Truth-Telling

If the truth is uncomfortable, the American audience would much rather not hear it.

Truth that’s uncomfortable? Truth that’s unseemly? Truth that’s ugly? I’d prefer a story with a happy ending, thank you.

The two top TV writers over the last couple of decades, David E. Kelly and Aaron Sorkin, have had unique relationships with truth-telling. Let’s take a look.

Sorkin and truth-telling

Sorkin had Toby. In The West Wing, Toby was the truth-teller. And quite early in the series, he justly calls himself “the kid in the class with his hand raised that nobody wants the teacher to call.”

Toby was the guy who said the bad things out loud, because he couldn’t stomach lies or self-delusion. Toby stared the truth in the face even when it hurt him.

The first time we saw Toby’s inability to keep his mouth shut was in the middle of a basketball game with the president of the United States, “Oh, this is perfect, you know that? This is a perfect metaphor. After you're gone, and the poets write, 'The Legend of Josiah Bartlet,' let them write you as a tragic figure, sir. Let the poets write that he had the tools of greatness, but the voices of his better angels was shouted down by his obsessive need to win.”

How many people in life do you know who will tell you your faults to your face? Are they loved? Are they shunned?

When Toby’s twins are born, Toby shares his feelings with Leo.

“I don't know,” he says. “For nine months, you're hearing how this is gonna change your life, and ‘You've never loved anything like this’, and ‘My God, the love’ and ‘Nothing's gonna be important any more.’ It just never really felt to me like I was someone who had the capacity for those feelings. Plus, you know, I like what's important to me. I want it to stay important. I want to be able to do it well.”

Leo says, “What do you mean, you don't have the capacity? Of course you're gonna be a great father. Of course you're gonna love your kids the way you're supposed to, the way other fathers—”

Toby interrupts him, “My God, Leo, we look around, we see that's not true. It's not automatic.”

Some parents don’t love their kids, and Toby knows that. Some parents treat their kids horribly, and Toby knows that. Some mothers feel bad that they don’t love their kids right away, not knowing it’s a process, and that it takes time. Toby doesn’t fall for that and even dares to admit that he is very different from what a father is supposed to be.

Another time, the president and Josh were shot. The president was all right, but Josh’s condition was critical. It was iffy if he would make it out of surgery.

Donna, Josh’s assistant who cares deeply for him, rushes in to the hospital, only knowing the president’s been shot. In a room full of friends, only Toby speaks, and says, “Donna. Josh was hit.”

“Hit with what?” Donna says.

Toby: “He was shot--in the chest.”

C.J. adds, “He's in surgery right now.”

Donna is in shock. “I don't understand. I don't understand, is -- is it serious?”

And the truth-teller gives it to her straight, without sugarcoating it, “Yes, it's critical. The bullet collapsed his lung and damaged a major artery.”

How many people do you know who don’t – and won’t – sugarcoat the awful truth for us?

Sorkin, of course, also knows how to make fun of it when he wants to. Because Toby isn’t only a truth-teller, he is a pessimist. Andy, Toby’s ex-wife, now pregnant with his child, says that she’s worried about how Toby will raise the kids.

“I do worry about the kids,” she tells him. “Because instead of showing them that the world is for them, you're going to be telling them that they have to work hard in school so they can bone up for a life of hopelessness and despair.”

Toby, not backing down, responds, “Wouldn't it be ironic if our kids were the only ones who were properly prepared?”

When Sorkin left the series after four seasons, Toby stopped being the truth-teller.

Kelley and truth-telling

Kelley’s palette of truth-telling is greater than Sorkin’s. Whereas Sorkin, in writing The West Wing, Sports Night, and Studio 60 only had Toby as a truth-teller, almost all of Kelley’s characters are truth-tellers at quite a few points of their lives.

But Kelly does us one better than that. He doesn’t let the need for everything to be resolved well get in his way. Whereas Sorkin ended the scene quoted above (in which Toby shared his worries about his being a bad father) on the best side possible (Leo tells Toby, “I’m not talking about everybody. I’m talking about you and I’m telling ya, it’s a mortal lock. It’s guaranteed”), Kelly tends to do the opposite.

