I'm off the Aaron Sorkin train again: Being the Ricardos

 

The typical Aaron Sorkin project features characters who all have IQs of 150, and possess the exact same degree of interest in holding extremely inefficient conversations that are always branching off into a minimum of three tangents per interaction. It seems like Sorkin's characters possess the listening skills of autistic Onion News reporter Michael Falk.

I assumed that with his run of "Moneyball", "Molly's Game" and "Trial of the Chicago 7" that Sorkin found a way to temper his most irritating elements.

But "Being the Ricardos", while an exciting story, is simply Sorkin writing Sorkinesque caricatures which is a pretty bad fit when the story is about show business and Sorkin attempts to give camera blocking the same gravity as a federal trial.

It's also a problem because this story should be about the Ricardos and it's hard to believe that the Ricardos sounded like Aaron Sorkin. This has led to noticeable anachronistic language (words like  gaslighting or infantilization didn't exist in 1953) and let's not get into the charges of inaccuracy on the part of Lucy and Desi's daughter.

What's even more disturbing is the way Aaron Sorkin unethically uses his platform as a writer to justify himself. In his other train wreck "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip", Sorkin used the show to air out all his grievances with the religiosity of ex Kristin Chenoweth and the show that fired him. The central character of that show (and audience avatar) was portrayed as a misunderstood genius while the other writers on the show were portrayed as hacks. 

Even when portraying other people, Sorkin champions the talent over the producers or sponsors and goes so far as to justify their egos even when they're awful people. This isn't a neutral script: It comes from a writer who famously rejected other writers' assistance when he ran "The West Wing."  Writer/producer Jess Openheimer and the episode's director are both portrayed as dolts who get in the way of true talent. This version of Lucille Ball is a Stanley Kubrick nightmare. The proper response to being woken up at 2 AM by your co-star to re-run a scene is "I am calling an agent and putting a rider in my contract that if I get woken up at this time, I walk." It's the same battle lines Sorkin employed on "Studio 60" and "The Newsroom" and it's getting old. 

When this much is going wrong, the clunky dialogue gets that much clunkier. Vivian Vance trying to tell a story to Bill Frawley over and over again (about a 7-year old accused of Communism) is intended to highlight that the two have a fun bickering rapport like they do on the show. However, it comes off as someone trying to force a conversation on someone else. Desi starting the table read with "I am the President of Desilu Productions and I say every word for the next 30 minutes is something in the script" comes off as over exposition. Bill Frawley kidding "it took three of you to write this" when he sees three names on the script (something standard at the time) is just plain lazy on the research end. And this is just one scene. 

The film has its moments and it's about an exciting topic. The acting is extraordinary. But Aaron Sorkin does not get out of his own way nearly enough and it's unfortunate so many reviewers are giving him a pass. Perhaps, it's that there are two or three films that discuss racism and sexism in the film and reviewers are calling it socially important. 

Perfect Harmony Review

When "Perfect Harmony" and "Sunnyside" both premiered this Fall, I had a hunch only one of the shows would survive due to NBC's penchant for cancelling promising shows (I still haven't forgiven the network for the double whammy of "Go On" and "The New Normal" circa 2013). I got an essay published on this at The Federalist but originally submitted it before "Sunnyside" got cancelled (fortunately, it's been picked up by Hulu). As a result, I cut out the "Perfect Harmony" part of the essay and focused solely on "Sunnyside." Here's the leftover "Perfect Harmony" stuff:

"Perfect Harmony" is an odd couple pairing between an uptight Princeton music professor (Brad Whitford) and the populace of a small Kentucky town. The (extremely laborious) premise for the set-up is that the professor has just been fired and is on his way to bury his dead wife and subsequently commit suicide when he hears a church choir singing awful music and decides on instinct to give them some quick pointers before pulling the trigger. He then decides to stay alive a few days longer through a choir competition against his new mortal enemy and things roll from there.

