West Wing Creator Aaron Sorkin to Return to TV

By Scott Huver  November 17, 2009 11:06 AM EST

West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin isn’t just planning to return to television after a stint in the film world. He’s planning another series set behind the scenes of a television show.

Sorkin tells TVGuideMagazine.comthat – like his previous series Sports Night (set around an ESPN-style sports news show) and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (set around a Saturday Night Live-esque sketch comedy show) – his next effort will take place backstage on yet another TV series.

"I'm going to be starting on a new TV series" when filming is done on the upcoming movie "The Social Network," the Sorkin-penned account of the founding of Facebook directed by David Fincher, he says. "It's going to be what turns out to be the third in the trilogy of TV shows that take place behind the scenes of a TV show, but this will be a different kind of TV show. That's all I can let out of the bag right now.”

Sorkin said he “hopes” to reunite on the project with at least some of the actors he’s worked with previously. “If you're a writer, when you're find an actor like Josh Malina, Felicity Huffman, Brad Whitford, Matt Perry, Allison Janney, Richard Schiff, all these great actors that I've worked with, you just want to stick them in your pocket and work with them forever, so I hope so.” He also expects to be working with director and longtime collaborator Tommy Schlamme “for sure.”

EXCITED!

You know the ones I mean. Book-ending every original comedy show on Channel 4. A terrible, TERRIBLE comedian in a Prisoner style jacket and regulation indie curly hair delivers some jaw-droppingly unfunny jokes about the Internet. The more you see it, the worse they get. You start to notice how the timing is off, the overly posh accent, the too quiet audience laughter.

 

It’s got to me. I hate it with every fibre of my being. So I did a little digging. I wanted to know who was responsible for these things. Who has been making me dread the advertising break. Who’s responsible?

I WANT ANSWERS!

Easy bit - The comedian is a man named Spencer Brown. He’s easy to find - there are plenty of his videos on YouTube. And while not being a revelatory comic who’s likely to set the world alight with his genius, he’s quite funny. A bit silly. Inoffensive. Even does a comedy rap about the Queen.

And he has a MySpace where he mentions working for 3.

They’re basically the kind of things that end in “3 mobile sponsors original comedy on 4″ or some such slogan.  Anyway, content-wise, they’re me doing stand up about the internet, so I thought they were probably worth mentioning. I haven’t seen them yet, and they presented quite a challenge as I was suddenly trapped inside advertising guidelines and up to five second time limits (not an easy feat) but fingers crossed they’ll turn out really well.

Sorry Spencer - they didn’t turn out really well. But you can see his situation. He’s a stand up, used to working in, at minimum, 20 minute chunks, suddenly thrust into a situation where you have to be funny in five seconds. Within industry guidelines. About a topic you didn’t choose.

He’s got good comedy pedigree too - playing characters in Garth Marenghi and Nathan Barley, so I think I’m going to forgive Spencer. It’s not his fault. He just wants a job. He didn’t choose this. Who did?

3. They are the culprits. What man would throw a young stand-up into an ill conceived stand up routine about the Internet? A topic that means it’s possible for the jokes to go only one of two ways - either so geeky that they alienate the mass audience, or so dated and overused Internet snarks like me will mock them mercilessly on blogs and forums.

What man would do that?

A marketing man.

A marketing man named Alan Doyle

A bit more searching and I found this…

Alan Doyle, Director of 3 Integrated Communications says:

 

Sponsorship of Channel 4’s comedy stream is a great fit for us as a brand. Like Channel 4, we like to push the boundaries of our industry. And while we strive for constant improvement to the status quo for our customers, we try not to take ourselves too seriously. These are values that are important to us, and we hope that this deal will help us share them with the 16-34 year old audience that the broadcaster’s award-winning programming attracts.

• Great Fit
• Brand
• Push The Boundaries
• Status Quo
• Values
• 16-34

Marketing speak 101.

So it’s Alan’s fault? Not entirely. As much as marketers may think they are creative - responsible for the output on our screens, monitors and magazines - they’re not. Marketing guys are number-crunchers. Dishing out money here, counting the results there. Middle men who leave the actual creative work to - well - creatives. Alan simply took his budget and spunked a big chunk of it on what he thought was cool. And Alan is a man who talks in age ranges. He probably knows his shit, does Alan, but he’s no creative.

The blame lays here. On the creative agency Alan hired to create these adverts.

They are the people who got paid ungodly amounts of money to sit in a swanky office in Shoreditch and say ‘Hey! How about we get a stand up to tell an Internet based joke in five seconds? That would go well with the comedy they’ve been watching. And, yeah, Internet goes really well with mobile. Yeah, mobile Internet. Shall we work on a script? Naaah. Actually, that’s the comedian’s job, innit? Lets all go down a gastropub and smell each others’ farts’

Or something.

The agency behind the crap 3 adverts is Glue. Here is the proof.  Shoreditch based, with a self-consciously cool website - featuring Julian Opie style portraits of the staff. Glue are, among other things, responsible for an RSS feed reader that features a dancing Page 3 girl.

They are the ones to blame. I couldn’t find the actual person responsible - but I’ll guess their Creative Director Seb has something to do with it.

There you have it. Pour your anger towards them.

I probably shouldn’t take these things so seriously should I?

Brilliant! I've hated these things since the first second I saw one.

Panasonic has announced plans to offer a wireless set, which would use wideband data transmission systems to send high definition signals from set-top-boxes and other devices to the TV without the need for cables or wires.

Err... call me stupid, but why would you need a wireless connection from your set top box to the telly? Surely the clue is in the name... set-top box. Why wouldn't you want to sit it on top of (or underneath or next to) your TV?