To the last, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip messed things up. It should have been a farewell full of schlock and unashamed sentimentality. Half a dozen intense storylines were queuing up for resolution. The writer, Aaron Sorkin, was a past master at this, penning four triumphant finales for The West Wing.

And yet even here, at the last hurdle, with no distance left to run (the show already cancelled by its American network) and no time left for half-measures and screw-ups, even here Studio 60 got it wrong.

Plots were dispatched into oblivion with all the aplomb of someone ticking off their weekly shopping list. Characters spoke wholly in platitudes. Nothing built to a climax; everything melted into banality. And barely once, in this supposedly definitive take on the mechanics of the American TV industry, was television mentioned.

To those who made it this far, who had travelled with the show through its ludicrously convulsed existence, the relief was akin to it being the end of a school term. Free! Free at last! For it had become apparent, very quickly after the first episode, there was little reason to stick with Studio 60 other than out of duty, and the hope of the odd flash of genius. Then, as the weeks skulked by, there emerged a perverse pleasure in seeing what tawdry gimmick or (presumably) self-deprecating cliché Sorkin would deploy this time around.

“Let’s see”, you liked to imagine him thinking, “we’ve had the drug addiction episode, the getting-locked-on-the-roof episode, the let’s-hire-a-black-writer episode. What’s left? How about … pregnancy?”.

The moment when president of fictional TV network NBS Jordan McDeere suddenly announced, completely out of nowhere, she was having a baby was one of the foulest pieces of TV possible. Utterly cynical if intended to be genuine, completely smug if conceived to be ironic, this was real jump-the-shark time: horrifying, yet also strangely fascinating, to watch right before your eyes.

After that there was no chance of redemption. This was a ship going down with all hands. Each episode became less and less about a TV show and more about ghastly relationships between ghastly people, punctuated with endless contradictory political diatribes. Every 30 seconds came the sound of someone clearing their throat to air another of Sorkin’s obsessions. Except these perorations were a world away from the informed, uplifting chatter of The West Wing. At times there was so much hatred on screen you could imagine viewers switching off in their thousands, asking, “What have we done to offend this man?”.

And while there was no concessions were made for people arriving halfway through the series, or who might have missed an episode, there was equally precious little reward meted out to those who stayed the course. We were treated like dunces, happy to overlook 180-degree personality changes and storylines conjured up and hastened away all in a matter of seconds.

Being generous you could argue this was partly to do with the way the series materialised during its one and only American transmission. While it unfolded in an uninterrupted 22-week run over here, over there it emerged in fits and starts, the first 10 episodes followed by a seven-week gap followed by five more episodes followed by a whopping three-month gap followed by a final six episodes.

Yet this only came to pass because the show was flawed in the first place. Its fascination with clever-clever plotting precluded the emergence of plausible, attractive characters and a likeable, intriguing setting. Sorkin and his regular cohort, director Thomas Schlamme, had nobody to blame but themselves. They knew how the TV industry worked (heavens, they were producing an entire series about the very thing!), and they knew their show would be threatened with cancellation if it flopped and temporarily taken off air.

Which it duly was, hence the hiatus in transmission, hence the air of panic, and hence the compounding of an already noxious brew with evermore hysterical ingredients.

Along came the war, in the guise of one of the cast’s brothers who was suddenly serving in Afghanistan. Along came, ho ho, “trouble with falling ratings”. Along came industrial action and religious fundamentalism and dangerous animals loose under the stage and weddings and people learning to pray (learning to pray?!?!) and premature babies and an utterly demented episode which didn’t feature any of the main characters and instead had Alison Janney from The West Wing appearing as herself alongside a person her character used to date in The West Wing but who now played someone who had a crush on Alison Janney overlooking the fact that previous episodes referred to The West Wing as if it were real and that Alison Janney didn’t actually exist.

