How Television Changed After 9/11
Part 2B: Aaron Sorkin Post The West Wing
In the glow of hindsight, there are many who consider Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Sorkin’s follow-up piece to The West Wing one of the greatest one-season series in history. I’m more inclined to hold to Entertainment Weekly’s ranking it among the 50 biggest disasters in Television history. I realize that millions probably think: the series had Bradley Whitford, Matthew Perry, Steven Weber, Amanda Peet and D.L. Hughley among its leads and such bright lights as Sarah Paulson and Merritt Weyer among its casts. How could it go wrong?
Well for starters, there was not a realistic or likable character in the bunch. Perry, so affable on Friends, started out as an arrogant prick and never softened. Peet, a great actress who television was still a few years away from realizing her true potential, played a network executive that you always wondered how she’d gotten so far. Sarah Paulson, an extraordinary actress who Ryan Murphy would finally tap her true genius, played perhaps the most unbelievable character of all: a born-again Christian who’d had a long-time affair with Perry’s character. (That their romance was never believable it is not a flaw limited to Sorkin’s writing; stretching back as far as Sports Night Sorkin has never truly been able to create a believable love story in any of series.) None of them were ever believable and all the dialogue in the world couldn’t elevate them/
That was actually the smallest flaw in the series. For a show that was ostensibly about comedy, almost none of the skits we saw or even heard about sounded like they would make Saturday Night Live on its worst day. The Pilot opened with the show’s creator being fired for the network refusing to run a sketch called ‘Crazy Christians: I don’t know what was less believable: that Perry’s character had written the sketch originally or that had been in ‘storage’ for five seasons and they were only trying to pull it out. It actually got worse from there: none of the sketches or idea we saw seemed funny, much less played that way. Even the most bottom feeding sketch show would have tried a sketch where the premise was Juliette Lewis was hosting Meet the Press: the very idea is a horrible joke. And the process of making the comedy seemed even more pointless when it became clear that Perry’s character was basically doing all the writing. Perhaps this was a roman a clef version of Sorkin himself (he notoriously takes credit for every episode of a series even if his influence was minimal) but even if it was, that wasn’t funny either.
And the pace of the series was god-awful slow. I was offending by how, in the early days of Grey’s Anatomy, it would often take three to four weeks for two days to pass. This pacing was positively lightning compared to the rate Studio 60 moved. It took them nearly three weeks to move through a storyline that took over the course of a single day. For a writer whose characters were known for their rapid-fire dialogue, you’d think Sorkin would’ve been better by now at keeping the action moving. The last five episodes of the series took place over the course of a few hours.
And most appalling of all was that somehow Studio 60 was often more political and less subtle about it than The West Wing ever was. One of the show’s performers (Nate Cordray) never seemed to be appreciated by his parents because his brother was serving in Afghanistan. They milked this so many times over the course of the season you’d think Sorkin could’ve made a real statement but it was just a plot point for him D.L Hooghly’s character had a major spat with the media in which he basically blamed them for the war in Iraq. And this paled in comparison to the final episodes when we learned why Whitford and Perry’s characters were fired from the series in the first place: they’d written a sketch about Karl Rove, there’d been blowback and they had to resign. This would barely have been tolerable in David E. Kelley’s hands; Sorkin somehow made it worse.
When the series collapsed in the spring of 2007, Sorkin went into movies. That went much better as in succession came three critical and box-office hits: Charlie Wilson’s War, The Social Network and Moneyball. The second got him an Oscar, the latter a nomination. Considering how brilliant Sorkin had taken two what seemed unfilmable stories and made great movies, he was understandably back on top and everybody realized again he was a genius. Then HBO gave him a series and he forgot everything he learned.
The Newsroom was Sorkin trying to make an argument about impartial journalism should work and was in almost every case a failure. Part of it was because Sorkin spent so much time among the journalists of MSNBC as influence. Most of it, however, was because Sorkin’s gift for dialogue now seemed far too heavy-handed. The opening teaser, where Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) says how America has lost its way and how it might be great again — and is completely hammered for it in the press — was an awful starting point for a series. And there were few aspects about it that ever worked. Mackenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer) rarely seemed like she was a competent producer and the fact that she’d had an affair with Will never seemed to gel. And even though none of the romances he’d written before had worked well, Sorkin went out of his way to make almost every other character be involved in a complicated love…rectangle, I guess that nobody was willing to acknowledge and kept becoming heavier baggage every few episodes. Mixing all of these stories with real-life events never really gave it a sense of realism, and for all the discussion of Will’s journalism, he always came across as much like a pundit as anyone on cable news.
