It would’ve been funnier to me if I hadn’t seen a comedian do a sketch like that (which was insanely funny) 16 years ago. 
I watched last night and didn’t understand the resolution with Tom. I felt kinda stupid because I couldn’t follow along with the story and figure out what the heck was going on.
Now after 24 hours, two pages of thread and dozens of posters weighing in with absolutely no consensus, I don’t feel bad at all. This was just terribly muddled storytelling.
The first half was better IMO.
This show is infuriating because it’s both brilliant and insanely stupid at the same time. Personally, I think it’s Sorkin is a brilliant writer, but he’s now writing characters that he honestly doesn’t understand. So you get brilliant dialog interspersed with smack-your-forehead cluelessness.
If the show was total dreck, it would be easy to dismiss. But it’s good enough to make you watch, and then bad enough to make you mad you watched.
Take the Sheriff character. I think this was Sorkin’s way of trying to say that the stereotypical view of a midwestern hick town and sheriff are wrong - he played to the stereotype, and then had Goodman’s character turn out to be clever, thoughtful, and ‘just’. Or at least, that’s what the other characters wound up thinking, because they were written to think that way.
But let’s think about this guy for a second. He was ready to lock up Tom and throw the book at him when he thought he was a liberal attending a protest. But when he found out that Tom’s brother was in Afghanistan, that alone was enough to destroy evidence, dismiss all charges, and let him go??? Huh? What kind of screwy justice is that? In the end, Goodman’s character came across as exactly the stereotype of a bigoted redneck sheriff, except that he was clever.
I know lots of people from the midwest. I have even interacted with a few sheriffs (in a good way). Here’s the big secret: You could take those people, plunk them down in a police station in LA, and not be able to tell the difference. People just aren’t that different. The goofball DA was another one.
If they did the show as a straight-up satire, then these characters would be fine. But when the show is played straight, the stereotypes just come across as being poorly written.
And here’s something else that annoys me - in a show that’s all about intellectual honesty, sticking to your guns, not bowing down to the forces of mediocrity and network pressure, this show sure is politically correct. For example, did you notice that Tom’s brother wasn’t just a soldier, he had to be a non-combatant soldier building schools in a war zone. Did Sorkin think that’s the only way he could make him palatable to his viewers? Why not just make him an infantryman in Iraq? My guess is that somewhere along the way there was a discussion of that, and they decided to make him a ‘good’ soldier. Bah.
Another example: The idiot DA brings a loaded paintball gun into the diner. He puts it down, and it goes off. But it doesn’t actually hit anyone. It conveniently shoots between two people and hits the wall. It would have been a lot funnier, and a better scene, if he had smacked Danny Tripp right in the forehead with a paintball. But no, they copped out.
The show does that all the time - tries to make a big point, but winds up weaseling out and coming up with an unsatisfying, mealy-mouth resolution that leaves no one happy but doesn’t offend anyone. You want to portray a midwestern sheriff as a redneck? Go for it. You want to show Christians as bigoted towards gays? Go for it. You want to show Hollywood liberals as being insensitive and out of touch? Go for it. But the show never does. Instead, it steps right up to the edge of the conflict, and backs down. It would be a lot better if it was more edgy. Make Harriet a REAL bigot. Make Matt a real self-centered, narrow-minded liberal who thinks he knows a lot more about the world than he really does. There’s some real conflict for your drama.
There was lots I liked about this episode. I liked the speech the network suit gave at the end. I liked a lot of banter that comes from Danny. I even liked some of John Goodman’s lines. I like the Tom character - I think Nate Corddry’s doing a great job. I just wish the show didn’t reek so much of being smugly aware of itself, and the persistent feeling I get that somewhere Aaron Sorkin is patting himself on the back for a perfect ‘balanced’ portrayal of people that in reality he doesn’t begin to understand.
Disclaimer: I’m in favor of gay marriage. I was a photographer for a gay friend at her wedding.
This is a bit of a political digression, but it amplifies the problem I have with the show, so I think it fits here.
The two statements I quoted above are just ignorant. If you haven’t heard non-scriptural arguments against gay marriage, you haven’t been paying attention. But I’m sure Sorkin feels the same way, because he probably hasn’t paid any attention to the other side of the argument either, so he can’t write conservative characters that can actually explain their position.
In a nutshell, here’s the most common argument against gay marriage, and it has nothing to do with scripture: Marriage is a bedrock institution in our society. It protects children, it creates support systems for individuals who are injured, sick, or down on their luck. For marriage to work, it should be considered to be a very special thing. You don’t enter into it lightly, and you don’t leave it lightly. Cultural conservatives would tell you that the epidemic of divorce and single parenthood is destructive to society, and that part of the problem has been caused by a trivialization of marriage as an institution. They see extending marriage to homosexuals as being a development that further destroys marriage as an institution. If homosexuals can marry, then how can you argue against polygamous marriages? And if you allow polygamous marriages, is there any limit at all to who can be ‘married’ and in what combination? What does that do to the institution? What will this trend do to families 20 years from now?