One time, in Chicago Hope, Alan Birch, the hospital’s lawyer, appears before a committee that holds the future of Chicago Hope in its hands. It doesn’t go well. He gets blindsided and his ass is handed to him. When he comes back to the hospital to prepare for the next session, Dr. Phillip Waters, his boss, reads him the riot act. Later on, Birch appears before the committee prepared, legally beats the aggressive committee to a pulp, and wins the day.

That evening, Dr. Waters comes to Birch’s room, to mollify matters (as usually happens in most American shows). Birch is busy working. I get it, he says. I’ve proven myself a hundred times before, and yet every day I have to prove myself to you as if I’m starting from zero. I get it. You would never have treated any of the surgeons this way. I get it. I’m not one of the guys. I get it. I’m just your lawyer.

And as Birch says these things, he leads Dr. Waters out of the room. For a second, Waters is standing with his back to the open door. He opens his mouth and turns around, only to find the door gently closing in his face.

He then leaves.

Birch was right, and David E. Kelley wouldn’t write a sappy ending just because it's the expected thing to do. Any other writer on any other show would have let Walters come into the room again and ‘explain’ things and show how everything is actually okay. But it isn't. Kelley leaves the painful truth hanging there, for us to see and feel.

Kelley in his truth-telling, does us even one better than that: He goes out and seeks the truth, showing us what really exists behind our actions.

Here are a couple of secrets that Kelley outed during his run on Picket Fences.

One time, Jimmy Brock, the sheriff, and Jill Brock, his wife and a doctor, are having Jill’s father over along with Max, one of Jimmy’s deputies, for dinner. Jill’s father, a professor, keeps making jokes at Max about the ineptness of policemen. The great career as a surgeon that Jill had given up to live as a doctor in this town is also mentioned in passing.

Spirits are heated and things are said. Jill’s father accuses Jill of having grown distant from him, of never calling, of never talking the way they used to. When things get more heated, Jimmy tells him that it’s all his fault. The second Jill met Jimmy, she started to feel her father’s lack of acceptance. Jimmy’s not the intellectual she deserves; he’s a stupid policeman; she could do better. And that, says Jimmy, is why Jill grew distant from you.

Jill’s father is shocked. He turns to Jill and asks her, Is that true? Did you feel that way?

Jill, feeling like a little girl, nods.

Jill’s father then turns to Jimmy. I can’t argue with what she feels, he says, but she didn’t get it from me. I think you’re the exception to the rule, he continues, you’re one of the bravest and smartest men I’ve ever met. Whatever it is that’s going on here, it doesn’t come from me.

Jimmy’s eyes move from Jill’s father to Jill. He’s right, he says. It does come from you. It’s always come from you.

And he’s right. The disapproval Jill ‘picked up on’ came from her and from her own judgments of Jimmy, the man she eventually married. And she kept feeling like this all these years. And that’s an ugly and terrible truth for a married couple to learn. (And if you want to know what happened next, watch the series.)

Another time, Jimmy’s ex-wife comes to town with a surprise: She wants to have another kid, and she’s been trying to get pregnant for quite a while. Unfortunately, it turns out that she has a special genetic disease that allows her to conceive only with genetically-compatible men - only one out of about 75,000 men is a viable candidate (“And how many have you tried?” asks Jill.) And so it turns out that by a freak coincidence Jimmy is one of those men (since they have already had a daughter, Kimberly, who is now a teenager). And she wants his sperm.

Jimmy’s ex doesn’t even want to have sex with him. A few years ago, they had frozen his sperm. She just wants his okay.

When Jimmy says no, she looks at him, squints her eyes, and says, You know what, I don’t need your approval, I’m going to do it.

As you can guess, a big brouhaha ensues, at the end of which she decides not to go through with her plan. But then, standing by her daughter near her car, she admits her true motive: With Kimberly going to college soon, she won’t have a reason any more to come and be in Jimmy’s life. And she wanted and needed a reason to still be around. She is, after all those years, still in love with him.

Now, who else would tell you such truths?

Eli's Coming: Why 'Studio 60' Fell

So Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip fell. What happened?

Sorkin Got Too Cocky

Aaron Sorkin, writer of most Sports Night episodes, the first four seasons of The West Wing, and Studio 60, got too cocky. It’s easy to understand how he got cocky. In his last gig, writing and creating The West Wing, he had made a drama about issues one of the most popular shows on TV. It had seemed like everything he touches turns into gold.

