I know I wasn't the only West Wing fan here (although assuredly the loudest ), but Aaron Sorkin has apparently pulled himself together enough to write a new show, Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip. The pilot is now available from Netflix, and is likely still being seeded on your favorite bittorrent site (yay for the internets! Who needs commercial-laden TV anyway?), and it's goooood. Not quite West Wing pilot good, but very well done and with all of the great Sorkin dialogue and interaction that was really missed on the last few TWW seasons. Plus, Bradley Whitford is in it, and you can't go wrong there.

The show's premise is similar to Sorkin's other two shows (he also wrote Sports Night) - a behind the scenes drama about a SNL-style comedy show. The first 10 minutes of the pilot are great: the creator of the show does what you've wanted Lorne Michaels to do for years - interrupt the live broadcast to go on camera and admit his show has become crap.

Anyways...anyone else looking forward to this as much as I am?

Extended trailer on Youtube

Official NBC site

Studio 60 wikipedia

i'm confused about how there's this show and then the tina fey/alec baldwin show.

Yeah, some people in TV land were obviously not communicating with each other.

But Tina Fey's show is a straight comedy, where as Studio 60 is a drama (although like Sports Night or West Wing, with some lighter moments), so thematically I think they'll be very different shows, it's just odd that they're both coming out at the same time.

So um...no one watched the pilot?

We watched it...I liked it. I'm gonna keep watching...looks like a lot of potential with interesting characters and storylines. And, I like the stars.
Anyone else?.

i loved it. especially judd hersh's opening "monologue." if it lives up to that, this could be a great show.

typical schlamme/sorkin, lots of dialogue/characters and stuff going on, if you go pee you could miss something important and be lost for a while.

if you missed the "pilot" episode, or had to go pee and missed something, you can still catch the entire thing HERE (click on the "studio 60" block) for free.

Eh, it was okay. Didn't think it lived up to the hype that had been building around it. Is there potential there? Sure. But given that Sorkin is, more or less, treading the same ground he's covered before it remains to be seen if there'll be anything particularly noteworthy about this show.