don't even like that first, multi-Emmy winning first season very much. And Studio 60's identical gambit - a male and female lead who used to date but now work together - then: Bradley Whitford's Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman and Moira Kelly's media consultant Mandy, now, Matthew Perry's head writer Matt and Paulson's Harriet - seems altogether much more successful on Studio 60, which Sorkin must know, as Kelly barely lasted the season on West Wing and Paulson seems poised to be part of the show's main focus.

So it's important to remember that, begrudgingly, The West Wing was the next great network drama, that its second season is a monument to which all dramas whould have to strive for, and that it was so doused in magnificent production values that when it was revived in its final season by writers other than Sorkin, the job seemed to have been easily accomplished by all the quality left behind from its inception.

The problem, I think, is that we may have already moved to a more rapid era of television consumption - every television report every tells you that year is unlike the years of the past, that TV's golden age is behind them, but I'm starting to think 2006 is not even 1999 anymore. Studio 60 earned 16.9 million viewers in its first episode, but, as was reported today, there are "no breakouts" amongst the new crop of fall premieres this year - "no surprises that capture the zeitgeist with instant high ratings like My Name Is Earl last year and Desperate Housewives the year before that," says a Reuters report quoting an NBC executive. That September is not even over and that no TV show has had more than 3 airings thus far does not seem to matter much in these pronouncements.

In fact, Studio 60's audience for the pilot dipped slightly from its first half hour to its second, and this is indication that it, too, will not be a hit (but this is not altogether an unreasonable projection - ABC's Six Degrees lost its viewers by 47% from one half hour to the next, its viewers no doubt worn out by an abyssmal premiere of juggernaut Grey's Anatomy followed by the even-more-abyssmal experience of watching any of Six Degrees). Still, I hope that the pressure gets taken off Studio 60 at some point so it can flatten out into something resembling normal episodes, something where the honestly obnoxious amount of self-referentiality can peter out a bit. One of the early death knell pronouncements for Studio 60 claims that normal, non-industry people "just don't connect to that much 'insider talk.'" This, if true, means only that NBC should cancel the show immediately, insider talk being all there actually is, besides a terrific set.

Then again, I recall early reviews of The West Wing wondering if people could give a damn about Washington "insider talk," a brand of talk that includes discussions of wheat subsidies and road tolls. An interesting thing: when TV shows try and recreate the actual day-to-day experiences of people - politicians or cops or mobsters or high schoolers or executives - audiences tend to show up.