Plagiarism Police: Sorkin vs. Spy

I’m a faithful watcher of Alan Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip as any reader of this blog can tell since I invented the Studio 60 Drinking Game and held a Studio 60-30 Rock Face Off. I’m also a huge fan of the late lamented Spy magazine having just read and reviewed the coffee table tribute to that snarky pioneer.

This leads to the current case in front of the Plagiarism Police®.

Docket: Aaron Sorkin vs. Spy magazine

Accusation: Lifting fictitious factoids from snarky 90s magazines.

Evidence:

Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip "The Christmas Show" by Aaron Sorkin	Spy, January 1991 "The Physics of Santa and His Reindeer" by Bruce Handy et. al.
Matt: They calculated the number of homes with children and the average weight of two presents per child. Danny: What did they find? Matt: He would need 214,200 reindeer pulling a sled weighing 321,000 tons at 3,000 times the speed of sound.	This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons… We need 214,200 reindeer.

Defense: None, he has never been called on this before I just brought it up. My guess is that he would use Yellojkt Plagiarist Excuse® #4. The original Spy magazine article has been widely distributed on the internet with and without attribution. It is so you-biquitous that it merits its own Snopes page.

Closing arguments: If you are going to quote faux-facts, you should at least copy the source correctly. The article assumes two-pounds of presents, not two presents per kid. Sorkin in general plays so fast and loose with his factoids that nobody really expects him to acknowledge his sources. According to some, he barely acknowledges his co-writers.

Verdict: Dismissed for lack of interest.

Sentence: Community service is recommended. Give us more original sub-plots like the New Orleans jazz tribute and fewer ad hominem attacks on the bloggers and the internet that are Sorkin’s uncredited cowriters.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: What have you seen suspiciously cribbed from the internet?

Looking Golden

I love it when people agree with me. Not many do, but the Hollywood Foreign Press Assocation shares at least a few opinions of mine. The Golden Globe nominations were announced today. While most of the news stories will lead with the Leo vs. Leo and Clint vs. Clint drama in the movie department, I want to look at the television nominations because I have some dogs in those fights.

Alec Baldwin got nominated for Best Actor (Comedy or Musical) as the over the top exec in 30 Rock that torments Tina Fey and Sarah Paulson from Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is up for Best Actress (Drama) for playing JesusGirl, a martini-swilling born-again love interest for Matthew Perry. These were both winners in their respective categories in my Studio 60-30 Rock Face-Off a few weeks back. Sadly, neither show drew a Best Show nod, so the final verdict will have to wait for Emmy season to see if either show can get recognized there.

Other highlights:

• Matthew Perry got an acting nomination for a TV movie, but the halo effect from his fine work in Studio 60 may help him.
• If you want a Best TV Actor Comedy nomination, it helps to be on NBC Thursday nights. Each show in the newly reformed Must-See-TV-Lite block got one nomination. Alec Baldwin is up against lead-ins Zach Braff, Jason Lee, and Stephen Carrell. Only Tony Shaloub is on another night or network.
• Heroes trumps both S60 and 30R with nominations for Best Drama and Best Supporting Actor for Geek God Masi Oka.
• The Best Show On Television, Battlestar Galactica is completely shut-out once again despite other cable shows like Big Love and Weeds getting multiple nominations.

The Golden Globes are the "fun" awards show since nobody, except the people with careers riding on it, really take it seriously. And maybe Drew Barrymore will show up with her Golden Globes again.

60-30 Vision

Much has been made of the fact that NBC is airing two different shows this fall based on the ever declining Saturday Night Live. Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, Aaron Sorkin’s bid got most of the pre-season publicity, but Tina Fey’s entry, 30 Rock (which since it’s half as long, got half the title), is a contender as well.

I figured the best way to compare these apples and oranges was to put the common elements up against each other.

Premise

Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip Two new producers try to re-energize a stale sketch comedy show.

30 Rock A new network executive reeks havoc on a sketch comedy show.

Neurotic Head Writer

Chandler Bing Matthew Perry plays Matt Albie, a fired writer brought back to his old show to give it fresh blood. Matt is the most maniacal brow furrowing serious writer since Jack Nicholson in The Shining. And he still joneses for a fellow cast member.

Tina Fey, the former head writer of SNL, is cast as Liz Lemon producer of The Girlie Show, a lame sketch comedy show that needs some fresh blood. Tina is in over her head from the word go, and gets stuck in odd situations that would make Lucy Ricardo look ridiculous.

Matthew Perry carries more authority and Tina rarely looks like she is charge.
Advantage: 60

Network Suit

Amanda Peet just is not convincing as a network head or anything else for that matter.

