A Weak Moment: Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip

18 September 2006 | Media, TV & Movies | Comments

Ah, technology. It accelerates and makes easier so many things… including character flaws.

Just this afternoon over lunch I shared with a colleague that I don’t have time to pick up any new TV shows, even though the premiere season is about to start here in the U.S.

I lied… even though I didn’t know it at the time.

In the same way that my goal at home is to pare down the clutter on my desk, I’ve tried to pare down the shows I watch. I welcomed the season finale of TNT’s “The Closer” with a glad heart, happy to be rid of it for a few months even though I find it utterly compelling. I didn’t much enjoy the season premiere of “House” — a show that drags us belly first through the glass-strewn trenches of medical anxiety each week only to comfort us with the belief that a whacko doctor WILL solve whatever’s wrong with us — and will give it up (unless my wife wants to watch it with me… which is unlikely). The once-charming “One Tree Hill” has plummeted into plotlines so absurd that the director of the last “Police Academy” sequel would cock his head at the screen and say, “…wha?” I’m trying to summon up the nerve to cancel the season pass on TiVo, even though I realize that the show is one of my only sources of information about modern music.

I’m still devoted to “Veronica Mars,” hope that my wife and I will continue to watch “Boston Legal” from time to time, and will stick with “Smallville” for another season out of sheer morbid curiosity and because I disliked “Superman Returns” and want to wash that bad taste out of my brain.

Smallville, Veronica Mars, Boston Legal… that’s it. Right?

And then my finger clicked the TiVo record button when I saw that tonight is the pilot for the new Aaron Sorkin drama, “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” which NBC has marketed relentlessly.

I watched the first season or so of “The West Wing,” and found it preachily enjoyable until the results of the 2000 Presidential election moved political reality in this country so distant from the West Wing narrative that I might as well have been watching “Power Rangers” on the Disney channel.

But I didn’t LOVE “West Wing.” “Sports Night” left me cold. I’m not a big Sorkin fan: his narrative and dialogic tricks are pretty good, but he doesn’t have enough of them.

So why did I press the record button?

In part, this is because I know two friends who are sure to watch the show: David and Josh, both ardent Sorkinians, and who doesn’t want to have something to talk about? And in part this is because I know the show is pitched at my demographic and sensibility.

Then there’s the simple desire to be a part of something happening in culture right this very moment… without having to go on a voyage of discovery to find it. Part of my back brain has decided that the new Sorkin show will set tongues a-waggin at the water cooler. And it’s this part of my finger’s decision that interests me: I’m too busy and tired to find something truly new, so I’ll go with something created by a known quantity — Sorkin — that I don’t even like all that much.

Sometimes, to quote the comedian Rick Reynolds, it feels so good to give up.

This is media fatigue.

Fine, NBC. You’ve done right by me in the past. You gave me the Cosby Show, Seinfeld, Mad About You, Cheers, 37 variations of Law & Order… you even brought back Chris Noth to the L&O franchise. OK, you haven’t done much for me lately, but I still owe you. You’re hanging your season hat on this “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip?” Sign me up. I’ll fall backwards into your marketing arms.

Just don’t drop me.

According to Nielsen Media Research, this year the average American has 96.4 TV channels available for his or her viewing pleasure, but that same viewer only watches 15.4. Near as I can tell, my TV is above average: I have over 1000 channels on my Time Warner cable, and what I have stored on TiVo only compounds the overwhelming number of choices that aggressively stare out from behind the screen whenever I turn on the TV.

Confronting my TV choices is like giving a guest lecture to a class of gifted students. At every question their hands all pop into the air: “Pick me! I know! Over here! Pick me!!!”

The word for this is “draining.”

Sometimes, late at night, when my wife and kids and dog are all asleep and it’s just me and the TV, I can’t bring myself to watch something that I’ve TiVoed. It’s too much of a commitment… like homework, and I’ve fallen behind. So I wind up watching something — usually something horrible — that’s on right at that moment because I just want to RELAX: I don’t want to make a serious and studied media consumption choice. I don’t want to watch something that is precisely suited to my tastes. I just want to chill… content in the knowledge that somewhere out there somebody else has made the same choice and is watching the same drivel.

And now, at 10:02pm when TiVo has started recording the new Sorking show, the paradox of all this is that I’m not watching the new Sorkin show live. I’m blogging about it instead, which means that now it will sit in my TiVo… waiting for me to catch up on my homework.