Matthew Perry, playing the writer on Studio 60, seemed to be saying things that the writer writing him now believed.

Time and again, Perry told other writers that if you’re really good, you’ll make it in Hollywood, so why don’t you get your act together. This is not true, but hard to disprove. It is easy to prove with actors, though. There are droves of supremely talented, past actors that have proven themselves in Hollywood but can’t get a gig today for various reasons. If it’s true with actors, it’s probably true with other artists, like writers.

Time and again, Perry’s character seemed to think that if you’re really talented, then whatever you write is good. That is not true, either. There are many styles, and even talented writers can be terrible at other forms of writing. But at the end of the day your story’s good only if you write about something you really care about.

In addition, Sorkin was sure that his writing was working because he was so freaking talented. Unfortunately, just because you’re better than anyone else in Hollywood (but one), that doesn’t mean that what you wrote today is any good. In fact, the more cocky you are that your craft is good enough, the less you search your soul for something good to write about.

The Show Wasn’t About Anything Important

Shows have volume and weight.

An hour-long show has to carry more volume and heft than a half-hour show. Otherwise, something feels wrong and out of balance.

The West Wing had appropriate volume for its length. Even CSI has appropriate volume for its length. Sports Night was appropriate for a half-hour show. Studio 60 had enough volume to justify 15-minutes of TV or, at most, 30 minutes. It wasn’t actually about anything.

Sorkin had a chance to talk about every subject in the world. He had set up an SNL-like environment that can take on any issue in the world, in the same way the west wing in The West Wing could tackle any issue in the world. Instead, he’d made it a dating show. An hour-long drama about relationships is great, but then you have to get elbow-deep as, say, Thirtysomething or My So-Called Life did.

Sorkin and Decadence

The show was about decadent people. Although in the pilot, the show’s leading men fought for their morals, in later episodes the decadence of Hollywood had spread to them.

One time, Lauren Graham was a guest on the show. Matt insults her, deeply, then asks for her phone number. Which he gets.

Danny, Matt’s friend, gets some extremely stupid girls to come to a party so that Matt can get over the woman he loves. Even though none of them can grasp the idea of what ‘writing the show’ means, Danny still tries to schmooze them.

Sorkin wrote those things because that’s what happens in Hollywood. But are those the people you want us to root for? Sorkin’s characters were never like this before.

In addition, the Hollywood norm of judging people by their salary, of people with lesser salaries not having the complete right to talk to people with higher salaries or, god forbid, date them, was rampant in the show. Hollywood’s decadence got to Sorkin.

The Actors

Although we don’t usually talk about acting, a bit of Studio 60’s problems goes to tremendously horrible casting choices. (Sorkin’s choices, no doubt.)

Bradley Whitford, Steven Webber, and Timothy Busfield gave virtuosic performances. And Merrit Wever, who had a small part as Suzanne, Matt’s assistant, was great.

Matthew Perry should have given a great performance, too. He was hired to play a man who knows he can be funny whenever he wants to be, but usually chooses not to, a role we all know he can do. But Perry took the dramatic side of his character, and magnified it so much as to overshadow everything else, bringing down his own character’s pace and rhythm, the overall mood, and the occasional comic lines.

Next, Amanda Peet may be hired to play many parts, but she shouldn’t be hired to play an alpha female. She isn’t one, and there are many strong women who don’t have to raise an eyebrow to be one of the strongest people in the room (Christine Lahti, for example, who had a small role in the middle of the season). In addition, Amanda Peet isn’t secure enough to try anything new. In the beginning, she chose to play an alpha female by getting a sexual ‘zing’ every time she manipulated and/or got her way. That’s not how it works in reality and it destroyed the believability of her character.

Next is Sarah Paulson. Every scene she is in has crap timing, which to the audience translates as “something’s wrong here but I can’t put my finger on it.” Now, for some reason, Sorkin kept giving Perry lines about how, although she is the famous star of a sketch show, only Perry knows how good a comedian she is.

This never happens in reality.

