WarrenEllis - September 12th, 2006
Okay, so, we know what STUDIO 60’s pilot deals with. But what’s the show about?
Sorkin himself calls it “a valentine to television,” and talks about his love for the form: basically, his love for the idea that he can mount a play that several million people will watch (roughly) all at once. yep yep that's what I am liking. that I can find conversations going on about tv shows, because so very many people all are following the same story. there's some good conversation, some life to it. it's where I've found the (sjc seminar style) round table. Which is of a piece with the late British TV writer Dennis Potter’s notion of television as “common culture.” The idea that television speaks to us all, and becomes part of the ongoing human conversation. I’m cheating a little there. Potter was talking about the death of television as common culture when I heard him use the term. What Potter was bemoaning — and by Christ that man could moan — was, in those pre-Web days, a common culture fractured by VHS, early timeshift tv, and the beginnings of satellite and cable service. Which was, of course, funded by advertising. And populist programming sells the most advertising. The small-s socialist, Reithian dream of, at the very least, middle-brow broadcasting discussed in offices and shops and schools the next day pretty much went away.
[John Reith, 1st Baron Reith - Wkp (20 July 1889–16 June 1971) was a Scottish broadcasting executive who established the tradition of independent public service broadcasting in the United Kingdom. He was the founder of the BBC.]
Sorkin, being American, doesn’t even have the tarnished beacon of the BBC to look up to. PBS is an organisation to be protected and cherished, but it’s not remotely the same thing. He has to be talking about network TV. …correct me if I’m wrong here, but isn’t most American network tv just shit? The BBC has the license fee to fund questioning work, and it receives the money regardless of whether anyone likes it or not. It doesn’t have to pander to advertisers. American network tv, however, is entirely driven by ads. If a show doesn’t get enough eyeballs in front of enough ads, it’s cancelled. There are many, many good reasons why American network tv is mostly… well, it’s not all WEST WING, is it?
In order to write his valentine, then, and make his case, he has to elevate the American televisual form into something it never was. (Unless you buy American cable, in which case you have access to some of the finest literary television ever made.) If he’s going to imagine an American show that says something worth listening to using social satire and thereby clawing back the high ground of public broadcasting, then we really do have the same themes as WEST WING back in play: a paean to public service that can only be told by idealising the work and workers of government. Which he wrung some terrific stories out of. Which is all that matters in the end.