More than anything else, "Perfect Harmony" is a red-state/blue-state clash of values and the sentimental highs it hopes to produce are from people overcoming their differences and meeting in the middle. The show portrays the small-town characters as eccentric, the viewer loyalty generally leans towards the red state mannerisms of the locals as they are portrayed as far more emotionally open and genuine.

Recent Emmy winner Brad Whitford is far too grumpy to be interesting. Like Danny and Matt in
"Studio 60", Whitford's Dr. Cochran's genius is portrayed as something that goes hand-in-hand with being a 40-year-old trapped in an 80-year-old curmudgeon's body. In truth, it just comes off as annoying.  

Sadly, the show does have a star in Anna Camp who is somewhat of an original character with her perkiness, Spring beauty, and an internal battle between restrained Southern charm and frustration-driven id. Sadly, the show puts too much emphasis on Whitford who doesn't have much going for him. So far, the show pedals in broad characters with friends/roommates Dwayne and Wayne serving as a redneck tweedle-dee/tweedle-dum of sorts (though Dwayne has hidden dimensions), diva Adams Adams who owns the local restaurant. I have a soft spot for Rizwan Manji who has alternately played genuinely nice people and passive-aggressive social climbers ("Outsourced" "Arrested Development") in equal measure.

Not sure where the show is going, but let's hope it doesn't get cancelled as well. (Although, good news! Sunnyside got picked up by Hulu)

Newsroom Review

At best, there's a love-hate relationship with Sorkin's stubborn insistence on sticking to the same tropes for every TV show of his: Characters that have three conversations at once talking 50 miles a minute, male protagonists with godlike egos, characters indistinct from each other in their level of intelligence and temperament, romantic relationships and flirting based on an intellect (even when the participants are friends with benefits), and the list goes on and on.

If people are still watching Sorkin, however, there are things to love: If there's anything that dramatically hooks the viewer, then the stakes and tension can get high. The dialogue itself can be grating but there can be something majestic at times about watching intelligent people passionately go toe-to-toe with each other.

But there's a big catch here: At some point, Sorkin will wear thin. Around "Studio 60," Sorkin's inflexibility with writing even a single character different from the standard Sorkin prototype reached a boiling point and he suffered backlash before moving on to success with films such as "Charlie Wilson's War", "Social Network", and "Moneyball" (one suspects the greater control allocated to directors in filmdom tempered Sorkin's voice).

In "The Newsroom," Sorkin essentially recreates "Studio 60" with a climate more appropriate--a cable news channel--to Sorkin's voice where characters don't look out of place walking around with a sense of urgency and spouting off facts about economics.

The end result hardly looks less ridiculous and at this point, I'm at my Sorkin saturation point. On the plus side, the cast is amazing and in the two episodes I watched (the first two of the third season), this show has the potential to launch some meaningful discourse on various news issues (which I'm a sucker for as a journalist). In one episode, for example, Maggie Jordan (Alison Pill) overhears a conversation by a government official and considers using it as breaking news. This is the kind of ethical dilemma that one hopes the public actively thinks about in order to appreciate the news.

However, as previously mentioned, there's so little differentiation between them. And it's a shame because that's all I'd need to consider the show watchable. Throw in a janitor or someone walking around scratching his head and going "huh?" into the mix and that would do miles for this show.

What baffles me most is that if you make a list of some of the most interesting stars who I never would have guessed were available on the TV market-Olivia Munn, Alison Pill, Emily Mortimer, Jeff Daniels, Sam Waterson, Dev "Slumdog Millionaire" Patel-you could not do better than the "Newsrooom" cast and that's not even counting Jane freakin' Fonda, Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden, and 2 Broke Girls' Kat Denning doing double duty in guest star roles. I'm sure someone like Emily Kapnek or Greg Garcia could use these actors and they don't write such hackneyed dialogue.

