TV is back

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip

In September, Aaron Sorkin returns to television, and NBC, in a new half-hour format show.

Yours truly has managed to acquire the pilot episode (okay, Netflix offered it to me while I was busily rearranging Quantum Leap at the top of my queue), and having viewed it, I am in awe.

It's not an unfamiliar feeling. In fact, this is the third time Aaron Sorkin has surprised me this way, and it keeps getting better and better. For those of you who do not know, Sorkin was the creator of both Sports Night and The West Wing, two of the best quality television programs ever to hit the airwaves. Unlike some of the more vulpine hour-long dramas, these shows are never guilty pleasures.

The series will be about a fictional SNL-type show on a fictional network. It stars Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford as the writing/producing team, and their boss Amanda Peet (who, by the way, is actually pretty excellent in the role).

The pilot features the previous Lorne Michaels figure, played by Judd Hirsch having a breakdown, which I have quoted for you here:

This isn't gonna be a very good show tonight and I think you show change the channel.
You should change the channel right now, or better yet turn off the TV.
No, I know it seems like this is supposed to be funny, but tomorrow you're gonna find out it wasn't and I'll have been fired by then. This isn't supposed--this isn't a sketch.
This show used to be cutting edge political and social satire, but it's gotten lobotomized by a candy-ass broadcast network hell-bent on doing nothing that might challenge their audience.
We were about to do a sketch you've already seen 500 times. Yes, no one's gonna confuse George Bush with George Plimpton, we get it. We're all being lobotomized by the country's most influential industry which has thrown in the towel on any endeavor that does not include the courting of 12-year-old boys.
And not event the smart 12-year-olds, the stupid ones, the idiots, of which there are plenty thanks in no small part to this network. So change the channel, turn off the TV. Do it right now.
...and there's always been a struggle between art and commerce, but now I'm telling you art is getting is ass kicked, and it's making us mean, and it's making us bitchy, and it's making us cheap punks and that's not who we are.
...We're eating works for money, "Who Wants to Screw My Sister", guys are getting killed in a war that's got theme music and a logo. That remote in your hand is a crack pipe...
...and it's not even good pornography. They're just this side of snuff films, and friends, that's what's next 'cause that's all that's left.
And the two things that make them scared gutless are the FCC and every psycho-religious cult that gets positively horny at the very mention of a boycott.
These are the people they're afraid of, this prissy, feckless, off-the-charts greed-filled whorehouse of a network you're watching. This thoroughly unpatriotic--

The show will air Mondays at 10 o'clock.