The Mesmerizingly Mortifying Legacy of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
I recently wrote up the “That’s swell, Tom, but your little brother is standing in the middle of Afghanistan!” scene in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip as an original piece for my upcoming book The Joy of Trash, which is very much available for preorder over at Backerkit. I am unhealthily obsessed with Aaron Sorkin’s notorious flop and thought I could succinctly capture the epic embarrassment of Studio 60 on a micro level by chronicling, in obsessive detail, its most infamous exchange.
Having suffered through the entirety of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip as the first entry when My Year of Flops mutated into My World of Flops, I knew that I could easily get 2000 words of literary gold out of a single unforgettable moment of unhinged television drama from the episode “The Wrap Party”
I did not realize that there were two other subplots in “The Wrap Party” every bit as unhinged, unintentionally hilarious and utterly damning as the scene where cast-member Tom (Nate Corddry) responds to his cartoonishly oblivious mother’s question about Studio 60’s “skits” by self-righteously insisting that “Skits are when the football players dress up as the cheerleaders and think it’s wit” whereas sketches are “where some of the best minds in comedy come together and put on a national television show that’s watched and talked about by millions of people!”
Needless to say, the brave warriors for satirical truth who make Studio 60’s show-within-a-show the greatest and most important art since that Shakespeare dude bit the dust do sketches, not skits.
Still unconvinced that his impossibly oblivious parents understand the importance of his work as a sketch comedy performer, Tom yells at his oafishly Midwestern mom and pops, “I’m trying to tell you you’re standing in the middle of the Paris Opera House of American television!” to which his indignant dad legendarily replies, “Well that’s swell, Tom, but your little brother is standing in the middle of Afghanistan!”
You’d think a nadir like that would be impossible for any show to match, no matter how atrocious or misconceived. “The Wrap Party” nearly matches it for camp idiocy not once but twice!
“The Wrap Party” manages to cram an entire season worth of surreally awful ideas into forty-eight impossibly jam-packed minutes.
That’s because “The Wrap Party” isn’t just the episode that gave the world “Well that’s swell, Tom, but your little brother is standing in the middle of Afghanistan!” and “you’re standing in the middle of the Paris Opera House of American television!”
It’s also the camp milestone responsible for a subplot where poor Eli Wallach played a senile old man who wanders into the holy cathedral of comedy where Studio 60 is filmed mumbling cryptic phrases that eventually reveal him to have been a writer during television's Golden Age who got one sketch on the air before being blacklisted.
This affords Professor Sorkin an opportunity to hop onboard his trusty, oft-employed soapbox to deliver overlapping lectures about the legendary greatness of Your Show of Shows and the evils of blacklisting, two things the whippersnappers of today know shamefully little about, in Sorkin’s estimation, at least.
Sorkin doesn’t just want to entertain: he also wants to educate. But even that’s not enough: he wants to uplift them as well. He fails spectacularly on all three counts.
The episode ends with Sorkin surrogate Matt Albie (Matthew Perry) and his best friend and partner Danny Tripp (Bradley Whitford) sitting at the great man’s feet so that they can listen reverently to the man’s stories about Milton Berle.
Both men could be receiving drunken blow jobs from beautiful twenty year old groupies but they are men of substance so of course no sexual conquest could possibly compare to the thrill of hearing an old man tell rambling stories about the distant past.
Matt also figures prominently in a subplot that is less notorious but every bit as insulting, pompous and preachy, but has the benefit of being racially problematic, condescending and kind of racist as well.
It involves the show’s sole black cast-member, Simon Stiles (D.L Hughley), another of Sorkin’s satirical Saints. He’s another of Sorkin’s MEN OF SUBSTANCE and MEN OF CHARACTER so he spends most of his time thinking about how he can use his comic genius and voice to single-handedly uplift his race.
He’s an aspirational figure who we learn in this episode grew up in the heart of the ghetto and got mixed up in the street life and was going to embark on a violent mission of vengeance with his fellow gangsters.
Sorry, ladies! No time for sex. An old man is going to tell stories about Ernie Kovacs!
Then fate intervened in the form of a fellow gangster who refused to let the passionate young man waste his life with meaningless violence, undoubtedly sensing that he was destined to someday work in the Paris Opera House of American television, where some of the best minds in comedy come together and put on a national television show that’s watched and talked about by millions of people.
Simon takes Matt to a comedy club to check out a black comedian he’s interested in possibly having write for a show without a single black writer.
But when Matt and Simon head to the comedy club these gourmands of comedy, these preeminent comic geniuses, these gods among men, are disgusted to discover that the comedian they’re interested in is a cynical, exploitative hack with a routine made up entirely of crude racial stereotypes.
To cite a representative, he frets that being a black man, he just can’t stop making babies, that he has baby mamas on top of baby mamas and that he has so many illegitimate children by so many random women that he’s run out of names for them, and will call his next baby “Oops.”
The material that Sorkin has written for this crude, mildly racist caricature of a Def Comedy Jam-style comedian upsets Sorkin surrogate Matt to such an extent that watching the man’s set he sports an expression not unlike Nicolas Cage watching a real snuff film in 8MM. Perhaps that’s fitting, since he’s killing comedy in front of a live audience.
“The Wrap Party” is hopelessly immersed in the racial politics of respectability. Sorkin makes it very clear what kind of black man he finds admirable and impressive and worthy of being emulated and admired and what kind of black man he finds distasteful and loathsome.
There’s a distinct element of social conservatism at play as well. Sorkin seems to share Conservative’s belief that the problems of African-Americans are largely cultural in nature, a matter of too many crude stand-up comedians, violent rappers and vulgar entertainers functioning as terrible role models and not enough men like Simon, who went from the ghetto to Yale Drama School to the Paris Opera House of television comedy, yet never forgot where he came from or his responsibility to help others in the same impossible situation.
Simon is even more disgusted by this hack comedian’s routine and persona than Matt. It embarrasses him as a black man, of course, but also as someone with exquisite taste in comedy.
Matt and Simon’s discerning comedy palette leads them to hate the comedian they came to the club to see and to love the comedian that performed immediately afterwards.
That’s because he’s the kind of respectable black man Sorkin finds admirable: a quirky, cerebral, low-energy oddball whose idea of a set-up is “I carry the scars of slavery like everyone else.”
Because he is not a philistine like the regrettable gent who came on immediately before him, the crowd is enraged. They boo and jeer, stopping just short of angrily heckling,. “Do more racist material! We disapprove of your form of blackness! Entertain us with the glorified minstrelsy we angrily demand!”
Only Matt and Simon have the taste, refinement and intelligence to appreciate this iconoclast, so they angrily give him a job as a writer on Studio 60. They don’t ask him if he wants a job. They don’t offer him a job. They tell him he has the job and that it starts immediately because Aaron Sorkin cannot conceive of a world where any black man wouldn’t leap at the opportunity to work for someone like himself, to learn at the feet of a true master of his craft.
If that sounds simultaneously clueless and condescending, self-aggrandizing and hopelessly smug, that’s because it is.
Sorkin has rebounded from Studio 60 spectacularly. In the decade and a half that it’s been off the air he won an Academy Award for his screenplay for The Social Network and re-established himself as an A-list screenwriter and television creator. He even has the audacity to revisit the subject of television comedy with his upcoming movie about I Love Lucy.
But to me Sorkin will always be the lunatic behind Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Sorkin could live to be hundred years old and win ten more Academy Awards and when he dies the first thing I will think of will be a dim caricature of a gruff Midwestern man yelling about a brother in Afghanistan.
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