50 Different Ways to criticize a show + Me: Studio 60

I recently came across a great article in the Los Angeles Times about three years ago concerning the sharp and rather open criticism the comic community was throwing at TV show "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" (2006 to 2007).

If you've ever seen this TV show that detailed the backstage workings of a fictional version of Saturday Night Live, it was simultaneously one of the best and worst things you've ever seen. The acting was impassioned and there was a palpable drama to it but there were a number of jarring problems with the show as well. It was such a delight to know that people shared the same level of frustration with me at watching this show three years ago. Considering TV critics were in the sack for it at the time and Aaron Sorkin continues to have a career in Hollywood (he wrote the biggest film of this past weekend: "The Social Network"), who'd have thought.

It appears that there was a tremendous amount of very creative Studio 60-hate when the show was on. There was a comedic sketch troupe in Los Angeles who would reenact the truly awful sketches within the show. There was also a live blog in which a rotating group of panelists would critique Studio 60 episode-by-episode and talk about why this show was not good. That I absolutely loved reading every single guest blogger's take either says something about the nature of criticism when done well or the power of that one show to invoke such a large volume of insighftful criticism.

I thought I'd add my own unique voice on why this particular show was such an abomination of TV. Here are five completely original reasons why I didn't like Studio 60:
1. The characters all sounded like the exact same person. That should be the first rule of screenwriting: Don't make every single character in the movie sound like yourself. They were all highly intelligent, impassioned and could easily quote various sources of knowledge which they would throw out in conversation as if they were constantly at the world's most pretentious cocktail party. More than anything else, I wanted to see the introduction of some character in a scene who had an IQ under 150 and just go "huh?" to whatever the other characters were saying.

The characters also had a terrible habit of going on tangents when they spoke, but what was even worse was that the other participant in the conversation would willfully follow them. Two executives would be walking down a hallway talking about how the ratings have taken a turn and all of a sudden one of them would talk about the critical concensus on Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gough. How many business executives would willingly want to hire people who all of a sudden start breaking out into tangents like that? Fortunately the guy who likes to start talking about Dutch filmmakers lucked out by being surrounded almost entirely by people who have the same problem as him, so they all willingly participate in each other's tangents.

2. The laugh track of a show that isn't funny-One of the biggest complaints was that the show-within-a-show wasn't funny. I completely agree. It is interesting to note that the real SNL used the same premise as one of Studio 60s sketches "Science Schmience" to pretty good effect in the Michael Phelps episode. The way that the show suddenly stops becoming realistic and/or entertaining lack of has been covered pretty excessively, but I'm going to add something new to the conversation: How about that obnoxious laugh track? To me, the most obnoxious thing a sitcom can do is to have more laughter than the show's humor merits. Everybody Loves Raymond, Will and Grace and The Cosby Show all dissapointed me on this level. They were funny shows at one point but oftentimes the audience was laughing just because Bill Cosby or Ray's mom entered a room and the audience was just familiar with how funny that character was. It was an unearned laugh.

An overused laugh track stings far worse here because the show was never even funny in the first place. It was excrutiating, however, in scenes set in dress rehearsals or the writer's room where the characters are cracking up at each other's jokes. Because the jokes aren't there, if the characters are laughing at those non-funny things then you stop beleiving that they are competenet.

3. The idea that Harriett Hayes' religion would be an issue for anyone beyond Matt Alvey. Two of the most universally agreed upon flaws of the show were that Sara Paulson was terribly miscast as the show's star comedienne and that the show practically turned itself into a dysfunctional romantic comedy with all the attention between Matthew Perry's Matt Alvey and Paulson's Harriet Hayes.

For reference purposes, Matt used to date Sara but it didn't work out because they had religious differences and they are now awkwardly working together.

