{"id":88,"date":"2006-09-27T00:28:10","date_gmt":"2006-09-27T05:28:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.xorph.com\/creator\/2006\/09\/27\/the-law-of-meta\/"},"modified":"2006-09-27T00:28:10","modified_gmt":"2006-09-27T05:28:10","slug":"the-law-of-meta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/2006\/09\/27\/the-law-of-meta\/","title":{"rendered":"The Law of Meta"},"content":{"rendered":"

To do meta well, you must first do well the thing within. Checkerboard Nightmare<\/a> did metahumor and it worked, because Kris Straub was already a skilled humorist; by contrast, almost all webcomics attempt it within their first couple of weeks and fail, because their creators haven’t developed any skill at comedy. So you can see why I’m worried about Studio 60.<\/p>\n

Not that Aaron Sorkin’s not a funny writer–with Mitch Hurwitz out, he’s the funniest writer on network television–but he’s not a sketch writer. Sketch comedy is hard<\/i>, and even harder to do consistently. The best writers in the history of the format have had a hit rate of maybe one in five; even in the age of viral video, the only success Saturday Night Live has found on the intertube was a fluke<\/a> that relied on hip name-dropping and the tired joke of white guys and gangsta poseury. And that’s out of what, three hundred skits a year? William Hung has a better batting average.<\/p>\n

Even if Studio 60 focuses mostly on the weekly downtime and not the show proper, eventually it’s going to have to back up its premise that Matt Albie is good at his job. That means showing us a sketch at least every few episodes. Last night they went as far as showing us the cold open, and it was just a joke they made five minutes earlier repeated to music. It was a nice dramatic moment, with the orchestra and the bold statement of purpose. But it wasn’t funny the second time through, or the third, or the tenth.<\/p>\n

A special case of the Law of Meta is the Law of Writing A Character Who is a Writer. The law is: don’t. Doing so almost invariably turns into massive self-indulgence and, worse, annoys me. Even Sports Night couldn’t escape that toward the end. And given that Studio 60 is already nicking from SN (homage to Felicity Huffman, fights with Standards and Practices, I understand next episode the power goes out), well, you understand why I’m worried again.<\/p>\n

But I want to see the next episode now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To do meta well, you must first do well the thing within. Checkerboard Nightmare did metahumor and it worked, because Kris Straub was already a skilled humorist; by contrast, almost all webcomics attempt it within their first couple of weeks and fail, because their creators haven’t developed any skill at comedy. So you can see […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,22,50,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-obsessions","category-plugs","category-television","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}