Don’t believe the Studio hype

What an injustice it was to cancel Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (More4) after only one season, the critics have cried. Aaron Sorkin’s first primetime drama, post-West Wing, was a fast, slick, smart and funny exposé on the shallow world of television, we were promised. But the hype is unwarranted. Studio 60 is sloppily mounted and vastly overrated. Sure it’s got a sexy subject and wisecracking cast. Like The West Wing, it seeks to flatter our intelligence. But dramatically it’s a smug, self-satisfied dud.

Sorkin aimed to expose the workings of a show not unlike Saturday Night Live, an institution of the US schedules like the fictional Studio 60. A two-hour sketch show, in its 1980s heyday Studio 60 was allegedly anarchic, but had now grown jaded and tired. In an age of TV chasing a younger demographic it was a dinosaur.

Sorkin’s drama’s first mistake was to attack today’s TV industry so volu-bly in the opening minutes. Wes, the longtime executive producer, spectacularly lost it on camera when told to remove a scene by a corporate drone. Interrupting a sketch, he harangued the viewers at home: “This show used to be cutting-edge political and social satire, but it’s gotten lobot-omised by a candy-ass broadcast network hell-bent on doing nothing to challenge their audience.”

All good stuff, and which West Wing-hankering liberal wouldn’t echo the sentiment? But it’s not original to voice these opinions: dramas about the media always include some broadside against the supposedly venal, intellectually bankrupt world from which they have sprung. It’s the hip way to bite the hand that feeds you. But we hadn’t seen any evidence of the network’s vapidity at this point. The writers’ room was a sea of flannel shirts and Grateful Dead facial hair. Wes’s blowout was airless.

The biggest flaw to this bombastic opening sequence was that Sorkin had every character subsequently compare it to the famous on-air meltdown of an anchor on 1976 movie Network. But this – rather than showing media-literacy of the highest order – merely revealed what an unoriginal point of departure Sorkin had chosen for Studio 60. Simply put, the on-air meltdown thing has been done better, more devastatingly, and more originally, before. In Network.

A facile, self-indulgent air hung over Sorkin’s drama. Matthew Perry (Chandler from Friends) and Bradley Whitford (Josh from The West Wing) played two writers, Matt Albie and and Danny Tripp, drafted in by new studio head Jordan (Amanda Peet) to revive Studio 60’s fortunes. We first met them at an awards ceremony.

They were swapping machinegun-speed bon mots with fellow guests as if Dorothy Parker herself was there, goading them on. But, despite listening carefully, rewinding three times to decipher what they were bloody saying, and then actually thinking about it, it appeared not in the least bit funny or incisive to this reviewer.

Still, we gathered they were brilliant. Tortured geniuses obviously (Tripp has a drug habit, which he then owned up to on national TV). But Jordan wanted them and wham-bam – more incomprehensible back-chat – they were on the payroll. Matt has just broken up with a key Studio 60 player Harriet “Harry” Hayes (Sarah Paulson). Yet Perry is incapable of playing a romantic scene. He does smart (“I’m your boss now and we’re going to have to postpone this fight for the next couple of years”) but gawps like a stunned carp when faced with an emotional crisis.

Every element – script, cast members, direction, music – jangled horribly. Jordan is just a nice lady who talks so quickly that it convinces all around her that she is ruthless, while the song-and-dance number conceived for the end of the first new-era Studio 60finale revealed just how navel-gazing Sorkin’s creation was. This featured the fictional Studio 60’s key players singing about being America’s number one satire show – rather than actually lampooning a political or cultural target.

What has happened to Sorkin? Talking quickly and sardonically doesn’t necessarily make you clever – or a drama zing. You cared about The West Wing’s characters because they were drawn with depth and subtlety. The fast tracking shots were a bonus. Studio 60 doesn’t engage, its characters elicit neither animosity nor empathy. The show is just fatigue-inducingly quick, like a well-scrubbed kid whose hand is up all the time in class. The mystery is why NBC let it run 22 episodes.

Out of the box

— Also last night, a wonderful collection of stories in Andy Wells’s Queer as Old Folk on Channel 4. Alan and Jimmy, for example, were about to get married after 43 years together but had never kissed because Jimmy’s mother had told him that’s how you got diseases. Then there was Roger and Ian, 39 years separating them, touring Ian’s stripper act to hen parties. Moving, funny and candid – and Alan finally kissed Jimmy after they exchanged vows.

— A final call to “get Charley out”. Channel 4 says six new housemates will enter Big Brother(though not necessarily the House permanently) after tonight’s eviction. So even without Ms Uchea, entertainment, of a kind, is guaranteed.

tim.teeman@thetimes.co.uk

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