There was twisted appeal in the savage lunacy of it all. As scene after scene fixated on America’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, you sat agape at something you’d never expect to see in a mainstream American television drama – and also at something you’d never expect to see being done so crassly by such noted Hollywood luminaries.

The last five episodes depicted the events of one single night: an audacious stunt Sorkin never dared try in The West Wing, and perpetrated here as much – you felt – for the sake of it as anything else. There certainly wasn’t the momentum to sustain interest in the same events over a quintet of shows, and as the plot entertained crisis upon crisis it was a bit like watching somebody’s artistic reputation self-combust in slow motion.

Studio 60 ended its life as one massive fuck you to us, to America, to television, to anyone and everyone. With every final crude dramatic revelation or hackneyed turn of dialogue another chunk of Sorkin’s legacy came tumbling to the ground. Except each sound you heard wasn’t that of falling masonry, it was of another TV fan’s heart breaking.

STUDIO 60 ON THE SUNSET STRIP
Thursday 26/07/07, More 4
reviewed by Steve Williams

It’s obvious why people would want to work in television. You get to enter famous buildings that the general public can’t. You get to casually mention technical terms and can talk about having new projects “in development” to amaze people at parties. You might get to go to a glitzy awards ceremony, and you can turn on the telly and say, “I made that!”.

Of course, you can do similar things in more or less every other job in the world. If you were a pest controller, for example, you too could enter famous buildings – albeit when they’re infested with cockroaches. Again, you could casually mention technical terms and might have a new piece of hardware “in development”. The pest control industry might host a glitzy award ceremony and you can drive past offices and houses and go, “I fumigated that!”.

Clearly, though, one of these is more glamorous than the other, which is why some of us can’t get enough of watching television shows about television programmes. It’s not a hugely successful genre – you’ve got The Larry Sanders Showand then a couple of rip-offs of The Larry Sanders Show - but for anyone who always watches out for BBC Television Centre when they travel past it on the London Underground, it’s always going to be appealing. Hence why Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip promised to be a real treat, as it comes from the pen of Aaron Sorkin, the creator of The West Wing. Who could resist some classy West Wing-style dialogue and intelligent plotting applied to the world of television?

The show-within-a-show in this case is Studio 60, a live topical comedy sketch show which after 20 years is showing signs of decline. The existing producer is so pissed off by the network’s interference he decides he’s had enough, and interrupts the broadcast to tell everyone this programme is a mess, and that telly has gone to the dogs. He’s immediately fired, and new network president Jordan McDeere, on her first day in the job, decides she needs to headhunt former writers Matt and Danny – who worked on the series when it was at its peak before being sacked and becoming hugely acclaimed Hollywood big shots – to bring the programme back from the brink.

At the end of this first episode, Danny breaks it to Matt that, as he’s failed a drugs test, he can’t direct the film they were going to make, so they decide to come back to the show.

Throughout the rest of the series, we’ll root for Matt and Danny and their efforts to make the thing work. If they succeed, all will be right with the world, and maybe the network’s share price will rise a few dollars and they might supply some slightly better champagne for the after-show party. If they screw up, everyone dies!

Oh, hang on, no they don’t. The show might get axed and the cast might have to do some adverts or TV movies instead. And really, this is the problem I have with this series. At the end of the day, who cares? While the liberal grandstanding and cutting dialogue works in The West Wing, you can at least understand the people in it are doing an important and exciting job. It’s hard to buy into the drama if the worst that can happen is someone gets slightly embarrassed at an awards ceremony, or a sketch doesn’t get a laugh.

In addition, it’s a drama about a comedy show. You could perhaps understand the sense of importance if they were working on a news programme or documentaries, and having to face dilemmas over political balance, or how to deal with serious and upsetting issues. There’d be plenty of points to be made about how the media can represent and influence society, and how to engage the younger generation with world events. However, the production they’re making here appears to be something along the lines of Dead Ringers. Surely no comedy writer, on either side of the Atlantic, has such an inflated sense of their own self-importance to consider what they’re doing actually matters in the long run?

