The West Wing and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip: A Pilot Case Study

I pride myself on my taste, so I rarely admit this but here’s the truth: Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is my favorite show of all time.

As a devout fan of Aaron Sorkin, Matthew Perry, Bradley Whitford, and the concept of television, Studio 60 feels like it was made personally for me. A stunningly poor reception among critics and wider audience alike would support that claim. It was cancelled after one season.

Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford in the Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip "Pilot". Image courtesy of IMDb.

I’m not bringing it up to argue its overall quality; its critics make some valid points. I’m bringing it up because, despite its flaws, it taught me an important lesson about pilot episodes- especially when compared to that of The West Wing.

Aaron Sorkin’s work is so similar to itself it’s a little comical. From one series to another you’ll recognize everything from cast members to episode titles to whole lines of dialogue. In fact, every one of his pilots shares the same plot: a character, fed up with the state of America, can’t stop themselves from launching into a public monologue that is both controversial and correct, and it costs- or almost costs- them their job.

These similarities are actually what made this a fruitful learning exercise for me; the differences stand out and reveal how the same story can be told more effectively. The West Wing, an objectively beloved and significant series, has one of the worst pilots I’ve ever seen. Studio 60, for all its lack thereof, demonstrates a clear awareness of its predecessor’s mistakes.

The West Wing follows White House senior staff and President of the United States as they fight an uphill battle to do right by America. Studio 60 follows the cast, writers, and executives of an SNL-esque late night variety show as they fight an uphill battle to do right by America... by serving it high-brow comedy. You might already be able to tell why one of these did better than the other.

In The West Wing’s pilot episode, deputy chief of staff Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) is on the chopping block after losing his temper in a televised debate with a Christian politician (“Lady, the God you pray to is too busy being indicted for tax fraud!”).

But before we find this out, the episode opens with deputy communications director, Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe), sitting at a bar with a reporter (Billy), who is begging Sam to go on the record admitting that Josh is about to be fired.

Rob Lowe in The West Wing "Pilot". Image courtesy of IMDb.

I think of this scene often because when I watched it, I had absolutely no idea which one of these men I was supposed to be paying attention to, who Josh was, why he might be getting fired, or why I should care. I spent the scene desperately looking for something to anchor me into the story and coming up empty. Sam and Billy come across as equally important in this scene. Yet Rob Lowe’s top billing in the opening credits indicates that he's the show’s main character, and we’ll never see Billy again. Who’d’ve thought?

The episode goes on to introduce the rest of the senior staff with admittedly more success. In this case by ‘success’, I mean clear readability into who the main character is in every scene. Nonetheless, Josh's outburst, which dominates this episode is, in the grand scheme of his personality, an anomaly. And beyond Josh's own character, the premise of his potential firing is equally out of place for the show as a whole.

In the pilot episode everyone’s pervasive anxiety surrounding the President’s potential firing of Josh presents him as a bit of a loose cannon, the wild card and liability among the senior staff. The further you get into the series, the more out of place this tone feels. While Josh is someone who speaks his mind, and will even make the occasional PR blunder- ones arguably much more serious than dissing Mary Marsh on Capital Beat- never again is it presented as such high a stakes failing of the administration, and never again is Josh's job even remotely in question.

Whether the effect is comedic, as in "Celestial Navigation" when Josh tramples over the minefield of the White House press corps ("So not only do I have a secret plan to fight inflation, but now you don't support it?"), or deeply serious, as in "Noel" when Josh's undiagnosed PTSD leads him to raise his voice at President Bartlet himself ("Long as I got a job, you got a job, understand?"), it will never again be in character for the administration to even consider turning its back on Josh. Yet in the pilot, Leo admits that Bartlet has in fact already ordered Josh's firing and he's now trying to talk him out of it.

An added point of confusion is that we only learn of this incident through snippets after it’s already happened. We hear every character talk about it, and we eventually see Josh obsessively watching a recording of the moment in question, but the context of the situation is ambiguous. How important is Mary Marsh, the woman he laid into? What is her job? How does it relate to the White House? Josh’s boss Leo has a conversation with a colleague of Marsh’s that hints at these things, but by and large, The West Wing pilot is a lot of listening to people talk about things that we haven’t been fully clued into. And without a clear understanding of who Josh is outside of this incident, it’s hard to feel overly invested in whether or not he keeps his job.

Bradley Whitford and Annie Corley in The West Wing "Pilot".