It was a pretty dysfunctional relationship which understandably might consume a lot of Matt's thoughts for a variety of reasons, but the show's flaw is assuming that anyone else would care about it. First of all, no one should care about Sara Paulson's Harriett Hayes because she was uninteresting, broody and not geared to be the star of a comedy show. But more to the point, the personal hang-ups that Matt has about Harriett shouldn't be an issue to other cast members (in an opening episode, a fellow cast member teases her for praying to God), the press or the show's viewing audience. The very idea that you could use a joke in a sketch (the episode where they did a Gilbert and Sullivan cold open) wish a verse of that song focusing on Harriett's religious beliefs is rediculous. What makes this worse is that Aaron Sorkin used his real-life break-up with actress Kristin Chenowith as inspiration for that plot so he basically thinks on both a show and a show-within-a-show level that his romantic hang-ups are something that a TV-viewing audience should know.

4. Nate Curddroy-There was a lot of talk about how obnoxious Harriet Hayes was but how about Nate Curddroy as Tom Jeter (he played another one of the actors on the show-within-a-show)? He was also not particularly funny on camera or off-camera either. At best, his comedic instincts might make him a somewhat decent character in a dramedy by Wes Anderson, Sophia Coppolla or Noah Bombauch.

Needless time was also consumed on a secondary romantic pairing between Tom and one of the show's writers that had no believable chemistry. Did the two have anything in common? Was there any reason for the writer to ask him out other than that he was the same height as her or famous?

One of the most rediculous attempts the show ever made to try to imbue serious themes was an episode in which Tom's parents came to visit the set and they tried to link one of thse oft-used "Dealing with Daddy's Dissapointment" subplots in a context that didn't makes sense. The dad's all grouchy throughout the episode and it's revealed that he doesn't think much of his son because he's not in the military. Seriously. That's his dad's big thing. He finds the idea of someone not being in the military distasteful. He basically wants the U.S. to be Ancient Sparta where every single able-bodied man must fight.

5. How obnoxious is the nickname "Big Three"? Coming up with this nickname for the three cast members who are also members on the show-within-a-show was an effort by the show to explain to the audience why the producers and directors would spend so much time talking to and talking about just three of the SWIAS's seven character and neglect the other seven so heavily. It was because these guys were the core of the show? But honestly, what lazy journalistic outlet would come up with such a dumb generalized nickname and what do these three performers have in common? The only people who get nicknames on Saturday Night Live would be like "The Women of SNL" because they're all...you know..female or "The Lonely Island guys" because they were on the Lonely Island before. The "Big 3" is a weekend update anchor and two disparate performers. Plus it assumes the show is that important with such a catch-all nickname.


On another note, please oblige me by checking out my columns

Top 10 TV Shows of 2006

Very soon, my review of Valkyrie will be up here (I very much liked it, 3 1/2 stars).

In the meantime, this is a retread of an article that NBC4 published in 2006. They just redid their website so a lot of my material might be virtually unsearchable at this point. You will notice that all of these shows with the exception of Studio 60, is still on the air:
1. The Office, NBC It’s hard to understate how much the show has outgrown its original premise of an office drone with haphazard career ambitions, the girl who’s taken that he fawns over anyway, the annoying cubicle mate he quarrels with, and the socially inept boss who desperately wants to be Mr. Popular. In the show’s second season and the start of its third, the Pam-Jim chemistry has become a more realistic portrayal of modern day romance than practically any movie in the last decade, Steve Carrell has given Michael Scott endearing traits and even Dwight has been starting to come around. Even better, the show has promoted most of the recurring guest stars to cast members this season, adding a whole new layer of depth. Overgrown valley girl Kelly (Mindy Kaling), politically correct Human Recourses man Toby (Paul Liberstein), and creepy Creed (Creed Bratton) add even more neuroses to an already hilariously chaotic workplace.