In fact, in this first episode we see very little of the titular Studio 60 to actually understand why we should care about the state of the programme. The only items we see that represent the bad old pre-Matt and Danny days are five seconds of a White House-set sketch which seems fairly inane but doesn’t progress long enough to allow us to hear any of the “jokes”, a performance by a (real?) hip-hop act and the titles to a sketch called Peripheral Vision Man, which we’re told is not funny but we don’t see why.

Presumably the idea is that the name is enough, and it’s sad a topical show has been reduced to such pointless fillers, but to be honest it just sounds like a piece of unpretentious whimsy.

Indeed, it’s a bit of a wasted opportunity. Had we seen any of the programme itself then there could have been the chance to make points about the general low quality of topical comedy that exists these days – rubbish like The Trail Of Tony Blair and other useless satire that thinks just saying George Bush is a bit thick and that Tony Blair sucked up to him a bit is enough – but no. In fact, one of the main flaws of this series so far has been the fabled Sorkin dialogue. Surely the first rule of drama is to show rather than tell? We’re told plenty about the old show being crap, and about how Matt and Danny are going to save it, but there’s precious little evidence to support this apart from people saying it over and over again.

Indeed, in this first episode Matt and Danny didn’t have a funny line between them and if all comedy writers are this miserable, it’s no wonder the genre appears to be in such dire straits.

To be honest, Studio 60 isn’t really telling us anything we don’t already know. It’s summed up by the huge rant Judd Hirsch’s outgoing producer character comes out with that leads to his dismissal. We don’t get to hear this in full, but from the bits we do catch there are endless references to pornography, reality TV, the religious right, the networks … all the usual bogeymen when people are discussing why telly is doomed. Not only is this an argument that’s been trotted out a million times, it’s also mostly rubbish. 20 years ago, the American networks were screening the likes of Manimaland Falcon Crest in prime time. Now the US networks are showing Lost, Heroes and, well, this show, and broadsheet critics are forever questioning why British telly can’t be as challenging or as original as the classy and intelligent American productions. In addition, it can’t help make Sorkin, a man who has made his career and reputation from network television, sound rather ungrateful.

Well, maybe the points they’re making are quite novel for an American audience. Really, I wonder if it was even worth Channel 4′s while buying Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, because vast swathes of it are frankly irrelevant for a British audience.

This self-importance is one thing. In the US, the television industry is a big business, with the fall schedule greeted with as much wonder and discussion as a new translation of The Bible. In the UK, nobody really cares that much. Hence, while the fate of Studio 60 seems to take on as much importance as the war in Iraq, you can’t imagine Kevin Lygo and Andy Duncan running around shouting if The Friday Night Project starts running out of steam, demanding their PAs locate Jimmy Carr this instant, to avoid the disaster of having a few jokes made at their expense in the diary column at the back of Broadcast magazine. British viewers – and, more than likely, most American viewers – will simply fail to understand why these things are being taken so seriously.

In addition, the problems of the media in the US have little impact here in the UK. The rant mentions that broadcasting in America is being killed by the FCC and religious lobby groups. In the UK, it blatantly isn’t. The FCC may be fining the US networks the annual GDP of an African nation for screening a one second shot of Janet Jackson’s nipple, but over here the series has debuted in the same week as BBC3 are screening an hour long documentary about the word “cunt”, and nobody’s bothered about it. Meanwhile while the religious right may exert huge power in the States, in the UK they consist of a couple of easily-ignorable websites, so much so that the forthcoming episode of Star Stories on Tom Cruise seems to consist in its entirety of jokes about scientology being a load of bollocks.

