Sorkin starts over with Studio 60

I caught the first episode of 'Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip' on Sunday (it airs a day earlier in Canada than the US...just another fringe benefit of northern living to pile on with poutine and the fact that we get to say that Celine Dion no longer lives in our country). I have high hopes for anything that pairs writer Aaron Sorkin and director Thomas Schlamme.

Their latest series is set at an SNL-type sketch show (though you may well feel you're actually backstage at Wing). Already in decline, the fictional Studio 60 is pushed over the edge by the live Network-like rant of the show's founder (Judd Hirsch).

Unlike their last drama, The West Wing, I didn't fall in love immediately, but I was left with a pleasant enough aftertaste to give it time. It was nice to see Matthew Perry eschew his Chandlerisms and to see some of the Sorkin regulars like Timothy Busfield, Bradley Whitford and Felicity Huffman back in action. I look forward to an at least tenuously realistic look behind the scenes of a world with which I'm unfamiliar, and I wait patiently for some classic speechifying. Maybe I'm just a sucker for highbrow cheese, but nobody writes inspirational rhetoric like Aaron Sorkin.

'Studio 60': Work never looked so fun [usatoday.com]

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