It’s Time to Once Again Laugh at the Unique Train Wreck of Studio 60

I recently watched Being the Ricardos and was disappointed by Aaron Sorkin’s inability to get out of his own way. Back in the day, Aaron Sorkin would feature characters who all have IQs of 150, and possess the exact same degree of interest in holding extremely inefficient conversations that are always branching off into a minimum of three tangents per interaction. It seems like Sorkin’s characters possess the listening skills of autistic Onion News reporter Michael Falk:

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I assumed that with his run of “Moneyball”, “Molly’s Game” and “Trial of the Chicago 7” that Sorkin found a way to temper his most irritating elements. “Trial of the Chicago 7” was a masterstroke in writing good Sorkinesque prose without the bad demons: The screenplay believably captured the dialogue of ditzes, stoners, establishment figures, big-time orators, and intellectuals and made them distinctly different.

But “Being the Ricardos”, while an exciting story, is simply Sorkin writing Sorkinesque caricatures which is a pretty bad fit when the story is about show business and Sorkin attempts to give camera blocking the same gravity as a federal trial. It’s also a problem because this story should be about the Ricardos and it’s hard to believe that the Ricardos sounded like Aaron Sorkin. It reminds me of the trainwreck that was Studio 60 which I wrote a blog entry on that I reprinted below