You can’t be a star comedian and not be appreciated for comic talent. No one needed to be told that Robin Williams is a comic genius because when he first burst on to the scene in Mork and Mindy, people couldn’t stop laughing. No one needed to be told that Eddie Murphy is a comic genius when he first appeared in SNL because people were too busy rolling on the floor. The test for comedians is immediate, and if you’ve passed it you’ve passed it. Sorkin’s reality test here was off.

And lastly we have the other actors playing the actors on the Studio 60 live sketch show. They occasionally had to play only two or three lines in the middle of an SNL-like sketch. That means that your mission, as an actor, is not to be funny, but to know what it’s like to be in a sketch after you got a laugh. You need to know how to get a laugh in the middle of a sketch, when things are going well, and not just how to be funny. These are roles that have to be played by comedians with vast comic experience onstage, and of them only D.L. Hughley fits the bill.

Sketch-Writing

Back to Sorkin. There are different kinds of comedy, and the fact that you’re good at making someone laugh doesn’t mean you can write any other kind of comedy well.

Sorkin writes very funny throwaways. That means that he can insert really funny lines into serious conversation as a throwaway - if someone in the audience got it, good; if not, they never noticed it. The conversation is never broken, and no one waits for a laugh. Here are a couple of examples:

In The West Wing, the staff is debating what to do about a group of Cubans who are at this moment making their way in ramshackle boats towards Florida.

Toby says, “Oh, for God’s sakes, forget about the journey. The voyage is not our problem.”

“What’s our problem?” asks C.J.

Toby says, “What to do when the Nina, the Pinta, and the Get-Me-The-Hell-Outta-Here hit Miami.”

If you got it, you got it. If not, who cares. You still understand the story and what he was trying to say, and you didn’t feel Sorkin was talking down to you.

In Sports Night, Dan picks up on the fact that his friend, Casey, likes the scheming and conniving Sally. He urges him not to go for it: “Don’t do it, Casey,” he says. “She’s got an agenda.”

Casey asks, “You think she wants a job on Sports Night?”

“No, I think she wants to rule all of Metropolis.”

And this discussion goes on. If you get all the jokes, it’s great. And if not, the gist of it is very clear.

Casey: ”You’ve seen the job she does on West Coast Update. She’s a very skilled producer.”

Dan: “Of course she’s skilled, she’s Satan’s handmaiden.”

Casey: “She’s not Satan’s handmaiden.”

Dan: “On the entire planet, have you ever seen anyone with eyes like that? She’s a Stepford producer.”

Casey: “I say she’s a very nice person.”

Dan: “I say she has no reflection.”

Another time, Sam and Toby get lost trying to find their way in the country, in order to solve an embarrassing incident with their Supreme Court nominee. Even after they find the police station, where the judge had been placed under arrest, Sam still kibitzes, “Let me tell you something. If we’d stayed on the Merritt parkway instead of getting off at Exit 29 and going east to Greenwich, I don’t think we’d have wound up in Bridgeport so many times.”

Sorkin also writes situational comedy (comedy that arises from the situation) very well.

One time, Casey came back from the doctor temporarily blinded, and Dan was having a field day getting him to duck, crawl, and scream by shouting at him about things that weren’t there.

Then there are the Cheese Day episodes on The West Wing, which you just have to see to believe, the fact that Josh was manipulated by the press to admitting the president has a secret plan to fight inflation, the Thanksgiving pranks, the Thanksgiving pardon of the other turkey, the Star Trek holiday, and Josh’s horrific encounter with people in the internet. And that’s just to name a few.

Sorkin, however, does not write good sketch comedy. That requires a different set of skills. He assumes that he can do it because he knows he can be funny. There are, unfortunately, many forms of funny, and being good at one doesn’t mean you’re good at the others.

The Good Old Days

Only once in all the episodes of Studio 60 did Sorkin write about the things that really matter to him, from his gut.

There are many things that matter to Sorkin, and one of them is clearly: The freakiness of happenstance, the junctures in life caused by coincidence. Sometimes unrelated events seem related while events that seem related aren’t that at all.

When President Bartlet explains the Latin phrase, Post hoc, ergo procter hoc, he says, “ ‘After, therefore because of’. It means one thing follows the other, therefore it was caused by the other. But it’s not always true. In fact, it’s hardly ever true.”