All of this has shown me what I now consider to be one of the most important qualities of a pilot: legibility. This episode would’ve been a great episode 1.12 or even 1.06; a strong pilot should not be interchangeable with any other episode in the season. A pilot needs to make it abundantly clear who we should be looking at and listening to in every scene. It should show us these people not necessarily at their best, but at their most themselves (in this episode Sam also unwittingly sleeps with a call girl he meets at the bar with Billy. The relationship he develops with her over the next several episodes will end up being very fitting, but in this episode what we learn about Sam is that he is someone who goes home with girls he meets in bars and knows nothing about. Throughout the rest of the series, he will never again do such a thing).

Studio 60, which premiered a year after The West Wing’s series finale, makes what appears to me to be a very deliberate rectification of these exact issues. First, it starts at the beginning. We’re minutes away from Studio 60 going live with their weekly broadcast when showrunner Wes Mendell is confronted by the head of Standards and Practices demanding that he cut an offensive sketch from the show. Wes puts up a fight, but ultimately pulls the plug on the sketch, begrudgingly replacing it with one that he declares has never been funny.

Yet minutes after the show begins, Wes is unable to sit idly by. He walks on stage in the middle of a sketch, sends the actors off stage, and launches into an on-air tirade about how “this show used to be cutting edge political and social satire, but it’s gotten lobotomized by a candy ass broadcast network hell bent on doing nothing that might challenge their audience”.

Judd Hirsch in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip "Pilot". Image courtesy of Entertainment Weekly.

Wes is a bit of a mysterious character- but in this case, it’s used to the show’s advantage. He’s initially overpowered by the network, yet he’s developed enough loyalty among his staff that the control room leaves him on the air to rant for 53 seconds. Later on- after he is promptly fired- it’s revealed that his replacements, head writer Matt Albie (Matthew Perry) and executive producer Danny Tripp (Bradley Whitford), are former employees of Wes’s and hold him in high esteem. Yet, when re-hashing Matt and Danny’s firing from the show four years prior, the chairman of the network declares that “for the record, when I pointed you to the door, it was your hero Wes Mendell who opened it”. Matt confirms that this is true.

Like Josh on The West Wing, it’s hard to get a read on Wes. How unusual is this behavior? Why is his staff so loyal to him when we’ve only seen him let them down? In this instance, these are good questions to be asking. They add depth and intrigue to the main characters who grapple with them just as much as we are in the audience. Wes himself will be fired and never seen again on the show; we don’t need to have a clear understanding of who he is as a character. His impact on the others is what matters, and his exit sets the stage for the real premise of the show: the return of Matt and Danny and their rescue of an underdog TV show.

After Wes’s on-air tirade and the show’s opening credits, a title card that simply reads “Jordan” leaves no room for confusion in who we should be looking at in the following scene. Sure enough, we meet Jordan McDeere, newly appointed president of Studio 60’s broadcast network (the National Broadcasting System), where her welcome dinner party is interrupted by Wes’s televised outburst. She is thrust into damage control, and it is abundantly clear who she is, what’s at stake, and why we should care.

The rest of the main characters- Matt and Danny, and ‘The Big Three’ (stars of the show-within-a-show Tom Jeter, Harriet Hayes, and Simon Stiles)- are similarly introduced with title cards briefing us on the important people in each scene before it begins. If it wasn’t a pilot, this would feel strange, heavy-handed, unnecessary. Even still, this is an admittedly blunt way to go about it. But it gets the job done, and pilots play by different rules than the rest of a series.

Excerpt from the Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip pilot script. Written by Aaron Sorkin.

On the whole, television is an intimate medium. We get to know the characters of our favorite shows as well as we know our best friends. We spend night after night with them in our living rooms. That’s the joy of TV. But pilots don’t get this luxury. They don’t get to shock us with characters doing unexpected things because we don’t yet know what is expected or unexpected. So, they have to find other methods to fast-track their way into our hearts- and make sure they don’t lose us along the way. After all, we’re in an unfamiliar place.

So say what you will about Studio 60, but its pilot isn’t confusing. Its characters are crystal clear. We learn Matt and Harriet’s history, Jordan’s unorthodox way of running a television network, Matt and Danny’s complicated feelings towards television as a medium (simultaneous reverence and contempt). All of this is completely consistent with the people we will keep getting to know throughout the tragically short series. The pilot episode is uniquely built to immerse us in the world without getting lost in it, an added consideration that this episode alone is responsible for.

Aaron Sorkin’s straightforward writing and comparable pieces of work make it easy to identify these important elements. With every new pilot I write, I genuinely ask myself if I’m writing a West Wing pilot or a Studio 60 pilot. But I would be remiss, when on this subject, not to mention the best pilot of all time: Friday Night Lights. To this day, it’s the only pilot that has brought me to tears (as it does again and again on every rewatch). In an unfamiliar place with people I don’t know, that is the ultimate feat of a pilot episode.

What do you think? Have you seen Studio 60? What are some of your favorite pilots? What do you love about them? Are there any you hate?