Earlier in the week, Pattie and I deleted several unwatched episodes of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip from our DVR. Once I stopped watching, I realized I had absolutely no desire to catch up. And I’m trying to figure out how this happened, given how promising everything seemed at the start.
One of the fundamental problems, and I may have written about this before, is that Sorkin is just not a very good plotter. He doesn’t seem to be interested in thinking through the consequences of anything that happens in his stories. The result is just an accumulation of things that don’t ring true, and because they don’t ring true, you don’t really care how they turn out. One of the more famous examples of this is probably Sorkin’s claim that he decided to give President Bartlet MS because he was working on a story where Bartlet needed to be sick in bed for a period, and so he figured, hey, why not give him MS. I’ve ranted about the problems of The American President ad infinitum. I think the best example of this, though, comes from Rob Reiner’s commentary on A Few Good Men. If you’ve seen the movie, you know that there’s a point at the end where Tom Cruise is cross-examining Jack Nicholson, and catches a very basic contradiction in Nicholson’s story. Reiner says that Sorkin hadn’t included this in the script - Reiner noticed the contradiction, and thought it would be something that Cruise should bring up. That’s the kind of not-seeing-how-things-fit-together that I think gets Sorkin into trouble.
I think this habit bothered me more on West Wing than it did on Sports Night because the stakes were lower on Sports Night, and the stories focused on the character intereactions a lot more. I thought Studio 60 would be the same, but instead Sorkin’s tried to use the show to discuss Big Issues, and it’s fallen flat. Plus the one major character arc that he was exploring while I was still watching the show was the romance between Matthew Perry’s and Sarah Paulson’s characters, and going back to Sports Night and the bizarre “dating plan,” it’s pretty clear to me that Sorkin has difficulties writing romances that I find believable or engaging.
Maybe I’ll check the show out again in a few weeks, but it’s definitely off my must-see radar. I guess that’s an easy way to clear the backlog.
I’m actually enjoying Studio 60, I think simply because it doesn’t require serious mental committment, the characters are likable without me caring much about them, and the witty banter is consistently witty.
On the other hand, though, I’ve given up Heroes more or less because I just don’t have the emotional capacity to actually care about that many characters, no matter how engaging the story is. I’m just too busy for really good tv. I have to settle for short burts of enjoyable tv with low demands. You might find yourself regretting cutting Studio 60 for exactly the same reason!
I don’t even find the characters likable enough - maybe it’s from being on my third go-round with Sorkin shows, I dunno. But I much prefer the folks from Eureka or Psych, so Studio 60 fell behind them on the priority list.
I hear you on the not-enough-time-for-TV, though. Heroes is in the wait-for-the-trade, I mean the DVD, pile. I catch Lost weekly. i’m horribly behind on Battlestar Galactica. I could really use a 33-hour day.