Sorkin seemed to realize how badly this was going, and in the second season tried to have an overarching storyline based on a 60 Minutes scandal about a misreporting of news. If anything, this made things worse. The series kept shifting between depositions and the present, dealing with even worse romantic choices among the leads, and a conclusion that wasn’t so much unbelievable as a complete dismissal of it. I’m not even sure the underlying story was ever resolved.
You’d like to think there was something of merit in a show that, in addition to Daniels and Mortimer, featured Sam Waterston, Dev Patel and Olivia Munn among its regulars and had Jane Fonda and Chris Messina in critical roles. But the moments of real interest were few and far between and in all honesty, giving Jeff Daniels the Best Actor Emmy in 2013 was one of the biggest mistakes the Emmys has ever made. (Even Daniels seemed to know it when he accepted.) And given a chance to actually end a series for the first time (all his previous series had either been cancelled or he’d left before they ended) Sorkin couldn’t come up with a good way to that, either. The show just petered out at the end of 2014. Sorkin has stayed in the world of movies ever since where, to be fair, he’s been much better equipped.
In a sense, I find it laughable when a man named Adam McKay considers Sorkin his equivalent on the right. Sorkin on the right? His Republicans are so far to the left they can say things like: “I’m a registered Republican. I just sound liberal because I believe hurricanes are caused by high barometric pressure and not by gay marriage.” That may be one of the biggest problems with Sorkin’s politics: he believes in party leanings rather than ideological ones. That was basically almost out of style when The West Wing began its run: these days ideology on both sides’ matters more and great leaders in both parties histories would be considered RINOs and DINOs today.
But that’s far from the biggest problem with Sorkin’s viewpoints on politics. His most direct statement on the matter may be in one of his first films The American President. At the climax of the movie, President Andrew Shepherd says of his opponent: “We’ve got serious problems. And I can assure you, Bob Rumson (his Republican opponent) is not interested in solving them. He is interested in two things… making you afraid of it, and telling you who’s to blame for it. That is how you win elections.”
Now the problem with politics today isn’t that there are too many Bob Rumson’s and not enough Andrew Shepherds. The problem is there were never any Andrew Shepherds (or later, Jed Bartlet’s) to begin with. Everybody with some connection to politics is essentially a Bob Rumson. One side may have a different for making you afraid of the problem, but they’re both only interested in telling you who’s the blame for it. Solving the problems, they’ll just kick that down the road. (In a back-handed way, Sorkin may have acknowledged that with the character of Josh in the third season of The West Wing. He’s involved with a woman who’s at the head of a women’s rights league and when a bill that the party that goes against that agenda becomes a flare-up, Josh choosing the bill over his girlfriend. The difference is, no one even thinks for a second about Amy’s feelings: all they care about is winning reelection.)
I realize that I may be dealing more with politics than art, but in a way Sorkin’s point of view on that explains why he’s never been able to be as effective in Peak TV. Sorkin’s characters believe that people and institutions are fundamentally good and that you can change the world if you just have the right argument. This comes into complete contrast with the beliefs at the core of the three first great series of HBO led by the three Davids: Chase, Simon and Milch. The Sopranos fundamentally believes that change is hard, and that given the option people will always do what’s easier than what’s hard. The Wire believes that the institutions of America are so fundamentally broken that any person who even tries to change it will get ground to dirt. And Deadwood believes, no matter how great or pretty the words are, force and the unbridled monstrosities of capitalism will eventually overcome.
In what would end up being one of the last exchanges of Deadwood, when A.W. Merrick, the towns earnest newsman asked George Hearst for his opinion of his coverage of the horrors that have unfolded, Hearst coldly says: “I’ve given up reading your paper…I’ll have my people create another one to lie the other way.” You can draw a line from that statement to the fundamental basics of how journalism and everything else works today. Compared to this blunt truth, Sorkin’s optimism and idealism are not only naïve, but completely contrary to the best of TV today. If he was ever serious about reviving The West Wing (as he mentions from time to time), this is one reboot that would never work because it was out-of-time even when it was new.