Beardown wrote:
Great season finale.
I love this show. They cram so many story lines into the hour. It's, intelligent, funny, sad, compelling and witty. That makes a great show. Kudos to the writers. They are the true stars of this show.
Ugh, no, stop. Aaron Sorkin is
not a good writer when left to his own devices. He can do very well when sufficiently babysat (
The Social Network), but when he's free to indulge all his peccadilloes, he's insufferable, not to mention that he lacks what many would agree are some pretty fundamental writing skills.
For instance, he's completely unable to write dialogue. "That's not so, he's got two people talking to each other all the time," you say. Well, yes, or
does he? He either doesn't know how to create characters who exist independent of himself (or Kristin Chenoweth) or he willfully declines to do so. He's admitted as much -- there's some interview out there where he says he doesn't get why fans can say Alison Janney's character said something out of character, because her character is only capable of saying what he writes for her to say. Superficially speaking, this is true; no one was out there ad-libbing it on
The West Wing, but the point he's missing is that good writing requires that you step outside of yourself in creating your characters. We're switching from television to literature here, but while Huckleberry Finn only said what Mark Twain told him to say, he didn't always say what Mark Twain himself would have said; you get my drift? DFW, who at first glance would probably be accused of making all his characters hyperverbose, was actually one of the best at capturing the ways Americans talk, and in fact, putting his characters' voices against his own served to accentuate how well he did it.
Sorkin is also one of the worst exposition/informed-attribute artists going. In going all out to prove that his is a Writer's Show and not an Actors' Show, he leans so hard on telling over showing that I'm surprised he hasn't broken his writing desk in half. Everything we're supposed to know about a character in his show, we know because someone says so. For someone who makes such a big deal out of doing "smart television," he at no point trusts his audience's intelligence enough to figure out for themselves that a character is intelligent or beautiful or a Republican. It always has to be said. Often repeatedly.
And on that Republican thing: writing Will as a Republican is such a weak stunt to me. We're supposed to think that boy, if a
Republican is this fed up with Republicans, things must
really be bad! Well, yes, they are that bad, but like I said with the informed attributes, he at no time says anything a Republican has said in the last 20 years, or anything a moderate Democrat hasn't said, so we only know he is a Republican because he says so. He's the
real Republican in Name Only! It hits close to home, being in the responsible-spending/culturally-permissive quadrant myself, but again, tying back to how all Sorkin characters are never not Sorkin, this isn't really a Republican criticizing from within, this is a liberal Democrat criticizing the Republicans from the outside and then slapping a false "Made in ___" label on the product. If the conservatives had their own Aaron Sorkin, I wonder if that guy would ever write a gay man who said "look, I may be gay, but I flirt with my female co-workers all day, sleep with them occasionally, then go home every night and fuck my wife. Some of you fairies are really giving us a bad name!"
So really, I'm not sure what this show offers other than the pleasant rhythms of witty retorts and pseudo-intellectual patter. Not that I'm against such a thing -- I sure did like the first few seasons of Gilmore Girls -- but at least a show like that was realistic about its place in the universe as a light dramedy on the fake UHF network that also showed
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and
America's Next Top Model. It never aspired to capital-letter Greatness the way Sorkin's shows do, swinging for the fences and missing. I don't see the fun, value, or efficacy of playing Captain Hindsight with news reporting, and then dressing it up in some generic office-romance shit for the women whose delicate ladybrains can't process the Great Men Doing Great Things that are the backbone of every Sorkin production.
_________________
Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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