Matthew Perry hates interviews. He prefers to give them on set, and never
one-to-one. For our first chat, he has with him Bradley Whitford and Sarah
Paulson, his co-stars in Aaron Sorkin’s new West-Wing-in-TV-land series,
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. The trio bounce around with evident
enjoyment, prodding and undercutting each other like an indie band doing
their first publicity.
I ask if there is a subversive element to Sorkin’s writing.
Whitford: I think The West Wing was an achingly patriotic song to what the
government could be. We don’t sit around a fireplace any more, we sit around
a television.
Perry: If we’re cold, maybe we sit in front of a fireplace.
BW: I was at such a pretentious height.
MP: I know.
BW: You cut my balls off.
MP: Keep going. I apologise.
BW: What was I saying?
From the rest of the conversation, we learn the following: the Studio 60 set
is right next door to the old Friends set; the show has comedy at its core,
but doesn’t need the three jokes a page that sitcom demands; and if Sorkin
asks you to be in one of his shows, even if you walked away from Friends
with millions in the bank and decided only to look at film scripts, you say
yes.
Studio 60 is set in a fictionalised version of the American comedy institution
Saturday Night Live. The writer/producer team of Matt Albie and Danny Tripp
(Perry and Whitford) are flown in to save the show after its long-standing
presenter quits over the pulling of a skit called Crazy Christians. Both men
are fighting big demons: they have “substance-abuse issues” and are cynical
about television. Albie has split up with his Christian girlfriend, Harriet
Hayes (Paulson), because she went on the rabid preacher Pat Robertson’s 700
Club programme to promote her country album. If it sounds a little raw for
contemporary America, you’re not wrong. Studio 60 is Sorkin’s counterblast
to the five years of pressure Hollywood has been feeling.
“One of the reasons I wanted to use this setting was that it seemed like a
good place for conflict in terms of the culture wars,” he explains in his
wood-panelled office. “This is a country that has been polarised, and
popular entertainment has been in the cross hairs for a while. The FCC
[Federal Communications Commission] and the religious right have the
networks on a tight leash, and Hollywood’s patriotism is always being
questioned – that we’re too liberal. In the months and years following 9/11,
if you were a writer, you felt like an idiot. It’s good that that time has
passed. But the world did change, and we’re just figuring out how to tell
the stories we want to tell.”
Although Studio 60 is far from preachy, West Wing fans will recognise Sorkin’s
delight in attacking shibboleths. Albie and Tripp offend pretty much all the
stuffy elements of American society you could name. They are protected by
the network’s first female president, Jordan McDeere, played with a girlish
smoulder by Amanda Peet. “My character is loosely based on Jamie Tarses, who
ran the ABC network when she was 33 – while Aaron and his producer/
director, Tommy Schlamme, were there, venturing into TV with the series
Sports Night,” Peet explains, slumped in a chair between takes, finding
working while pregnant a bit of a strain. “She was charismatic, a bit of a
maverick, and focused on the work and protecting the artist. The fact Aaron
made her a young woman is ... I sound like a student, but I feel it’s very
feminist. I was impressed that this was written by a man.”
Tarses isn’t the only real-life model for Studio 60. In creating a driven
writer who couldn’t let others change his work, worked closely with a
producer buddy and split with a Christian girlfriend after she went on the
700 Club, Sorkin turned to – well, to himself. “Thinking I’m playing Aaron
is a good jumping-off point,” Perry says. “Albie’s a mixture of the ideal
version of what Aaron wants to be and what I would want myself to be. There
areelements of Tommy and Aaron’s relationship, too. Aaronlives with his
heart on his sleeve a little bit more, causing problems in the business
world that Tommy has to unravel.” Perry plays Albie with such a delicate
touch, you forget Chandler Bing immediately. His will-they-won’t-they thing
with Paulson is mapped out perfectly, while Whitford and Peet stumble
closer together after starting out locked in mortal combat. Indeed, apart
from the bile dripped on Bush’s base, you could see Studio 60 as a screwball
romcom.
The problem is, the audience hasn’t quite agreed. NBC shuffled the show around
in the schedules and tried a few marketing tricks. It even ordered a full
22-episode run. But nobody is expecting a second series, which is a shame.
Studio 60 is one of the few attempts to portray TV on TV that plays its
comedy self-deprecating and its romance authentic. Its chequered career may
reflect the new and confusing world television faces. The past few years
have seen bit-torrent technology – a way of turning programmes into the
equivalent of MP3 files – become an increasingly popular way to download
programmes illegally from pirate sites. To head this off, NBC made Studio 60
episodes available on its website, as well as on Amazon, iTunes, Xbox and a
US broadband network. Several episodes top the iTunes charts; and when
digital video recorders such as Sky+ are taken into account, the show’s
ratings increase by more than 10%.
Studio 60 should do good business for Channel 4. It feels like an HBO rather
than an NBC production, and it has one of those likeable, buddy-buddy
relationships at its heart, a thinly disguised version of Sorkin’s
friendship with Schlamme. “I like those kinds of relationships,” Sorkin
shrugs. “Whether it’s the two anchors on Sports Night or the three guys on
The West Wing, there need to be men who know each other better than anyone
else, who are committed to each other and can tell each other to f*** off
without causing offence. Basically, my whole career, I just keep trying to
write Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is on Channel 4 this summer