It looks like religion is likely to play a major role in this series. It transpires that the producer’s rant was brought on by the network demanding a religious sketch was removed. Of course, we don’t see this sketch, but invariably we’re told it was very funny. Later too, we’re told the sketch was called “Crazy Christians”. However, this tells us nothing. Maybe it was a challenging look at how religion plays a role in 21st Century America, making some serious points along the way. Alternatively, maybe it was just some unpleasant sneers at evangelical Christians for being thick enough to believe the Bible. It could have been like The Vicar Of Dibley for all we know. The point seems to be that just the idea of mentioning religion is an incredible thing. Again, there’s a sense of “been there, done that” in Britain – see Jerry Springer: The Opera, but also see Simon Amstell doing jokes about Judaism on Popworld on Saturday mornings.

So far, then, all we’re getting is a bunch of self-important people treating the business of irreverence with ludicrous reverence, while ladling on some Dummies’ Guide To Liberal Politics-style points – so the men in suits who run networks are bad, reality TV is bad, organised religion is bad, and so endlessly on. Of course, we know now that American audiences failed to be spellbound by the series and this no-holds-barred look at how the telly industry is sidelining intelligent programming was ironically booted around the schedules and finally axed. It’s hard to see how British viewers will be any more impressed.

If you’re looking for a new project, then, Aaron, how about a drama about pest controllers? If they mess up, people could actually die!

A show about TV, made by some of TV’s most celebrated talents, but which says TV is rubbish, and that everyone who works in TV including its most celebrated talents is rubbish, yet wants to celebrate TV and all who work in it for being rubbish, all at the same time?

No wonder it got cancelled. In fact, Aaron Sorkin, the creator of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, probably relished its demise as some kind of abstract, self-referential tribute. A tribute, that is, to his own genius for telling it like it is, and in no way to do with the show being a jumbled, incoherent mess of mixed messages. Oh no.

Granted, The West Wing was always going to be a hard act to follow. And the hype surrounding the US premiere of Studio 60 – almost a whole 12 months ago, such has been Channel 4′s dithering – implied the world was about to gaze upon a new jewel in television’s crown. But Sorkin and his West Wing cohort Thomas Schlamme didn’t make things any easier for themselves, or their millions of expectant fans, by bequeathing Studio 60 unto the planet in a manner suggestive of having forgotten how to produce a decent opening episode.

Both this and The West Wing came bearing self-evident gifts: a ringside seat in the most powerful office in the world and a berth in the engine room of one of the most watched programmes on television. The premise alone was almost enough to make you tune in.

But while The West Wing‘s premiere unfolded with the minimum of exposition, Studio 60‘s debut was choked with set-ups and plot points and back-stories.

By the end of the first episode of the former we knew virtually nothing about the private lives of the principal characters: we only knew them through their work, which had been shown to be dazzling, perilous and utterly compelling. Conversely by the end of the first episode of Studio 60 we’d had to wade through a slurry of obtuse details involving drug habits, back surgery, gospel albums and ball games, only to reach a point that we knew was going to happen all along: the two leads, Matt (Matthew Perry) and Danny (Bradley Whitford) would take charge of the eponymous late-night entertainment revue.

As such there was no sense of anything being proved or accomplished, and no feeling of having just spent an hour being entertainingly enlightened. Rather it was 60 minutes, or 40 to be precise, eavesdropping on clever-clever dialogue, pointlessly circular arguments and clunky non-sequiturs (“Stop talking now? You bet”).

Think of how The West Wing pilot was so stunningly crafted, carrying you up and up through a tower of mini-crises and misunderstandings, methodically etching aspects of the protagonists’ responsibilities, ever-expanding its depiction of life in the White House until – bang! – two-thirds of the way through, the President burst into view, becalming colleagues and blasting critics and generally righting the world’s wrongs. By way of a debut, it was the classiest way of saying if you like this, stick around, there’s plenty more to come.

With Studio 60 there was no such invitation. The viewer’s interest was taken utterly for granted, as was our inclination to tune in again. We were given no reason to stick around. The primary assumption on behalf of the producers seemed to be, simply: look! Here’s Chandler from Friends and Josh off The West Wing – together! And if you want, you can see them together again next week! Isn’t that great?!