Alex Baldwin attacks the psycho net-exec with a gusto that makes you wonder if he is Ted Baxter or Dr. Evil.

Peet is completely implausible as a tough net-exec. Baldwin is so crazy, he may be underplaying it.
Advantage: 30

Ditzy Blond Chick

Sarah Paulson does great impressions of celebrities but nobody is buying her as the love interest for Matt. She's also the token Christian.

Jane Krakowski puts the dumb in blonde, but fails to add any dimension to a poorly written character. Rachel Dratsch should be grateful she got spared this indignity.

JesusGirl is a real character. Krakowski is just a punchline.
Advantage: Studio 60 by a thread.

Funny Black Guy

D. L. Hughley plays a Yale trained thespian that can’t do a Bill Cosby impression. He's been known to hit the whacky weed as well.

Tracey Morgan goes completely over the top as a nutjob that makes Martin Lawrence look like Sydney Portier. And he does a pretty good Bill Cosby impression.

Hughley is written too noble. Morgan gets to chew the scenery with gusto.
Advantage: 30 Rock

Show In A Show

Bad sketches taken way too seriously. And they tend to ridicule religion.

At least they have the excuse that they’re supposed to be bad.

Both shows are astoundingly bad and probably would be as rating-impaired as the shows about them. We never saw the actual Alan Brady Show for a reason. Some things are better left to the imagination.
Advantage: Neither

Ratings Disaster.

Opened weak and started sinking like a rock. They lose about half their Heroes lead-in. It has gotten picked up for a full season, but it was a close call.

Lowered expectations probably help, but still not good. It is being moved to the Thursday Night Must See TV Lite block to catch some My Name Is Earl and The Office synergy.

Studio 60 relies on it's upscale demographics to justify ratings that would get most shows shown the door. 30 Rock is a funny over-the-top comedy that could get good buzz with the right time slot.
Advantage: 30

Winner: 30 Rock
Sorkin's sudser got all the buzz, but if you pay attention, 30 Rock actually sneaks in more inside jokes and takes the edgier look. 30 Rock had a "walk and talk" where they go in a complete circle around the studio and realize they haven't gotten anywhere. What a great in-joke and subtle dig at its competition. Matthew Perry successfully breaks the Friends typecasting, but Alec Baldwin has created a character that you love to hate. There's room for both on the rapidly shrinking NBC line-up, but definitely catch 30 Rock if you can.

Blatant Old Post Plugging(trademark pending): Check out my Studio 60 Drinking Game as well.

Update (11/17/06): Tom Shales of the Washington Post agrees with me for the most part.

Going Viral

The other day something happened to my blog that I had always hoped would happen, but never thought it would happen to me. My blog started getting linked by blogs I had never heard of. My blog had gone viral.

About two weeks ago, I was writing a post about Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. It was a snarky sarcastic summary of the first episode. In a desperate attempt to pad the post a little bit, I threw in a drinking game based on the well-known Sorkin clichés and a few things I saw in the episode. I had never written a drinking game before but knew the format well. You pick repeated phrases and situations and make fun of them. The archetype of this goes back to the old Bob Newhart show where you had to drink everytime someone said “Hi, Bob.”

I figured there was some group out there that authorized and vetted the various drinking games on the internet, but there isn’t. After I posted the drinking game, I did a Google™ search for “Studio 60 Drinking Game” to see how my effort compared to the prior art. The only serious match I got was a thread on the Television Without Pity forum board for Studio 60 where they were running a drinking game thread with about 40 comments. Most of them had been posted before the show aired and were based on Sorkin’s other series. In a mild breach of message board etiquette, I made an on-topic comment and included a link to my drinking game. That brought in about a dozen rubberneckers over to my site, which is typical for when I pull that kind of stunt.

The giant entertainment blog Defamer noted that NBC had put up a parody site called Defaker that pretended the pilot of Studio 60 was real and summarized the first episode as if it were written by a gossip blog complete with screen captures as paparazzi photos. To make it look and feel real, the blog had an unmoderated comment section. At first the commenters (some of which had to be shills or sock puppets) were playing along with the conceit that it was a “real” blog about a “real” show. Then the hoi polloi arrived and things got ugly. People were trashing the show and even more, the fake blog. I did my comment and run plug and that brought in another couple of dozen hits. I felt pretty smug about my guerilla marketing since the whole fake blog was pulled just a few days later and any future blog whoring opportunities there were now lost.

