TV series review – “Sunset on Studio 60” ***

Entertaining and frustrating but I think this series was doomed from the outset. There’s no reason you couldn’t set a TV series behind the scenes of a comedy show (many TV series use TV as a background eg Frontline, Murphy Brown, Mary Tyler Moore) but Aaron Sorkin made the mistake of writing a show which was about putting on a comedy series, rather than characters who happen to work there. Why does this matter? Because the stakes are so low.

Who cares if a comedy show goes on or not? Comedy shows are great, sure, but they don’t really matter – who cares if Ricky and Ron take over, or the jokes are stale, or the ratings are wonky, or they use a joke which turns out to be stolen, etc? It just doesn’t matter – at least, not enough to match up with the weight they are given here.

Sorkin falls back on Christians-getting-angry plots which were great on West Wing, but this is a TV show – if it gets axed, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, to be honest, for the characters either – Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford are already fabulously successful and well paid, ditto Amanda Peet and the cast members. (It’s different, say, with Entourage, where we know if Vinnie Chase picks one wrong movie his whole career goes crashing down).

And this is heartbreaking because everything else in this series is pretty much spot on – the writing is divine, the dialogue snaps and crackles, the emotion is strong, the acting good (I felt Perry and Whitford were too old at first but they grew on me, Peet was a revelation, and there is sterling support work from the two leading male comedians and the chubby secretary; the exception is Sarah Paulson who is beautiful and likeable but not convincing as a great comic).

It’s just got this central issue which isn’t resolved. I think this would have worked a treat as a film – a romantic comedy between a feisty writer and a Christian star with a TV show background, that’s gold. Or as a TV series about something with weight - a current affairs show or a news program. But you keep going “aargh!”. Like when a comic’s brother is abducted in Afghanistan – that would be a horrible thing to happen, but who cares how it affects a TV comedy show?

NB much has been written about how unfunny the comedy segments are. I would agree they are mostly unfunny, in some cases very unfunny – but its hard to be funny. As someone in one of William Froug’s books once pointed out, its easy to write to make people smile, very hard to make them laugh out loud – and Sorkin is more a smile writer than a hard gag writer. This isn’t the main problem with the show, though. What is bewildering is why they offer up so many of the sketches. We don’t have to see any of them (in Entourage we only get glimpses of Vinnie Chase’s acting abilities and movies – and to be honest, even the amount we do see is too much) but as the episodes go on, we get more and more. It’s like, stop it, Sorkin – no one can do everything.