Aaron Sorkin, Why Do You Make Me Cry?

Just look at this smug bastard...

I started watching the West Wing yesterday and it has been very difficult to stop. I avoided it for years because I knew it to be the longest running Sorkin show and who has that kind of time to commit? Turns out, I do.


My enjoyment of Sorkin began in college when I started watching reruns of Sports Night on Comedy Central. The show had one major flaw (in the first season) in that it was a one camera show, obviously filmed on a series of sets, that had a laugh track as if a giggling chorus of assholes was following the cast around while they filmed. For one thing, like all Sorkin shows, it is funny but it also has a lot of drama. So, trying to find a place to squeeze in a laugh track in a story about sexual harassment is kind of crass, to say the least.

Jeremy (on the far left) is my surrogate character.

At any rate, I found myself sucked into Sports Night. Which is weird, if you know me, because I don't care about sports. At all. At. All. The premise of the show is that it follows the support staff and on-air talent of a Sports Center type show.  Although team names would usually be accurate, specific athletes and coaches were made up for the show. I like to think all of Sorkin's shows take place in an alternate universe (the Sorkin-verse, if you will). In the end, Sports Night ends up being about sports like I've heard Friday Night Lights isn't really about football. The two anchors of the show within the show are single, one of them is in love with the producer of the show (Felicity Huffman). There are writers and assistant producers and researchers and all of them have their own lives and plotlines. It is like any other workplace dramedy in that respect.

The thing that hooked me, at first, was the rapid fire dialogue. Being a huge fan of Cary Grant in His Girl Friday, I love to watch fast, witty banter. You have to actively listen and watch the whole show because there are references and callbacks that make no sense unless you have been paying attention. It rewards non-casual watchers, which is what I am. I almost never turn on the TV just to have something on or to play in the background. If I am watching TV, that is what I am doing (or watching while I am on my treadmill, but, same thing). I found Sports Night incredibly witty. It is almost never belly laugh funny but it great for chuckles and wry, knowing laughter.

Then I noticed an odd phenomenon. After I got to know the characters a bit, I would find myself just weeping like a shithead at the end of almost every episode. I bought the DVD box set and watched the pilot for the first time, and that made me cry. I didn't want to look too closely at why. At various points in my life, especially when I have attempted to be stoic in the face of hard times or depression, the slightest emotional push from a movie, song or TV show could make me well up. Everclear songs, Woody Allen movies and (most inexplicably) any program where a character who doesn't usually sing has to sing...all these things have made me cry for little to no reason when I have been emotionally vulnerable. So, I didn't give it much thought when Sports Night made me boo-hoo because I figured, this must be one of those times.

My theory was further proven (a bit) when I began watching Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. I liked the cast and I was caught up in comparing it to 30 Rock like everyone did that first season. Studio 60 almost never made me cry. There were a couple of good ones in there but, by and large, it was kind of unlikable. Maybe because I knew that Sorkin was pouring some of his venom over a relationship gone wrong into the show, I found it hard watch characters who should love each other hating each other. It was still funny (if in an off-base way) but not Sports Night good.

I wanted to never stop punching half these people.

The Social Network really won me back over to Sorkin's side as a great screenplay. A topic on which I had no interest, again, was made to fascinate and pull me in. I watched the first episode of The Newsroom and realized I would probably have gotten sucked into that, too, if I still had cable.

This is the first scene from the Newsroom. I love the rant that ends this but it is an 8 minute investment.

Watching these first few episodes of The West Wing, the old waterworks are back. Now, granted, I have been having a tough time lately. However, no one who reads this blog would accuse me of being stoic or not expressing my feelings. I think, now that I am watching a pure intersection of Sorkin and politics, that I get why his writing moves me, emotionally.

As a liberal, you have to be kind of willfully naive about a few things. You have to be under the impression that people want to be good to each other, help each other. We may bicker, disagree, get angry but, at the end of the day, we would all stand up and do the right thing. Sorkin writes the best of all possible worlds. He writes where people behave as if they have honor and scruples.

There is a debate in the first couple of West Wing episodes between doing the right thing and appearing to do the right thing. In the real world, the appearance of doing the right thing (in politics) is the most important thing. In the Sorkinverse, his characters get to do the right thing and not pay the price for it. I realize, this is the kind of world I want to live in. Everyone is smart, well-informed, a little smarmy and ultimately decent to one another. If there are bad guys, they are kind of 2-d straw men to be knocked over by our fiercely intelligent protagonists. This is in no way a realistic or fair depiction of the world, Sorkin's is a world of black and white morality that pretends to dabble in the gray (but always veers back to a tidy conclusion).

Besides being moral and witty, the number one trait of a Sorkin character is selflessness. I have noticed that this makes me cry more than any other action depicted on screen. And I don't mean the selflessness of throwing oneself on a grenade or dying for what you believe in (not to be glib, but that is almost easier because you don't have to deal with anything after your sacrifice) but rather the every day little acts of decency that keep society from collapsing.

For an example of his worldview, in the pilot episode of Sports Night, most of the stories the team covers are about scandals and crime in professional sports. The episode ends with one of the anchors showing his son footage of a Nigerian man setting a sprinting record. The anchor just wants his son to see what sports can be at their best, triumphant and focused not so much on competition but human achievement. The rest of the series doesn't really hit that button again (it isn't a defense of sports week after week) but it sets the tone for all of Sorkin's TV work. That is to say, it is about acknowledging the harsh realities of the world but looking for the goodness in it.

I want to live in Sorkin's world, unless it is at Studio 60. Also, his best character on West Wing is named Josh, so...hurray for that!