I’m a big fan of The West Wing and I watched Studio 60 with high expectations when it was broadcast. While it had its moments, it was a disappointment overall. A few months ago, I saw the box set on sale and I decided to give it a second chance - maybe I’d rethink it on a second viewing. But I found it was pretty much as I remembered it.
Welcome to the club, Beelzebubba. 
I’m a big Sorkin fan, and I love The West Wing. I own the boxed set and I can get HD episodes via Amazon Prime and Netflix, but I rarely watch the entire series: instead, I’ll pick favorite episodes or a favorite part of a season and watch as the mood strikes me. It’s not unusual for me to sit through both parts of “In The Shadow of Two Gunmen” (the assasination attempt and origin story at the start of season 2) when I can’t find anything else that I feel like watching…and that usually leads to me skipping the third episode of the season and watching the first two episodes with Ainsley Hayes (“In This White House” and “And It’s Surely to Their Credit”).
I didn’t discover Sports Night until well after The West Wing, but I wound up buying the box set of that show, too, and I do tend to binge-watch that one (with just two seasons it’s not as daunting). I love the 22-minute episodes, because it’s easier to watch as much or as little as I want in one sitting. My heart still twinges a little when I see establishing shots of the twin towers, though.
Also, I’m in the Studio 60 minority: I really enjoyed it, and bought the entire series (one season). Usually I’ll binge-watch that after a viewing of Sports Night, or vice-versa.
I loved Sports Night! 
I think I bailed after the pilot. I like Sorkin patter. I liked the cast. But it just didn’t work for me. I couldn’t help thinking “These characters are supposed to be comedians putting on a comedy show. Why are they so unfunny?” I think what got me was that the characters felt they needed to get back to being cutting-edge satire and damn the consequences and to so how edgy they were they had a Gilbert and Sullivan song parody. Nothing says cutting-edge like Victorian era operetta.
Sports Night is still my favorite Sorkin project.
Bumped.
I’m going back and watching favorite episodes, but not the whole thing.
I seem to remember an episode in which C.J., at the White House briefing room podium, criticized the Qumari government for the death of schoolgirls who were forced to remain in a building while it was on fire. I thought it might be “The Women of Qumar,” but it isn’t. Does anyone remember which episode that happened in?
Enemies Foreign And Domestic.
Right you are - thanks! And I see it’s Saudi Arabia, not the fictional Qumar.
Sports Night was an incredible show for the first season. In the second season a totally phony breakup between Natalie and Jeremy and other character changes destroyed its chemistry. I think Sorkin was less involved that season, but I may be misremembering
West Wing was an incredible show for the first few seasons. Then Sorkin left and the show was so disappointing that I had to stop watching. It was like watching Community the season that Dan Harmon left: all the pieces were there but nothing meshed.
Studio 60 was a failure from the first moment. 30 Rock had a weirdness that took time to adjust to but then just grew and grew into one of the great shows in tv history.
Very few shows work from the first episode through the last season.
But an interesting failure. I watched the single season on DVD, and, while it had its highs and lows, I thought it was overall worth watching and had a satisfying ending.
In order for it to work Sorkin or somebody would have to show that they knew anything about comedy. The show did not have to be funny but the show within the show had to have at least a glimmer of comedy. They lost me at the very beginning when in response to bad news about the producer (was it cocaine?) they decided that the only way to get ahead of it was to make a big sketch that will wow the country. Their answer was…. a Gilbert and Sullivan number? It felt so incredibly tone deaf.
Sure, you can say the final seasons of WW weren’t as good as the first - but they were still damned good.
We watched the opus a couple of years ago. What bothered us was the extent to which the “issues” were essentially the same as currently. Just sad to see the lack of progress on so many issues.
Maybe I’m a philistine, but I will confess I really didn’t notice any dropoff in quality after Sorkin left the show. Although some episodes were certainly better than others, I thought it was a very good, sometimes clearly great, show all the way through.
Frasier is, I think, the only other show that I thought maintained high quality throughout a long run.
Funny - at y wife’s request, we’re working our way through Frasier right now.
A little of the 2 brothers goes a long way for me.
Well, I’d never want to do a Frasier marathon, but I could watch, say, two or three episodes back to back and be smiling pretty much all the way through.
Just found this website with great TWW swag, by the way: https://lemonlyman.shop/product-category/episodes/
I’m currently rewatching it. As in it’s on right now as I type. I’m mid-season 6. My last rewatch made me very angry, but this time I like it more, for the most part. I did notice a big drop off after Aaron, but some of my favorite moments and episodes (The Supremes, the shutdown) were after his departure.
Probably next time I watch I won’t like it as much. It seems to be poor expectation management on my part (I think I’ll love it and I don’t, I think I’ll hate it and I don’t).
I’ve spent most of this rewatch crying at random parts, knowing what happens in S7 with Leo.
I love it and watch it all the way through every few years. Currently just started my next rewatch. Couldn’t watch it though during the Trump years, that tainted it for me.
They both made their debut in the same season. I remember Tina Fey made a comment like “If there’s a good idea out there, NBC will find a way to do it twice.”
I loved the West Wing as an actor’s showcase, and it deserved every acting award it got. Even as an unapologetic lefty though, it struck me as earnest and sometimes off-putting wishful thinking as counter-programming to the Dubya Bush years.
Sorkin is a phenomenal writer (I’m especially a fan of Charlie Wilson’s War and Molly’s Game) but he uses his TV scripts for exorcising his own relationship demons, which detracts from the drama for me. The Sarah Paulson character in Studio 60 was based on Kristen Chenowith, with whom he had a relationship, and the religion-bashing around her character was pretty ham-handed (a sketch called “Crazy Christians”?) And I say this an a total atheist who’d probably agree with him a lot more if not for his frequent use of strawmen.
I’ll have to check to see if there is anything Sorkin wrote that I DISLIKED. I recently enjoyed the Chicago 7 movie. And just recently we watched Being the Riccardos - at my wife’s urging. I’m not a big Nicole Kidman fan, nor a fan of Lucy, but I found the movie surprisingly engaging. Had no idea Sorkin wrote it.
Did you guys know that Joshua Malina (Will Bailey on The West Wing and Jeremy Goodwin on Sports Night) co-hosts live commentary of Sports Night episodes every Wednesday night? He’s once again teamed up with Hrishikesh Hirway, his co-host from the West Wing Weekly podcast. They call it Unnecessary Commentary; access is via Patreon.
For me, so far the only thing that fits in that category is The Newsroom. I 
Sam Waterston and Jeff Daniels (and got to see the latter on Broadway in To Kill A Mockingbird a few years ago), but that show just relies too much on/retreads too many of Sorkin’s favorite themes. I’ve watched the first season a few times, because it used to bug me that I didn’t like it, but eventually I figured out why: I’d seen it all before. Usually twice.
Sorkin shares a writing credit with Scott Frank on the mediocre thriller Malice, starring Alec Baldwin. I love Roger Ebert’s review of it. To quote, “Offhand, this is the only movie I can recall in which an entire subplot about a serial killer is thrown in simply for atmosphere.” The revelation of the big twist is utterly ludicrous. If here’s a nadir to his filmography, I’d say that’s it.
Otherwise, I tend to love his style, which is basically “Smart people being really good at their jobs and talking fast while they do it” which is catnip for my brain and my ears. But as I commented above, it’s always tempered by his easy potshots. The widely-circulated clip from the first episode of The Newsroom (“America’s not the greatest country any more”) kinda grates as well. I agree with everything Jeff Daniels says in it, but it’s a dopey setup that I can’t believe.