December 5, 2000

'West Wing,' 'Ally,' et al.: Words, words, words

By ROGER ANDERSON Scripps Howard News Service

Quick, someone tell Aaron Sorkin to get over himself just a tiny bit. Maybe then he could serve as a role model for David E. Kelley.

Critics and viewers alike are perhaps remiss for heaping so much praise and so many high ratings on Sorkin's and Kelley's brainchildren, “The West Wing” and "SportsNight" (Sorkin) and "Ally McBeal" and “The Practice” (Kelley), because now we're stuck with a couple of Frankenstein's monsters who imagine their chronic logorrhea is in some way a good thing for us to be exposed to.

And giving Sorkin the Emmy for "West Wing" this year and Kelley one for "Ally McBeal" and one for "The Practice" the year before doesn't seem to have helped deflate their heads or their rhetoric any.

OK, "The West Wing” is a sparkling, trenchant drama, etc., etc., blah-blah-blah. It also consists of about 20 minutes out of every hour in which the characters trade inane, "clever" quips while frantically ambulating through the crowded warrens of a fictitious White House.

While a movie's auteur is always the director, the person who directs a TV show tends to be a mere couple of steps up from the guy who goes for sandwiches. The real power is the creator (Quinn Martin, Dick Wolf), the writer (Larry Gelbart on "MASH" or Kelley on "St. Elsewhere") and, especially, the writer/creator (Chris Carter of "The X-Files,” Kelley, Sorkin).

Where your movie auteur, the director, is likely to get into trouble by being plain self-indulgent in every department (Tim Burton, Francis Ford Coppola, Oliver Stone, Ken Russell and a cast of hundreds), the TV creator or writer or writer/creator gets in dutch by spending way too much time at the word processor making his characters get smart-mouthed with each other.

Gelbart's writing, for example, made "MASH” all but unwatchable (or at least unlistenable) in its later seasons because no matter who was talking - Col. Potter, Radar, Klinger, Hawkeye or even Hot Lips -- they were bound to speak in long sentences chockablock with elaborate puns and sophisticated references.

Let's not even talk about Kelley's early showcase, "Picket Fences." Starting out as a more coherent "Twin Peaks," the series degenerated into an endless weekly hour in which all the characters did nothing but talk to each other while playing up some patently outre plot "development" that Kelley had dreamed up between bon mots.

On "NYPD Blue," when David Milch was on deck as co-creator and writer, the problem was different - when these characters opened their mouths, you couldn't figure out what they were talking about. Never mind the use of terms like "skel" and "hump," which you figured out via context after a mere two or three seasons, and such (probably apocryphal) New Yorkisms as "Yeah, huh?"

What really made the show heavy sledding (we employ the past tense because Milch is out this season) was the fact that crucial plot developments were laid out in dialogue that you couldn't even hear because the participants were standing in some stairwell, apparently mumbling to themselves.

It's sobering to realize, after many hours and years of faithful viewing, that a high-action show like "NYPD Blue" or a science fiction extravaganza like "The X-Files" consists mainly of people in offices talking to each other, with an occasional jump cut to some "skel" absconding under heavy gunfire or a spaceship taking off into the blue.

This idea of letting one person - e.g., Milch, Kelley and Sorkin - handle all or almost all the writing chores for an ongoing series wouldn't, on the face of it, appear to be a very smart one. We can vouch for the fact that it's difficult verging on impossible merely to write a 600-word newspaper essay every once in a while, never mind 60 minutes of badinage every week.

Roger Anderson is arts and entertainment editor at Scripps Howard News Service.

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