Take, for example, an episode of Sports Night called Eli’s Coming. Our heroes are having a very weird day. Rebecca, the woman Dan was in love with, was having conversations with her ex-husband. Isaac, the boss, was supposed to have returned from London already, and yet wasn’t there. Bobby Bernstein was coming to guest-host, and every time she would come, she would blame Dan for not having called her after he’d slept with her in Spain. Dan, meanwhile, believed she was a crazy woman, seeing as he’d never been to Spain and had never slept with her.

Dan says to Casey, “Rebecca isn’t here, Isaac isn’t here. There’s a strangeness about this day.” He looks around, and says, “Eli’s coming.”

“Eli?” Casey asks.

“From the Three Dog Night song. Eli’s something bad. A darkness.”

Casey doesn’t get it, “ ‘Eli’s coming, hide your heart girl.’ Eli’s an inveterate womanizer. I think you’re getting the song wrong.”

“I know I’m getting the song wrong, but when I first heard it, that’s what I always thought it meant, and things stick with you that way.” He looks around again. “They say it’s always calmest before the storm. That’s not true. I’m a serious sailor. It isn’t calm before the storm. Stuff happens.”

Sorkin is blindsiding us here. Because almost immediately, Bobby Bernstein finally enters, and Rebecca returns. Rebecca, it turns out, isn’t really divorced, she’s just separated. And the husband that used to abuse her now wants to reconcile, and she doesn’t know what to do. Meanwhile, it turns out that Dan actually was in Spain and did sleep with Bobby, and didn’t call and didn’t remember. But none of that is the storm. Because soon they learn that Isaac has had a heart attack in the airport, and no one knows how serious it is.

Another time, during their hour-long Sports Night show, everyone is freaked because this is the anniversary of the ghost of Thespis, who likes to slap people around who appear in front of audiences. Everything that can go wrong does: There’s a mysterious drip on the desk, a thawed turkey falls down on the desk right as they head to commercial, they forget text, they miss cues, and they go off the air for a minute or so. Are these things connected? No, but they seem to be. It’s the freakiness of happenstance, and Sorkin loves it.

In fact, it’s in the little things, too. One day, simply because things happen that way, Casey is kicked out of two or three rooms, for reasons that have nothing to do with him. It’s the freakiness of happenstance.

A while ago, we named Sorkin the second-best writer in TV today, and in another article, we talked about why. Here’s hoping he takes a long vacation and writes with a less cocky attitude about things that are important to him.

Where the Soul Is

Hollywood has a bad reputation for quality. And, more often than not, it’s justified. But the truth is that there are gems out there, and there are writers whose every line should be studied by us in the same way that Tennessee Williams’, Eugene O’Neill’s and Edward Albee’s lines are studied and scrutinized.

We begin Storytellers with a four-article series, of which this is the last, concentrating on the top four writers or writing-teams working in television today. Most of their scripts are certainly worthy of study and re-examination, and yet the episodes we watch get old in our minds faster than yesterday’s newspaper.

The Top Four

In the top spot: David E. Kelley.

At number two: Aaron Sorkin. Sorkin maintains high quality more often than Kelley. But when Kelley’s good, he has an even wider range, sharper claws, and better drama.

In third place we had Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, writers of most of the first six seasons of Gilmore Girls.

And this week we get to talk about the writers in fourth place: Rescue Me’s creators and main writers, Peter Tolan and Denis Leary.

All these writers or writing-teams can write heart-wrenching drama; can have more laugh-out-loud comedy in a drama than can be found in most sitcoms; have a clear view on life, which they convey through their stories; can deliver stories that feel as intense and intensive as a two-hour movie; do not look down at their audience and do not talk down to it; and all four put their heart in their hands when they write well, and let us watch it bleed.

Peter Tolan and Denis Leary deserve special attention, because they created something rarely found in television or movies these days: A show with soul.

Apart or Together?

Leary and Tolan are not the same apart as they are together. We last saw them on separate shows.

Peter Tolan is best remembered for The Larry Sanders Show, a brilliantly-written show that was as cold as ice.

Denis Leary, meanwhile, wrote The Job, where he played, much like in Rescue Me, a macho, alcoholic cop who cheats on his wife and can’t handle life. But at the end of the day, The Job wasn’t about anything, and its plots were all over the place. Although Peter Tolan was around, his presence was not felt in the writing. This was Leary’s show.