A few days later, I noticed that I was getting a lot of hits from two entertainment blogs, namely InsideSoCal.com and TVTattler.com. These sites had linked to my drinking game and were bringing hundreds of readers. Then later that same day, Defamer itself gave a link and traffic shot through the roof. The next day a blog called PopCandy run by USA Today also linked to the game. Instead of the typical 100-200 visitors I get, I spiked at over 3000 visitors. Once the word got out, about another half-dozen blogs linked to my game. The most flattering to me was from Zentertainment written by Sean Jordan which I used to read nearly ten years ago when it was an e-mail subscription list.

Since then, my traffic stats have been doing their inevitable exponential decay back towards my core group of readers. I’ve always fantasized wondered what it would be like to be linked to by Boing Boing or Digg or Wonkette. Now I know. It’s not as big a thrill as I expected. Viral phenomena on the internet do resemble their biological metaphorical cousins. In my case, it caused a brief fever and a quick return to my normal state. A “stickier” meme would eventually spread to dozens of site and cause a permanent build in traffic like Where The Hell Is Matt?

I’m happy with my fifteen minutes of rather minor internet fame, but it’s not going to change my life or my writing style. I write about what I want and it’s up to the blogosphere to decide whether or not to pay attention.

Still, I am now the “I Feel Lucky” hit for “Studio 60 Drinking Game” and I expect to get a small spike in traffic every Monday night when bored viewers go websurfing for drinking games. I’ll be playing along at home too.

Studio 60 Drinking Game

It’s well established that any show I decide to take an interest in is doomed to cancellation. This does not bode well for the new Aaron Sorkin show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip since I have programmed my VCR for Monday nights at 10. Things already look a little grim rating-wise as Tom Shales mentions in the Washington Post today. It seems the numbers for the premiere were good, not great. And worse, after about a half hour, people started turning off in droves. Tom Shales's theory is that the most brain dead show on television is not the best lead-in for the smartest.

Sorkin shows require thinking and he adds a degree of difficulty by throwing in as much visual and aural clutter as possible. For example, during one "walk-and-talk" the rap group with more Oscars than Scorsese is strangling cats in the background just to make sure you miss at least one witty line. Since so little on the show is ever summarized by Dr. Exposition, I had to piece together what actually happened. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can watch it streaming here or catch it on Bravo tonight.

SPOILERS BELOW

The hard-ass network censor demanded a skit be pulled because it made fun of Christians. This made Judd Hirsch channel Peter Finch. The suit demanded that he be cut-off, but Elliott from thirtysomething (doing a Willie Tanner impersonation) kept the camera rolling.

The eversexy Amanda Peet decided the best people to save the show would be Chandler (since that would reunite two-thirds of the Whole Nine Yards dream team), who was flying on 'shrooms his chiropractor gave him, and Josh Lyman, who does all the stuff Hamilton Jordan always denied doing in office.

Chandler used to bang Galinda The Goody-Goody Comedian until she sang gospel songs on a show her target market actually watches. Ironic twist: She was supposed to be in the Christian-mocking skit that Chandler and Josh had written years ago but which had been plagiarized by the current head writers. The religion mocking skit itself was never seen and probably never will be. It's one of those rules about shows-in-shows.

And least that is what I saw. According to this recap, I got at least a few details screwed up. Like Matthew Perry's character, I may have taken too many Motrin for my sprained wrist to make anything coherent out of it.
/END SPOILER

In the interest of Internet traditions, even though the show has only aired one episode, I propose a drinking game guaranteed to get you more sloshed that Mel Gibson at a bar mitzvah.

Studio 60 Drinking Game Rules

Take a sip when:

• Someone makes a thinly veiled reference to an actual NBC show.
• A cast member of either West Wing or SportsNight guest stars or cameos. (Bradley Whitford does NOT count.)
• The camera completely circles any characters talking to each other.
• Amanda Peet calls someone by the wrong name.
• Anyone carrying a clipboard gives exposition.
• The “director” yells some technical jargon to a flunkie.
• Any character starts to drink an alcoholic beverage but puts it back down.
• There is a TV on in the background showing something else happening.
• Anyone makes snide cracks about bloggers or the internet.

Drink the whole bottle if:

• A real cast member, past or present, of Saturday Night Live is name-checked.
• Anyone says “bing” in any context.
• A major religion or a political figure is ridiculed.

And check into rehab whenever:

• A character struggling with a substance abuse problem falls off the wagon.

Have fun, because I guarantee you won't stay sober through the first commercial break.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: Feel free to add your own rules if you don't think these will get your blood alcohol level high enough.

Update (10/8/06): For a meta-update on this post see my reaction to going viral.

Update (11/13/06): Check out my head to head comparison of Studio 60 and 30 Rock. The results may surprise you.