Un-Deadwood
Wouldn’t that be something? Eloquent, wild-west, zombies! But no, I’m talking about Aaron Sorkin’s latest, “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.” It’s a show about a show; Studio 60 is the name of their sketch-comedy show on fictional network NBS. Think of it as SNL, except, well, think of it as SNL. The pilot set us up with the show’s director, or manager, or whatever a fake Lorne Michaels would be called, having a sort of breakdown, interrupting the opening skit on live television and ranting about everything wrong with the show, the network, the FCC, the religious right, basically everything in the entertainment culture of television. He’s fired on the spot and the two previous directors (Matthew Perry and Bradly Whitford) are brought back to the show by NBS’s new head of something or other (Amanda Peet). It’s an unpopular move with the network suits who want business as usual and conventional PR damage control, but Peet is set up as our plucky, iconoclast, entertainment mogul with a heart of gold. Peet, Perry, and Whitford are our heros, basically falling in with the sentiments that got the old guy fired, but hopefully from a position to make a change in the show/industry instead of going out in a blaze of unemployment glory.
Sorkin gave us West Wing (and that sports show I never watched but heard good things about), and it’s pretty obvious after about five minutes of Studio 60. It’s the same dialog, it’s even a lot of the same cast, and it’s awesome. It’s a very specific kind of awesome though, which brings me to the Deadwood comparison. Here’s a quote from someone* on a forum I frequent:
Sorkin writes this odd little world where nobody ever walks away from a conversation thinking “damn I should have said X” because they always have the perfect response right on the tip of their tongue.
That said, it’s not bad, but I’m waiting to see if there’s any heart to the show. At this point it just feels like chess pieces being moved around the board while Sorkin develops the metatextual issues he seems more interested in.
He hits the nail on the head. Sorkin is writing situations; conflicts and relationships. His dialog is clever and smart, but interchangeable and impersonal. I’m not complaining; he’s giving us a lot of entertainment, but banter and interesting plots won’t be enough for some people.
David Milch, creator of Deadwood (and plenty of other stuff I guess, but Deadwood’s all I’ve seen), almost drove me up the wall because he couldn’t do anything but write characters. As a show on HBO, you expect a little bit of freedom from the reset-button of most ongoing TV shows. People can be introduced and killed off whenever it suits the story; a story which can be constantly moving forward and changing directions. You don’t have to return things to the status quo at the end of each week. There are examples of that in Deadwood, but there are so many more examples of times Milch needed to kill off or write out a character, but he apparently couldn’t bring himself to part with them. Characters that seemed trivial on introduction were kept around far longer than they proved interesting, often with new and very boring stories that felt tacked on to the show just to justify the people.
By the end of the final season, it felt like we were losing half of each episode to characters we had no interest in for reasons we couldn’t fathom. Luckily, the other half was really really great, and Milch does his own fantastic brand of dialog. I’m not sure what it’s indicative of, if anything, that both shows have such great dialog (though very different in style); I guess just that I enjoy that a lot (see also: Firefly).
Caveats ahoy! We’re only two episodes into Studio 60, and I don’t know who’s actually behind the writing issues with Deadwood. Maybe Studio 60 will tank or simply be cancelled, it wouldn’t be the first time a good show got the axe (see also: Firefly), and maybe Milch was fighting every step of the way with some crazy SAG clause that kept his actors around longer than he could use them; I don’t know. It was just interesting to me that two shows I’ve recently enjoyed a great deal would have such peculiar but perfectly opposing faults.
*I’d give credit, but it’s just some guy’s forum screen name. If he reads this and asks, I’ll happily clarify; he really did a great job summarizing