A few years later, when the two collaborated in writing and creating Rescue Me, it seems that each gave the other what he lacked. Tolan gave Leary structure, while Leary gave Tolan the soul he needed. Together, they created a show that’s actually about something.

Tough Guys and Tortured Souls

Rescue Me is about people who hold it in and what they go through when life gets tough. It is about the virtues and faults of holding it in. But mostly, it’s about what happens to people who don’t break when they finally do break.

Before we get to the stuff that breaks the characters down, let’s meet them.

Tommy, played by Leary, is an alcoholic, chain-smoking, pill-popping New-York Irish fireman who cheats on his wife, Janet, and comes from a long line of alcoholic, chain-smoking, pill-popping Irish firemen who cheat on their wives. He has three kids and when we meet him, he’s going through a divorce, and is spying on his wife, unable to let her go.

Here he is, in season 1, explaining why the guys at work don’t know he stopped drinking: “I quit drinking in front of family, so that Janet would think that I really quit drinking so I could get back together with her, but I didn’t tell the guys at work I quit drinking because I didn’t want them to think it’s a sign of weakness, or that, you know, I was having some kind of sudden change, like I was losing it. Plus it allowed me to keep drinking while I was going to AA.”

Tommy’s firehouse is filled with men who are the archetype ‘tough guys’: macho, homophobic, and emotionally unavailable. Firefighters are heroes to Leary and Tolan, but they are as flawed as any of us. For example:

Tommy is talking with Franco about last night’s escapades. Halfway through, Tommy says, “What I can’t believe is you making a move on a chick with sideburns.”

To which Franco replies: “Hey, Tommy, it’s getting slow out there, pal. All that pussy I was getting after 9/11? Now nothing. People forget.”

“Yeah,” Tommy says. “Sad commentary.”

Acerbic, cynical people. And real.

Here’s another example of how Leary and Tolan write their tough guys:

Someone anonymously posted a poem they wrote in the firehouse.

Tommy reads it allowed, then ridicules it.

The author says, “I don’t know, it’s not that bad. It rhymes.”

“So what,” says Tommy. “My ten-year-old can make stuff rhyme. It doesn’t mean he’s the next, uh... Name a poet.”

“Angie Dickinson,” says one firefighter.

“Angie Dickinson? From Police Woman?”

Franco, puffing on his cigarette, says, “Nah, I think you mean Emily Dickinson, from the Belle of Amherst.”

Tommy looks at him, surprised, “You know poetry?”

“Nah,” he puffs on his cigarette again. “I jacked off to a picture of her once, when I was eleven.”

But it’s not the comedy that gives Rescue Me its soul, and not the dialogue. It’s the broken, shattered people. The show is populated with tough people with tough lives who don’t know what to do when things get too tough. One of Tommy’s firefighting friends has a gay son with which he cannot talk and a wife with Alzheimer who forgets she’s married. Another firefighter's daughter is rushed to the hospital because she took his pills, but that's not enough for him to be able to quit taking them. Tommy’s wife takes the kids, sells the house, and all four disappear.

Jimmy, also a firefighter, was Tommy’s cousin and best friend, and he died on 9/11. His wife, Sheila, can’t stop crying and can’t find a man. She gets drunk and hits on Tommy: “I can’t meet anybody. I can’t get Jimmy out of my mind. He’s always there. You are the closest thing I have to him. You’re sweet. You’re funny. And you’re here. Right now. Right here. Christ, you lost Jimmy, you just lost Billy Warren, I mean how long do you think all of us have?”

Tommy is haunted by the ghosts of the people he didn’t save, including Jimmy’s. The dead people follow him, talk to him, and haunt his dreams as well as his waking life.

When Tommy’s mother dies unexpectedly, his father begins to cry: “You know, my father cried a lot towards the end of his life. He never cried before then. Probably not even as a baby. But near the end, you looked at him cross-eyed, and he’d bust out bawling. It’s the ghosts, Tommy.”

Tommy suddenly takes a greater interest in this, “It’s the what?”

“All the people you’ve hurt, all the meanness you did. You get old, you stop moving a million miles a minute. It all comes back. It really shows up again. All you can do... All you can do is cry.” And he does. Too embarrassed, he waves Tommy off, “Go on, get out of here! Make your suck-ass coffee!”