There are plenty of good counters to this argument - I’ve made them myself. But the cultural conservative viewpoint has some validity - there are social institutions in our society that we mess with at our peril. There are high percentages of children in broken homes, divorce rates are high, single mothers have a hell of a time of it. Cultural conservatives might say that we were too quick to make it easy to marry and easy to divorce. Not just legally, but socially. Social pressure can be a force for good, if it guides people into healthy behaviours. It used to be frowned upon to marry frivolously and to divorce easily. Today, no one cares. So is it surprising that a lot of children are suffering under the weight of a high divorce rate? Is it so bad that we preserve an institution like marriage, by not changing an essential part of its nature, which is that it’s a union between a man and a woman? We can let gay people have all the legal benefits of marriage - just don’t call it marriage. Keep the status quo. Resist changing something so critical to the functioning of society.
I’ve heard that argument from stone-cold athiests.
I can give you another one: Our institutions aren’t prepared for gay marriage, and we run the risk of losing a lot of the benefits of marriage that draw people together in the first place. Marriage has rewards: you can get tax breaks. You can get benefits for your spouse. There are laws around guardianship and having the ability to make decisions for an incapacitated spouse that allow two married people to look after each other. These types of benefits help society because they make marriage valuable, and marriage is a good thing. But if people of the same sex can marry, what happens? If two friends live together for a couple of years, are they considered to be common-law married? If anyone can be ‘married’, regardless of sex, what’s to stop two roommates from ‘marrying’ and taking all the benefits? And if people start doing this en masse, what happens to all those benefits? They go away, and people have even less reason to become married.
I’m just speculating but the judge had just mentioned that his brother’s unit is one that gets deployed with minimal notice. I’m guessing Tom’s brother got orders that he was leaving for Afghanistan in a few hours and Tom raced out from Los Angeles to see him before he left.
I think one thing this show is missing that would greatly help it is conflict between the characters. Everybody in the cast and crew of Studio 60 is so cooperative and supportive and dedicated to the show. We’ve got Jack (who’s now turning) and Ricky and Ron (who are barely seen) as antagonists. And with no real internal conflict, Sorkin is free to gather his cast together and unite them against the evil world outside the studio.
Wouldn’t it be more interesting if one of the cast members had a serious drug or alcohol problem? Or if one of them was egotistical and trying to expand his role? Or was immensely popular and Danny and Matt had to try to convince him not to leave the show to do movies? Sorkin should be stealing this kind of thing from the biographies of the real life SNL cast.
That’s my sense too, although admittedly it wasn’t crystal clear to me at the time I was watching it.
Sam Stone, of course I’ve heard or rather read those arguments before, because I know they’ve been made on the Dope. They are the very definition of “specious,” however. You cannot seriously suggest that Harriet should make them on the show. It’s true that people are supposed to laugh at her, but only in her professional capacity.
This is worth commenting on only because it has wider implications for the current culture. The press, in its various forms, has learned that it is safe if it allows voices to be heard making opposing arguments on any subject with the tiniest possibility of controversy, which today means every subject.
But there aren’t two equal sides to every subject, even if you try to pervert them to pro and anti rather than multi-dimensional. Many issues do not have any reasonable, let alone compelling, arguments on one side except for ideological beliefs of one sort or another. You’ve confirmed that gay marriage is one of them.
Sorkin’s problem is that he seemingly feels the need to produce characters to argue moral issues with the same type of oppositional wrangling that he used to argue public policy on the West Wing. Backstage at a comedy show rather than in the hallways of the White House, it feels forced and phony in the voices of these characters in these roles at these times.
Harriet is surrounded by gay individuals in a gay-friendly atmosphere and has been her entire professional life. She has long since passed the point where “I don’t know” is anything more than massive cognitive dissonance.
Similarly, Tom’s parents having a son who has been in show business his entire adult life and a nationally-famous star on a weekly television program for longer than his little brother could possibly have been in Afghanistan could not believably maintain a total lack of awareness concerning that entire world. Tom’s brother’s being a soldier is not an other side to his being in show business and Sorkin should never have intimated that the two were sides that his parents had taken unless he wanted their interaction to turn into a bad Dear Abby letter.
Nor should he have Harriet give her side on the subject of gay marriage as something apart from an issue that surrounds her in her life because we all know that the cast and crew are going to be shown as being full of gay people interacting with her daily, and the wrongs of their not being able to marry will bury her interpretation of biblical verses that millions of other believing Christians find so much not to be controlling doctrine that some denominations are ordaining gay Bishops.