2. Grey’s Anatomy, ABC It seems an inescapable fact that there’s always going to be a medical TV show that’s going to be the source of water cooler talk everywhere you go, and as medical dramas go, none have a more well-rounded cast. Accomplished actors Isiah Washington (Hollywood Homicide) and Sandrah Oh (Sideways) along with comedic actress Kate Walsh (Kicking and Screaming, Showbiz Show) play meaty supporting roles, and Chandra Wilson as the resident disciplinarian is excellent. Contrary to popular perception, the show doesn’t ignore the hospital setting in favor of juicy romance stories, but it does effectively make the stories human by focusing less on the medical jargon.



3. America ’s Got Talent While it was clear that the answer to the question “Does America have talent?” would be an obvious yes because it is a big country, you would still be pretty amazed by the quality of the acts that chose to answer this reality show’s call. Some of the acts worth tuning into included the homemade hiphop-acapella group At Last, the tap-dancing-and-fiddling family act Celtic Spring, a rapping Granny, and the bluesy Millers Brothers among so many others. Combined with a vaudeville-meets-reality-TV atmosphere and a panel of judges that includes a Brit that actually makes sense when he talks in Piers Morgan and nitpicky star David Hasselhoff on a career rebound, and this was THE reality show of the year.

4. American Idol On second thought, don’t forget American Idol. This season, the show had one of its most talented from top-to-bottom and uniquely diverse casts. Despite Cowell’s insults to the contrary, Ryan Seacrest’s star power continues to grow and Paula, Simon, and Randy all still are prevalent icons in pop culture today. How much longer until this show runs out of talented singers is a mystery, but this season the show was as strong a facet of pop culture as ever.

5. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, FX The dialogue doesn’t skip a beat and underneath all the bickering, there really is a lot of love between the lifelong friends who own a bar in Philly and share a common narcissistic outlook on life. The addition of Danny De Vitto to the emsemble is pitch-perfect casting.



6. 30 Rock/Studio 60, NBC Each show, about the fascinating topic of backstage comedy, has something the other half doesn’t, so put together they make one excellent TV show. Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 tackles serious issues with insight, and it offers very fleshed out characters except for the fact that none of them have a sense of humor. Unfortunately, that is kind of vital to a show about comedy. On the other hand, 30 Rock doesn’t have as much depth, but its characters convincingly belong on a comedy show. It also boasts two of today’s most appealing comic actors in Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey. If only one can learn from the other, NBC would have a hit.






7. Ugly Betty, ABC James Poniewozik of Time Magazine had a good point in his November 20th article that Ugly Betty really is the new face of the American dream. “Smart and sweet-hearted, she embodies the Puritan-Shaker-Quaker principle of valuing inner good over outer appearance. She's as Norman Rockwell as a chestnut-stuffed turkey,” he writes. For those not wanting to look that deep under the surface, the show is a fairly entertaining dramedy about a fish-out-of-water that exudes a lot of charm.

8. Heroes, NBC At a point when the entire superhero genre in films and TV is pretty much made of recycled comics material, part of the appeal of Heroes is that it’s fresh, completely original, and entirely unpredictable. Played out as a serial like Lost was last year, the show grounds the world of superheroes firmly in everyday reality, revolving around a group of people scattered across the globe who are slowly discovering and coming to terms with their supernatural powers. The episode plays out through multiple storylines being weaved together and more often than not each individual one is interesting enough to be able to sustain itself. The show is also becoming known for the character Hiro Nakamura (Masi Oka), the Japanese computer programmer who possesses childlike giddiness over his ability to teleport.

9. 30 Days, FX Morgan Spurlock’s shtick of investigative-reporting-by-experiencing is transferred from the movies (Supersize Me) to the TV screen with decidingly interesting results. Morgan Spurlock spends 30 days in a Richmond prison, and various other people spend a month outside their comfort zone. An abortion clinic director moves into a pastor’s motherhood clinic, a conservative moves into San Fransisco’s gay community, and an anti-immigration advocate moves into a bordertown with a family of illegal immigrants. This is one of the few reality shows to escape the sensationalistic clichés of the format: people don’t lose or win, they just get enlightened and by watching them, we do as well.

