You Have Failed Me For the Last Time (Probably.)

Dammit, Aaron Sorkin, you and I are through. I'm breaking up with you. It was good for a while; we had a lot of good times, you and I. Your friends Tommy Schlamme and Snuffy Walden were cool to hang around with, and they brought a lot to the table, but it's just not working anymore.

I just got done watching the series finale of Studio 60, and this is the decision that I have made. Much like actual breakups, I miss the way things were, but you can't reclaim the past. The potential for greatness remained, but it's just not the same. Suddenly, there were obvious axes to grind and morality to preach and a really boring/irritating relationship arc to get bogged down in. Everything was so promising, and for a while, I thought it could be like it was in the past, but alas... Somewhere, buried, is the stuff that made me want to work on a Sorkin show so badly I'd stab a man, but it's not that sort of relationship anymore. Lately, all we do is fight, and I rail against the fates asking why things can't be the way they used to be. I'll pop in the West Wing DVDs, or hunt for Sports Night, or even gain some solace in the bits of S60 that were good. All it does, though, is prompt me to ask why it can't be like that all the time.

This is all probably a pointless excercise: I'd probably come back to Sorkin, if given the option. You don't forget that kind of thing, and there's always, quietly, the hope that you can get back to where you were when things were good. Josh Malina's going to come walking down the hall, talking quirkily with Brad Whitford, and it'll be like nothing ever changed. But you can't count on that, and I've gotten mad too many times at Sarah Paulson and Matthew Perry barely salvaging conversations that real people don't have to fall back into it that easily. Sorkin's going to have to prove to me that it can consistently be like it used to be, or that we can at least meet somewhere in the middle. Perhaps I'll see other television shows for a while, but when the name comes up on my screen, it's likely that it'll still hurt. We'll see. I don't wish him ill - I just want it to be better.

Sorry, Aaron, but it's for the best.

Dammit, why couldn't that show be good? I really liked... everything I've said in previous posts. We almost made it. Damn.

This is the Jump.

It Would Be Difficult to Be a Bigger Nerd

So. You can feel free to ignore this post, if you're some sort of connoisseur of quality writing, or in-depth analysis, because I'm just going to tell you that I wish I had been watching TV with someone, rather than by myself tonight, because I found myself to be very clever.

First, the only show I watched was Battlestar Galactica, which immediately limits my co-audience to people who aren't put off by the fact that the drama takes place in space, where there are robots-what-look-like-humans who are trying to kill our protagonists.
It's good drama, most of the time. Crisp writing. Plot twists. Good acting. So, get over yourself about the robots/space/future/imaginary-military stuff. You watch cop dramas, right? You watch 24? That's equally unbelievable - it's the story that's important.

But I digress. The two delightful things were as follows:

1) There's a guy who's on trial for being a bastard and letting a bunch of the robots-what-look-like-people kill a bunch of the people-who-are-in-fact-people-unless-they're-robot-sleepers-in-disguise. Bad crazy, president, bad! So, during this trial (in spaaaaaace), the prosecuting attorney lets us know that he, due to the allegations of genocide, must pay the Ultimate Price.

Clearly, Gaius Baltar will have to live with the Farrises[1]. And that's a television show I'd watch religiously. I'm going to pitch that as a television show, actually. As soon as I wrap my mind around it and can condense it into a sentence or two. Because right now it reads like this:

So, this genius scientist guy who's currently all scruffy and Jesus-looking has this megalomania thing going on, as genius scientists are wont to do, right? He's almost wiped out humanity twice, he found out his girlfriend was a robot, initially bent on the destruction of the human race, and he currently is hallucinating his sexy robot girlfriend and writing polemics on the rising aristocracy. He has to live with a college marching band director who's even weirder, and his wife, who is a total mystery, but briefly was thought to be a vampire. (This was later proven to be untrue. Or at least unlikely.) Hijinks ensue.

2) This is less involved. One character says, "I have a feeling about [something something]," leading the second character to say "Just a feeling?" Clearly, I must pause the TiVo, and sing Boston's "More Than a Feeling," briefly. I then un-pause the TiVo, to hear the character say "More than a feeling..."

I cheer.

[1]If you were never in NUMB, this was an actual conversation, once upon a time: "Then he'll have to pay the ultimate price." "He'll have to move in with Mr. Farris?" Of course, when he got married, it got amended to "the Farrises." I appreciate the correction to that quote, if it needs a correction.

This is the Jump.