Well, not if you weren’t much enamoured of them in the first place. Likeable alternatives were in short supply as well. It was unsettling that someone with a track record like Sorkin should choose to stack the shop window for his latest ensemble full of distinctly unappealing creations. The female characters in particular were really badly written, network boss Jordan McDeere (Amanda Peet) coming over as utterly without gravitas and credibility while Harriet Hayes (Sarah Paulson), one of the supposed “Big Three” show stars, was like a walking open sore, forever bleeding one-note contempt and weird expressions.

The only agreeable and, in fact, dimensional character of them all was the show’s veteran creator Wes Mendell, superbly played by Judd Hirsch, and he got fired 15 minutes in.

Mendell’s live, on-air outburst (“… There’s a struggle between art and commerce … a candy-ass broadcast network hell-bent on doing nothing that might challenge their audience … I’m telling you, art is getting its ass kicked …”) was the only exciting thing in the whole episode. But even this was a pastiche, by dint of constituting an unsubtle homage to the film Network – a homage hammered into the ground by Sorkin via a scene showing rival TV stations all chuntering on hysterically about the screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky.

If you rip something off then make great play of referencing what it is you’re ripping off, does that make it all okay? Not, perhaps, if the homage (“This is what happened in the movie!”) goes on to never quite emerge from the shadows of the original.

Maybe all TV studio executives are unlikeable types. Maybe they are all self-obsessed and egotistical and appallingly arrogant. Maybe all American TV networks are “prissy, feckless, off-the-charts greed-filled whorehouses”. It doesn’t follow, though, that saying as much, and in as bludgeoning a manner possible, is itself good television.

There are surely other ways to satirise the TV industry than having characters lazily refer to right-wing religious programmes as “a Klan rally” and their hosts as “bigots”. Other, more imaginative, more original ways. Ways less predicated on schoolboy humour and the kind of generalisations that confirm rather than challenge stereotypes.

If, however, television is founded upon laziness and generalisation – as Sorkin appears to want us to believe – embracing them in the name of commerce is no substitute for eviscerating them in the name of art.

Appropriately enough, that’s thanks to the power of the internet, and a certain file-sharing site, which has currently got the first two episodes available for download.

I’m not a whole-hearted Sorkin convert, although I will get round to watching series four of The West Wing sometime between now and Christmas 2007, I promise. And yet I have become quite enthused by Studio 60. Granted, a lot about it feels familar. Episode two kicks off with the newly-appointed, straight-talkin’ network boss fire-fighting criticism at a press conference, while her colleagues watch on muttering, “She’s good”. Later, himoff Friends leads a brain-storming session as the gang try to come up with a suitably spectacular opening sketch for his debut show (er, I’m going to assume you know what Studio 60 is, Matthew Perry’s role, who Josh is playing and – well – everything. If not, look at this) and, gradually, ideas coalesce and form together, triumphantly proving how clever everyone is. It’s just that Martin Sheen’s not there to amble in at the end and say so.

In this instance, the bravura moment is instead a musical number, parodying The Major General’s Song from The Pirates of Penzance, from which that “intellectual reach-around” comes from.

But, I like it. The show does enough to get you onside and warming to the characters so you’re rooting for them to succeed – to be funny – despite the fact it’s Sorkin’s own script that declares if they are or not (with critics, penned by the writer, penning criticism of the fictional Studio 60 revue show … penned by the writer). As such, it’s less of a reach-around, and something more masturbatory.

Oh. How did I end up saying that?

“Don’t worry, you’re good. This is a good blog entry.”

Great. 

So, you see how that works? 

Anyway, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is good. It’s funny. It’s complicated, it’s warm and – best of all – it’s all about making a TV show. And I love show’s about shows.