Tommy and all the men in the firehouse and their families don’t know how to break. Leary and Tolan throw at their characters everything they can, making their lives as hard as possible, to see how they would react. To teach us, to teach the characters, and to teach themselves something more about human nature.

Three extreme examples of how tough things get and what happens then:

After his wife kidnaps the kids, sells the house, and disappears, Tommy hits rock bottom. He soaks himself in vodka, and lights the lighter, inching it closer towards his body.

Halfway through the show, just as his life is getting back in order, and as everything with his wife is good again, their son is killed in a mindless hit-and-run. How do you deal with something as horrible as that? And how does someone like Tommy, who can’t deal with anything, deal with something like that?

Another unbearable, unforgettable moment of television comes a few episodes later. His own brother is secretly sleeping with Tommy’s ex-wife. One episode revolves around the fact that one of the firefighters in Tommy’s firehouse is secretly sleeping with Tommy’s crazy sister, constantly telling us how Tommy beat her last boyfriend within an inch of his life. This helps set up Tommy’s mindset and, at the same time, blindside us to the main event. Towards the end of the episode, in a family event, Tommy sees his brother and his ex-wife touching under the table.

In an amazing piece of acting, Tommy completely loses it: We see the wires snap inside his brain, as he just looks at them. Then, with absolutely no warning, he leaps across the table, no longer entirely sane, and beats his brother. He throws him all over the place, then into the street, throws his head through the car of a window, kicks him, and, spitting on him, leaves him half-dead on the road.

There is a difference between this drama in Rescue Me and the dramatic turns that appear in shows like ER and Third Watch. The last two have drama for drama's sake, because it keeps the audience glued to the set. Something is burning inside Leary, and he and Tolan keep writing situations that return to the same thing: breaking the unbreakable people. And during that process, Leary makes us feel for an hour what he feels all the time, and we all learn something about human nature.

Aaron Sorkin, the Nature of Friendship, and 9/11

When Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip first came out a few months ago, Matthew Perry was making the talk show rounds. More than once, he referred to Aaron Sorkin, the creator and writer of the show, as a genius, and to monologues and dialogues he’s had to perform as “Another Aaron Sorkin genius monologue”.

When someone is referred to as a genius, it too often also means that everything he does is genius or that if I can’t see what’s good about something that person did, I must be the stupid one. The latter statement, in fact, is how directors like David Lynch and Lars von Trier get actresses to do crazy things for them.

Aaron Sorkin is a genius. But let’s ask the real question: What’s in it for us?

We last saw Aaron Sorkin in a The West Wing episode, a show he had created and had written all but one of the episodes in its first four seasons. With Bartlet’s daughter kidnapped, the Democratic President resigned temporarily, ceding power to the Republican Speaker of the House, played by John Goodman. In that meeting, Goodman chided Bartlet’s staff, and Bartlet stood up for them. Cutting Bartlet short, Goodman looked at him, and said, “You’re relieved, Mr. President.”

It was certainly among the top ten most memorable television moments.

With that, and with Bartlet’s daughter still kidnapped, Aaron Sorkin left the series, which ran for four more years.

In The West Wing Sorkin coddled us with great actors, characters who are unabashedly intelligent and well-read, an unpredictable plot that makes us think we just watched a two-hour movie, good drama, good comedy (there are usually more funnies in a Sorkin drama than there are in a half-hour sitcom), all with a fast-paced intelligent dialogue, usually about things that actually matters.

Dialogues like that are hard to find in any Hollywood product, since the prevalent wisdom is that it’s a turn-off for the audience. But the truth is that Sorkin’s writing was ripe with talk about policy even as the ratings got higher and higher. The reason it didn’t get old was because Sorkin made sure that even a discussion about the census was, at the end of the day, about people.

The most extreme example of something prevalent wisdom says should never work on television was in an episode called ‘Arctic Radar’, when Toby and Will Bailey had a write-off. Yes, that’s right, a write-off! Can you imagine two people sitting down and silently reading each others’ scripts as compelling TV? Sorkin made it work.

