My wife nails what’s wrong with “Studio 60″ in one sentence

22 October 2006 | Media, TV & Movies | Comments

The kids were asleep; the dog snored quietly in the corner; my wife and I slumped onto the couch in order to watch something together– oh rare and frabjous night!

Ordinarily, we’d try to catch up on “Boston Legal,” which tends to be an entertaining frippery that gets neither of us riled up after, but Kathi wanted to try something new, so we wound up watching “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.”

The opening sequence was vintage Sorkin with a clickety-clack sequence between Matthew Perry and Christine Lahti (summary here), after which it broke to the opening credits and commercial.

“So, what do you think so far?” I asked.

“It’s a sprezzatura performance… about a Twinkie.”

And that nailed it in one sentence… to such an extent that I may just go ahead and delete the TiVo season pass right now.

For those of you who don’t know or care much about early modern rhetoric, “sprezzatura” is a form of concealed mastery. It happens when an artist takes enormous effort to conceal that fact that it took enormous effort to create a masterpiece of art. This doesn’t only happen with art, though. In England, this manifests itself in the late nights that college spend secretly swotting their exams in order to have an air of — you guessed it — effortless superiority. (Wikipedia has a nice entry on this.)

With “Studio 60,” the intensity, the Mach 10 dialog, the tantrums, the inabilty of the characters to smile… doesn’t it all seem a bit much? They’re making a frickin’ television show– and worse yet a sketch comedy show. Isn’t sketch comedy — in the great cultural chain of being — somewhere just below cabaret and just above bear baiting? Sorkin could get away with this more easily on The West Wing because that was about the leader of the free world.

Static Zombie, written by Peter (my roomie from senior year at Brown), has a much longer discussion of this than Kathi’s killer sentence. My favorite of Peter’s post pearls? “Studio 60’s crisis-laden tone comes off as the latest example of self-infatuated Hollywood navel-gazing.” It’s worth a look.