10. Best Week Ever, VH1 Possibly the only good thing VH1 has ever done, the show works as an offbeat alternative to the now more mainstream Daily Show where clips of news events, celebrity shenanigans and the highlights of the week are shown and a collection of comedians take turns sounding off on them and as of late, they’ve gotten surprisingly good within their format. The quality is far better than commercialized nostalgia-fests of VH1’s Best Week Ever.

Someone get Aaron Sorkin a script doctor

I don't know much about screen writing and can't really do it myself but it seems like an obvious rule that if you want to have a prolific career you are aloud to write characters that are like you, but to give contrast, you need to be add at least a few characters that aren't like you.

I recently watched one of Woody Allen's movies and just got a little tired of it because he's just made too many movies for someone with his lack of range. He is very innovative, no question, and he mixes things up (Sweet and Lowdown didn't seem much like a Woody Allen film, for example), so it's kind of up in the air, but most of Woody Allen's characters, however, are the same. They're usually engaged in some creative industry, Jewish, from New York, self-possessed, self-aware, incapable of taking relationships and not making them more complicated than they are, etc.Aaron Sorkin suffers from that same problem immensely. I really didn't like Sports Night because it just seemed really phony and the clichés started growing and growing until, after enough viewing, every bit of dialogue could be predicted a mile away.

I didn't bother with West Wing but because I have an interest in Saturday Night Live and the comic industry (I've read two books on the behind-the-scenes workings of Saturday Night Live), I've tuned into this one, and there's no doubt it has some great stuff in it. The characters are really great and it really has a keen eye for its topic. From the first to the second episode, however, my annoyance with the dialogue grew and I'm worried that like Sports Night that is going to increase with each episode, to the point where I'm not willing to take the good with the bad and I'll just be forced to ditch the show. Like Sports Night, the characters:
-All have ADD, they can't discuss less than 3 topics at once
-They all complete each other's sentences like married couples (Robert Altman did this a lot in films like MASH and was considered a revolutionary for it, but Sorkin pushes it to annoying extremes)
-They are all highly intelligent but at the same time they all have really bad tact every once in a while and bring up the wrong thing to say at the wrong time
-They usually have some conflict with someone else, and often are entangled in some work-related relationship which they can't discuss in a conversation without discussing 2 or 3 things at a time with them.

Just for the heck of it, could Aaron Sorkin have thrown in a big, slow guy who will just say "huh" in response to what the other characters are saying?

Worst of all, the characters have the same sense of humor, a kind of witty and unapolagetically smart irony. This is really bad for a dramatic portrayal of a comedy show. While you don't need to necessarily be funny for an hour drama show, you need to realistically portray funny people. Watch the show and ask yourself are Nathan Corddroy, Sarah Paulsen, D.L. Hughley, and Matthew Perry's characters actually funny? Even when they're performing in the show-within-a-show scenario, are they even remotely making you laugh? Sarah Paulsen's character, a born-again Christian, who's just-ended relationship with Matthew Perry is very much at the center of the drama. She's self-deprecating about her religion and slightly whimsical but beyond that, she's not remotely convincing as a funny person, and has yet to say or do anything funny except to provide a light-hearted moment to ease the mood in the way that dramas like Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing might do.

Perhaps, the point of the pilot was to show that they, in fact, weren't funny, but the drama is that hopefully the two new writers will make the show funny. Still, that sets the bar pretty high for Sorkin and company to make us laugh and I'm not sure if he can reach it. I can't imagine it being that hard considering D.L. Hughley is an acclaimed stand-up comedian and Matthew Perry was already successful at being funny on a TV sitcom. This show has great potential but Aaron Sorkin needs to get someone else involved in the writing process who can provide a slightly different voice to his scripts, preferably a funny one, so when we watch it at home, we'll
have the feeling that we're watching more than one character.