What amazes me about Sorkin - besides the watching the slow painful flameout of the show as Aaron Sorkin gets away with preachy, poorly researched, autobiographical wish fullfillment crap so bad (like having the writer and director characters get stopped by autograph hounds outside a nightclub) it's like he snuck into an SNL Backstage Fan Fiction site run by people who never watch the show and then upped the Mary Sue factor by 10 - is how he keeps shoving these speeches about Quality and Art and Not Condescending To The View into people's mouths while at the same time engaging in condescending, cheap-ass writing.
One week he has a character "bravely" refuse to do a joke about a school censoring some play because it would mean mocking a small town of working class people - as if economics excuses censorship or would be a reason anyone gave for killing a joke, ever, outside of a comedy show run by the West Wing staff.* Then another week he has the dramatic and comic foils being uptight Midwestern parents so fucking out of touch they've never heard the 5 billion references to Who's On First which would have saturated their generation. This from a guy who thinks a Gilbert and Sullivan sketch would be a genius stroke cold open sketch in 2006. Good god, the Capitol Steps are more in tune with the zeitgeist. Of course, I knew it would be bad from the moment the plot stopped dead so some of the youngest characters on the show could engage in dialogue voicing Sorkin's personal grudge against internet chat boards (left over from his freakout on Television Without Pity a while ago).
The West Wing was a Capra-inspired fantasy, but audiences were intersted in idealistic projections when it involved the White House (and it was still better researched). When it involves Saturday Night Live, the fantasy projections which are interesting have NOTHING to do with noblity.
Sorkin seems to be projecting a pre-SNL sensibility onto his post-SNL world - as the Chicago Reader put it: "But that's Studio 60's dirty little secret: it's nostalgic for the days when people didn't have any choice. Back in the golden age, when Saturday Night Live was first hitting it big -- which was also when Network came out -- the media landscape was a monolithic police state."
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One week he has a character "bravely" refuse to do a joke about a school censoring some play because it would mean mocking a small town of working class people - as if economics excuses censorship or would be a reason anyone gave for killing a joke, ever, outside of a comedy show run by the West Wing staff.* Then another week he has the dramatic and comic foils being uptight Midwestern parents so fucking out of touch they've never heard the 5 billion references to Who's On First which would have saturated their generation. This from a guy who thinks a Gilbert and Sullivan sketch would be a genius stroke cold open sketch in 2006. Good god, the Capitol Steps are more in tune with the zeitgeist. Of course, I knew it would be bad from the moment the plot stopped dead so some of the youngest characters on the show could engage in dialogue voicing Sorkin's personal grudge against internet chat boards (left over from his freakout on Television Without Pity a while ago).
The West Wing was a Capra-inspired fantasy, but audiences were intersted in idealistic projections when it involved the White House (and it was still better researched). When it involves Saturday Night Live, the fantasy projections which are interesting have NOTHING to do with noblity.
Sorkin seems to be projecting a pre-SNL sensibility onto his post-SNL world - as the Chicago Reader put it: "But that's Studio 60's dirty little secret: it's nostalgic for the days when people didn't have any choice. Back in the golden age, when Saturday Night Live was first hitting it big -- which was also when Network came out -- the media landscape was a monolithic police state."