Academy of the Overrated: The Induction Speech

I should have know better than to write something about Aaron Sorkin when Lance would do the job, but this is exactly right:

Whatever. He started as a playwright, he learned to tell his stories by having his characters talk them out, and he hasn’t learned any new lessons for his adopted medium, which is only part of his weakness as a television writer.

Sorkin writes snappy dialogue. But he doesn’t write as much of it as you might think, if you listen to his shows with only half an ear.

His characters don’t talk in their own voices. They all talk in his voice. And they don’t talk about themselves. They talk about what’s happening around them. Sorkin writes lots of exposition and divides it up among his characters to read at us.
He’s like a novelist who puts all the narration inside quotation marks.

Lance also points us to this review in the Chicago Reader, which tempts me to watch Studio 60 next week if only for the trainwreck effect:

Too insidery? Does anybody think this looks even remotely like what really goes on at Saturday Night Live, or at any other show in the history of TV? It’s straight out of a World War II movie about a desperate mission behind enemy lines. All the cliches are in place: the heroic renegades who can’t fit in with the military establishment, the tough, old-school commanding officer who grudgingly agrees they’re the best men for the job, even the perky, brilliant young staff officer who pipes up with the daringly unconventional plan that Just Might Work.

But it can’t be a joke — not given the show’s enfeebled concept of humor. Our heroes, those edgy, brilliant writer/producers, need a way to reestablish their cred as quickly as possible. So they, too, come up with a daring idea. They’ll open with one of those big, controversial, startling comedy sketches they used to do, the ones that back in the day got everybody in America talking. Here’s the sketch: they have a choir sing “We are the very model of a modern network TV show,” to the tune of “Modern Major General” from The Pirates of Penzance.

Now there’s cutting-edge comedy for you: a Gilbert and Sullivan parody! It’ll have the frat boys in the audience in stitches!

I haven’t even gotten to the backstage drama. So far it’s mostly focused on why one of the writer/producers has broken up with his girlfriend, who is both the star of the SNL-ish show and a Christian singer. He says she’s pissed at him because he didn’t show up when she sang the “Star Spangled Banner” at a baseball game. But that’s just a cover story. The real reason is that he can’t forgive her for going on The 700 Club to promote her new CD of Christian music.

Empathize with his dilemma? I can’t even follow it. He’s pretending to be indifferent to her performance of the national anthem to cover up how he’s actually upset because she made a promotional appearance on a talk show he disapproves of. Has anyone in Hollywood — anyone on planet earth — ever had a problem so shallow and rarefied at once? It’s like a story in Us Weekly rewritten by Henry James.

Well, there is Ann Althouse and her crusade against wearing shorts in the summer.

Let’s review: Studio 60‘s pose of being all backstage and insidery is a preposterous sham, and its characters bear no relationship to actual human beings. Sounds like classic TV to me — why isn’t it a hit?

Good question. There’s lots more about how the anti-TV rants he puts in the mouths of his characters are anachronistic old-fartism, pining for a Golden Age of tightly controlled quality television that didn’t actually exist. I can’t say about Studio 60, but it was definitely true of The West Wing. As Ezra pointed out, it was never a liberal fantasy; it was a nostalgic fantasy of High Broderism, in which decent, moderate Republicans engaged with principled, well-meaning, moderately liberal Democrats in what resembled the Oxford Debating Society more than actual politics. You could definitely make an interesting show about the nature of contemporary politics, but whatever its other strengths The West Wing had nothing whatsoever to do with it.