"You Ain’t A Writer, You’re A Journalist."

This mixed review of the weakly rated but for the most part critically revered Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip reminds me why I won’t be watching it:

Still, given that Sorkin’s White House seemed so authentic in its details, you’d expect him to nail every nuance of the late-night comedy world, from the egos to the slang. Instead, in its first hour, Studio 60 is surprisingly, even alarmingly tin-eared. After Mendell’s meltdown, the neophyte studio president (Amanda Peet) decides the only way to salvage the show’s public prestige is to rehire a superstar writer-and-director team (Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford) that had been jettisoned. Say what? Can you name even a single writer or director from Saturday Night Live’s entire history, save maybe Conan O’Brien and Tina Fey (who’s busy launching 30 Rock, an SNL spin­off of her own)? More to the point, if Lorne Michaels ever did implode, would the public treat it like a cultural emergency? The clip would be posted on YouTube, laughed about for a weekend, and then the show’s demographic would head back to CollegeHumor.com.

But wait—there is one case of a high-profile writer and director being publicly exiled from their own successful show: Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme, on The West Wing, in 2003. The parallels are hard to ignore. You wonder if anyone politely suggested to Sorkin that his redemptive story line might be problematic. (Or, for that matter, the line of dialogue in which an actor announces, “It took four years, but the show collapsed without them.”) Every writer has a right, and an imperative, to borrow from his experiences, but Studio 60 is so baldly autobiographical that Sorkin upstages his creation. It’s not a show about a comedy franchise; it’s a show about Sorkin’s career.

Right. And the problem is, I don’t care.

While I wasn’t a fan, I don’t mean to suggest that The West Wing didn’t have its virtues. Sorkin attracts good actors, and while his dialogue is overrated at his best he can definitely get a certain classic-Hollywood repartee going. I like the idea of a show about the detailed workings of the White House. But for me, the show will always be symbolized by the post-9/11 episode, which literally involved trapping fictional schoolchildren in a room so that Sorkin could share some of his (exceedingly unoriginal) thoughts about the problems facing America, neatly constructed in A- high school essays. Admittedly, it was an extreme case, but at a lower level this kind of thing was endemic to the show; the writing was not so much intelligent as Aaron Sorkin desperately trying to let you know how intelligent he was. And this might be OK, except that while Sorkin is well-informed about politics for a television writer as a political analyst he’s not at all interesting, sharing the same moderate elite-liberal sentiments you could just as well get from Michael Kinsley.

Given how disproportionately annoyed I get by characters being used as empty vessels in which to pour banal commentary about the issues of the day, one might think that Studio 60 would be more up my alley–there would certainly seem to be less space for position paper reading than in The West Wing or A Few Good Men. Actually, I’m not so sure–apparently the new show starts of with the umpteenth post-Network example of a someone breaking character on television to share his creator’s thoughts about…Quality Television. But the bigger problem is that I’ve seen Sportsnight, which both admirers and detractors of the new show compare it to. Sportsnight is often held up as an example of a show that was undeservedly cancelled, and it was indeed intelligent, well-acted, high-minded, etc. I must admit that I also thought it was a boring dud. As satire, it was completely toothless; it was too genteel and middlebrow to be a good soap opera; but it had too little to say to be great drama. Sorkin’s convictions at least gave The West Wing some juice; Sportsnight had no reason for existing whatsoever. The new show seems to have the same problem with a extra layers of solipsism and self-pity. It has to be better than even its supporters make it sound, but I’ll pass.

I guess I would compare Sorkin to another artist widely beloved by critics and large audiences I dislike: post-Say Anything Cameron Crowe. A movie that revolves around the deep moral dilemmas created by…agents who take on too many clients? About a guy who writes some pompous Tony Robbins-esque manifesto about the Ideals of Sports Agency–but far from being made the butt of humor, he’s the deeply earnest good guy? People who have seen Studio 60 can tell me if this is accurate, but yikes it sounds bad:

To better understand Studio 60, take a look back at Sorkin’s first TV venture, Sports Night. That show also centered on a relatively trifling TV product (an ESPN-esque sports-highlight show) and a male friendship (the show’s two anchors). That show’s pilot also featured a speech in which one of the principals announces he won’t be held hostage to a viewing audience of 11-year-old boys. (On Studio 60, the boorish viewers are 12-year-olds, a slight bump in the average age of philistines.)

Ugh. At least the West Wing got him out of himself a bit…

…more here.