True, that there is no reasonable argument against gay marriage doesn’t preclude people from holding unreasonable beliefs about it with great psychic strength. That’s why “I don’t know” won’t cut it. And that’s why the scene was bad from every angle, not from the lack of an argument that was made in its most elemental form by Rick “man on dog” Santorum. The slippery slope that has people worried is not the one that leads from gay marriage to polygamy and bestiality but the one from religious control over the definition of marriage to widespread secular and therefore legal acceptance of marriages some religions have decided to condemn. That’s the hidden assumption that underlies your arguments, Sam and it’s why they are specious and why they fail. And why there is no other side, and Sorkin, like you, is fooling himself in the attempt to state otherwise.
Yes some people do wear bracelets listing family members serving overseas, including units they are serving in.
The judge probably didn’t know Tom’s brother at all. He most likely got the rank and unit off of Tom’s bracelet. He was established as being familiar with the airbase, so recognizing what the Red Horse Squadron was followed. And yes, the judge was rewarding Tom for keeping quiet about his brother and not trying to use him to get out of trouble.
You might want to do a little research before making statements like this. The 820th Red Horse, while an engineering unit, is not full of non-combatants. It is the US Air Force equivalent of the SeaBees or the Army Corp of Engineers. All of them are primarily builders, but they all can and do fight when they need to.
And I agree with Little Nemo, the Red Horse squadrons are all on rapid deployment status, so Tom was in a hurry to see his brother before he left for war again.
Seems to me a bunch of comedy writers/actors would be making references to classic comedy bits with a frequency rivalling Family Guy and not just pretentious Gilbert and Sullivan riffs, either. I think they missed an opportunity with:
Writer #1: “Pahrump.” It’s such a funny name. Pahrump, Pahrump, Pahrump…
Other writers: [picking up on gag] Pahrump, Pahrump, Pahrump…
Writer #1: [points at one of the writers] I didn’t get a “Pahrump” outta that guy!
Writer #2: Give the governor a “Pahrump.”
Writer #3: Uh, Pahrump?
Writer #1: [menacingly] Watch your ass.
I’m not sure if this is a hijack or not, but I just wanted to expand on this a bit. You see, I think Harriet knows full well her beliefs have forced her into this bit of cognitive dissonance, and I think her frustration with others for not getting that was evident. I think she knows “I don’t know” is an incomplete and unsatisfying answer, but it’s the only one her faith provides. She’s not a homophobe, she’s a deeply conflicted Christian whose beliefs tell her something is wrong and yet simultaneously tell her she can’t judge. So while she may have experienced the friendship and camaraderie of any number of homosexuals, and while she may be able to intellectually agree with everything Matt was saying, her basic beliefs conflict with her experience. When she and Matt were talking near the end of this episode and she repeated once again what she had said, she added, “I said I don’t know,” which I took to be her somewhat anguished admission she cannot reconcile her faith with her experience; she’s pained by it. Because she didn’t actually say “I don’t know” in the interview, what she had said was “The Bible says it’s wrong but it also says I shouldn’t judge.”
I think her character may be just a bit deeper than some of you are giving Sorkin credit for. He may be setting her up not just as a cardboard cut-out person of faith, but as someone who acknowledges the effects and sacrifices of her devotion.
I can’t give Sorkin that much credit. I’m not a Christian or a conservative but I find Sorkin’s views on these people to be condescending. I think it’s clear from characters he’s written on this show and other works, that Sorkin believes that almost all Christians are right-wing fundamentalist bigots and that he’s being amazingly tolerant to portray one or two of them as being half-way decent human beings. It’s clear he doesn’t see the irony in saying “this person is good despite being a Christian” and patting himself on the back for being so open-minded.
I dunno… President Bartlet was a strong Catholic. Was he a little hard on his “Moral Majority” analogues on “The West Wing”? Sure he was. Was it a constant stream of Christian-bashing? Not in the least.
It would be a hell of a lot more interesting, and it would finally be the show I really hoped this one would be. Thank you for putting into words the nagging thought I’ve been unable to focus all along!
[hijack] And something I found out this weekend, it you’re talking Studi 60 cast members that worked together before: Amanda Peet and Sarah Paulson were on the TV show Jack and Jill. [/hijack]
That was when she was first hired for the Bartlet administration. The two women were Mandy and her assistant/partner, and they had just lost their only client, Mandy’s boyfriend the Senator who had just been talked out of running for President by Josh. First two episodes of West Wing.
Bryan I’m pretty sure they’d have to put Mel Brooks on the credits as a writer if they used your riff. But it was funny.
I just get the feeling that Sorkin can’t decide whether he’s writing a drama or a comedy, so he’s writing confusing drama and unfunny comedy. Not a good compromise.
Ah. I think what happened was I missed that episode in realtime, then caught it years later in rerun on Bravo, and in my mind somehow inserted it into the ‘years later’ timeline.
Is she “surrounded by gay individuals?” I mean, of course Hollywood is a gay-friendly atmosphere, but to my recollection none of the cast or crew at Studio 60 has been established as being gay.
Not specifically, but they talk about there being gay members of the cast and crew as a general concept.