Aaron Sorkin left The West Wing in 2003. His last teleplay was a stirring episode where the President invoked the 25th amendment, temporarily removing himself from office due to his kidnapped daughter’s uncertain fate. It was a glorious end to an inspired run.

When he left, the show went in the tank. The West Wing hobbled to its finish line more wounded than Barbaro, a decaying Constantinople not deserving its association with the glory of Rome. When the West Wing opened in 1999 to booming ratings I hoped that this show and its brilliant creator were actually here to save network television. Maybe if the people who control television could see that America would watch a show that relied on intelligent dialogue and complex issues, they would give us more of them. Back in 1999 the West Wing was doing well, Fraiser was doing well (it was never funny, but whatever), there was legitimate reason to hope that easy and stupid would not prevail.

Then George Bush was elected. Then Anthony Zuicker discovered that people who never studied biology are really impressed by the technology of a microscope and CSI was born. Then the Towers fell and people flocked to the “bad guys are really obvious and always apprehended” comfort that only Law and Order: You Could Die Tomorrow can provide. Predictably, the West Wing’s ratings started to fall as people agreed that the mere concept of an intelligent president required too much suspension of disbelief. Eventually people started to abandon the show in favor of dramas with more realistic dialogue (like “fuck you cocksucker”) and plot lines (hasn’t everybody had at least one of their wives killed for flipping to the FBI?). The opportunity for intelligent television was lost, and Aaron Sorkin the light-bringer left the medium as well.

Luckily, everything is a cycle. The abandonment of intelligent television inexorably led to the day where a major television network would find itself relying on Howie Mandel and his math-less band of box pointers to prop up their faltering ratings. NBC turned to Sorkin and apparently gave him enough control that his entire pilot could revolve around eviscerating the ravaged corpse that used to call itself Saturday Night Live. Those of us who like both thought and entertainment at the same time once again have reason to rejoice.

I’m going to assume that you are coming to this article with an open mind. I’m going to assume that even if you had your problems or complaints about the West Wing, you are still open to quality TV. So let me tell you why we all can be excited about Sorkin’s new show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. We should all be excited and give this show a chance because Aaron Sorkin does two things better than anybody else who has ever written a television show.

The man can write parts for women. Smart women. Professional women. Aaron Sorkin doesn’t just create roles where actresses have the opportunity to wear a full compliment of clothing and speak in complete sentences, he actually knows how to write things for them to say and stuff for them to do. He’s the only TV writer who knows how to do this. I know my point sounds hyperbolic, but apparently writing dialogue for intelligent women is so difficult that only Aaron Sorkin knows how to do it.

As far as I can tell, there are three standard ways of writing a females character: write her like a man who occasionally menstruates and has breasts, write her as a hooker/housewife (desperate or otherwise), or use the old Mr. Udall standby from As Good as it Gets “I think of a man, and then I take away reason and accountability.”. Those are your choices if you want to be a woman on TV. Carmela Soprano is a great character with some real intense issues. Its probably the best woman’s role on television, but she’s still a housewife. The writers of The Wire were so flummoxed about how to write a professional woman that they didn’t even try. They made Kima Greggs a lesbian and write her as a heterosexual man … with breasts. Don’t even get me started on Sex in the City. If a man who makes less than $100,000 a year met any one of those women, he’d hate them immediately. If a woman who is too busy working and thinking to keep apprised of the latest Prada sale met “the girls” for brunch, there’s a good chance that Carrie would get the street beating she so desperately deserves.

I get that women playing roles traditionally reserved for men represents significant progress in our backwards little society, but making Geena Davis the President and then making her talk like a man whose trying to prove he’s not a pussy is progress at a snails pace. While everybody else is running around trying to find which new and powerful title they can give to their female characters, Aaron Sorkin is doing the hard work of actually giving these characters something to say. His female characters don’t act “like a man” they act like a woman, a woman who is professional, a woman who is educated, just a grown up self-confident female. It’s important to watch how Sorkin deals with the female characters if for no other reason than to expose how far the rest of television still has to go.

The second skill that Sorkin posses zen mastery of is his ability to depict the world as it should be. This is the biggest criticism of his work, voiced largely out of the film school, “keepin’ it real” bastion of snobbery. Sorkin’s characters are always way more intelligent than they would be if they were real. Their motives are always way too pure. The good guys finish first. Truth triumphs. Sorkin is most definitely an idealist, but he is not a liar.

I’m a cynic. I’m jaded. Like most people I look back on the television shows of the 1950s and feel like I’m getting raped in my eye socket. The depiction of life where everybody had a stable nuclear family, everybody was always nice, and all of life’s problems could be wrapped up by dinner time was a complete lie and actually did nothing but make people feel worse about their lives that were so different than the ones they saw on TV. It was a lie that was perpetrated on the American public in an effort to sell washing machines and houses in the suburbs. Idealism, at least the brand that Sorkin is selling, is a completely different thing. Sorkin is showing us the way things could be. He’s showing us the way the world could operate if we wanted it to. He is reminding us that the way things work is not the way things have to work.

Take President Bartlett. Is the President a Nobel Laureate who is also a good husband, kind father, and always the smartest guy in the room? In real life, no, of course not, our current President is always the dumbest guy in the room and his predecessor was the Webster’s definition of a bad husband. But the character of Josiah Bartlett is there to remind us that the President should be like that and could be like that if we wanted to go find that guy and elect him. The problems that Sorkin’s characters face are realistic, their personal issues and demons are realistic, he’s not selling us some Leave it to Beaver universe where nothing bad happens ever. It is in the way the characters handle and overcome these very real obstacles that the idealism is exposed. The characters rely on intellect and study and work and a very strong moral compass to guide them through their travails. Maybe that is not how “real” people handle most of their problems, but isn’t it how we should try to handle the crap of the day? As individuals, we can do better. As a society, we can do better. If some realism has to be sacrificed to depict a country that is not as consumed with mediocrity as ours is that’s a sacrifice well worth making.

A very good writer has come back to television and is once again asking for an hour of our time. We should give him this hour. We should give it to him because if don’t we’re about one mid season replacement away from watching homeless people scrape scratch off tickets for the grand prize of a sandwich. We should give him this hour because if we do we will have one whole hour of looking at what we could become. As Jor-El once said, we are a good people, we need only the light to show us the way. Well Superman is a CGI fantasy, but Aaron Sorkin is real.

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