Did anyone watch Studio 60 BEFORE they watched the West Wing
I saw West Wing first, and then I moved on to Studio 60 and I personally feel that as a result I finished up liking Studio 60 a lot less than I would normally have.
Studio 60, has all the right ingredients, lovable characters, good and engrossing central conflicts, and intelligent and witty dialogues. However, because I was switching over from West Wing to Studio 60, the former of which deals with the inner workings of the white house, to the latter which is essentially not even about the inner working of a comedy sketch show, but rather about the lives of the people who are involved with a comedy sketch show. Sure at times the show has to deal with the inner workings of the show, but its not exactly aiming to take us behind the scenes, much like the West Wing did, and to go on who is to say to it would have been better had it done so.
So suffice it to say that the subject matter of Studio 60 so dramatically pales in comparison to what the West wing was dealing with, that its hard to feel the same level of ... well ... reverence for Studio 60 that one had for the West Wing.
The second question I must ask is why must I compare West Wing and Studio 60. Infact that comparison seems to flow naturally, and I often ask whether Studio 60 needs to be compared to the West Wing, and why can't it be judged indpendantly. Like for instance, I saw Social Network before I saw the West Wing, but had I not done so, and had I seen the Social Network after I had been introduced to President Bartlet, would I be allowed to compare West Wing and Social Network and say, the former deals with the West Wing, while the latter with the initial years of the formation of facebook, and a behind the scenes look at how it was formed, which though interesting is not exactly the same as a behind the scenes look of the White House. Would I have been making this comparison, and I find I believe that I would have been able to look at the Social Network independently of the West Wing. Secondly even if I did make a comparison facebook is one of THE websites of our times, and so I would most definitely have given the subject more points than the inner workings of a fictitious TV Show. However, I do believe I would be making comparisons between the two.
So why then I ask do we have to make a comparison between the West Wing and Studio 60 and judge them in light of each other? I suppose it is the general narrative style of the shows that are so similar, the way each episode is structured, the overall narrative style for both shows seems so similar, right down to the credits text, which is exactly the same, to the unmissable long conversations that the characters have while walking around in corridors or while walking from Point A to Point B on the sets of Studio 60, to the fact that there are a lot of cast members which are common to both shows.
I therefore feel that as a viewer one is forced to look at the West Wing and Studio 60 in comparison to one another and in doing so because the central topic that West Wing deals with is so much more important than what Studio 60 deals with, the payoff of having seen an episode of the West Wing and learnt a little bit more about the White House, would almost always be greater than having seen an episode of Studio 60.
Thus, I feel that in structuring Studio 60 to be so similar to the West Wing, the creators did a great disservice to Studio 60, as there is no way that a show about a sketch comedy, could payoff the audience more than a show about the white house.
So even though Studio 60 is a show that would/should have gone down as one of the best shows on TV with some excellent characters, it will instead forever be in the shadows of the West Wing.