In fact, he chose a venue that was perfect for it: every subject in the universe could wind up on the President’s desk. What it comes down to is something as ancient as the Greek tragedies: Big events are happening somewhere off-screen or off-stage, while our characters sit in a room and talk about it, debate, and decide what to do – all in a compelling way. When the story is done right, talking about the action is as powerful as seeing the action. That’s why the special effects were cheaper back in 500 B.C.

Not only did Sorkin not resort to special effects in The West Wing, he insisted on talking about problematic issues intelligently, while never resorting to sex, violence, or even a mini-skirt. And he still got good ratings. Imagine that.

Now imagine something else. Imagine a writer who believes he can change the world by showing us the beauty of what he sees. Take, for example, the power of friendship. The two main characters in Sports Night were best friends, who supported each other through tough times. In The West Wing one recalls the time Bartlet was about to reveal the fact that he had lied to the American people and everybody’s life was about to turn into a living hell. Bartlet sat his aide Charlie down, and said: “I’m confident in your loyalty to me. I’m confident in your love for me. But if you lie to protect me, if you lie just once, if you lie just a little, if you lie because you can’t stand what’s happening to me and the people making it happen, if you ever, ever lie... you’re finished with me. Do you understand?”

That is how you write love.

In the first episode of Studio 60, we see the friendship of Matt Albie and Danny Tripp (played by Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford respectively) two friends who know each other from forever-ago, know their faults and worship their talents. Now here’s the trick: What does a friend do to lift a friend when he is completely on the ropes? He gives him responsibility.

After he hears that Whitford had fallen off the wagon for the first time in 11 years, after listening to his friend, after offering to help, to go on a vacation, after making sure he’s fine, Perry brings him back by gently laying the responsibility on his friend’s shoulders: “Forget that. But it’s going to be our show now. And only one of us can screw up at a time. And I think we both know that most of the time it’s going to be me. You’re the big shoulders.”

A friend says ‘Save me’, and the other friend now has to put on the human mask, get off the floor, and save him. And that’s how he is saved, as well. It’s a male-friendship thing, because men like to pull themselves out of trouble by putting on masks. And, boy, it works. In real life and on television, when written by someone who has experienced it more than once. It’s a motif that appears throughout Sorkin’s writing, and now that his two characters are such good friends, perhaps we’ll explore it again and again.

There is one more element to Sorkin’s writing that is revealed in everything he does: He wants to do some good, and he believes in his audience’s ability to achieve it. When he tackles things he thinks are wrong, he does not simply criticize, he criticizes constructively. He does not just topple, he helps us build, by showing us how things could be done.

Sorkin seems to believe he can fix at least part of the world. Not through hubris, but through persuasion, and by showing us that we are capable of something better and more beautiful than what we have achieved so far.

There are many examples, but certainly one of the most touching is his 9/11 speech. In the second episode of the West Wing’s fourth season, terrorists put some bombs under bleachers in a university, and the bombs go off. Everyone is horrified, of course, and the President gives a speech that day. And I’ll be damned if this isn’t the speech Sorkin wishes Bush had given after 9/11 about the tragedy and about the firefighters. Sorkin uses his supreme talent to find exactly what the American people needed to hear then and probably still need to hear now. He is giving us his version of the 9/11 speech with Martin Sheen’s delivery:

“More than any time in recent history, America’s destiny is not of its own choosing. We did not seek, nor did we provoke, an assault on our freedom and our way of life. We did not expect, nor did we invite, a confrontation with evil. Yet the true measure of a people’s strength is how they rise to master that moment when it does arrive. Forty-four people were killed a couple of hours ago in Kensington State University. Three swimmers from the men’s team were killed and two others are in critical condition when, after having heard the explosion from their practice facility, they ran into the fire to help get people out. ... Ran into the fire. The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels tonight. They’re our students and our teachers and our parents and our friends. The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels. When every time we think we’ve measured our capacity to meet a challenge we look up and we’re reminded that our capacity may well be limitless. This is a time for American heroes. We will do what is hard. We will achieve what is great. This is a time for American heroes and we reach for the stars. God bless their memory. God bless you. And God bless the United States of America.”

Sorkin believes that writing can affect change, that writing can move mountains. That it can blow the roof. That it can make us better people. That it can make us cry and make us laugh. That art, when done right, makes us better people.