When I was in elementary school, my dad told me that the most important day of my academic life was the first day of kindergarten. It's their first impression of you, he said. If you have a good first day, anything worse will just be a bad day. If you have a bad first day, good behavior will just be a pleasant surprise. While his summary of the past 17 years of my life might have been an overstatement, certainly it is true that you should always try to start off with a bang. You've got to have a great hook to keep people interested.How disappointing, then, that Aaron Sorkin's new series, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, started off ...well, I'm not sure how they did it, but it started both slow and confusingly fast. We're introduced to characters, and then they're fired, seemingly to never come again (at least not in this episode or in anything I could find online). Some characters are fictional, but Felicity Huffman pops in briefly to play Felicity Huffman. The camera moves around a lot, but not in that smooth, hand-holding technique of the West Wing. Instead, we're given a lot of cuts and spinning around characters before we really get a chance to look at them. At the same time, it's almost boring because the plot line is directly taken from the 1976 movie "Network". The similarities are recognized by the script, but that doesn't forgive a pilot episode for having a lengthy, preachy monologue before we're ten minutes into the series.
But, mercifully, after the first segment, the show hits its stride. Little wonder that the actors who finally carry the script off are West Wing veterans Bradley Whitford and Matthew Perry. They understand that, for better of worse, Aaron Sorkin's dialogue requires a certain level of musicality -- Sorkin is a writer who loves writing, and his characters have to love language, too. Whitford and Perry's introduction into the episode also signal a shift from the Network-based plot, and the last third of the show felt eerily similar to certain episodes in West Wing or Sports Night ("What if she's for real?" is actually a line of Whitford's). From the introduction of those two characters, the rest of the episode seemed to fly by. The jokes got better, the dialogue got smarter, and I no longer felt like I was watching a cheap TV rip-off of a 70s movie that I didn't really like anyway.
It'll be intriguing to see where the show goes from here. I love Sorkin's writing, and once Schlamme calmed down from some impressive camera gymanstics in the first segment, the show found a great pace. And there's a lot of material that the Studio 60 team obviously is going to cover. The pilot introduced religious bigotry, cocaine addiction, and media self-censorship, and Sorkin is probably one of the few television writers who can address those issues without being too patronizing or didactic. I just hope he doesn't get carried away with his issues (as some of the weaker episodes of Sports Night did), and that he keeps the characters smart, inspired, and inspiring. That hope for intelligent television is, after all, what we like about Sorkin and why we tuned in tonight at all.
