I’ve had a chance to watch a few episodes of Sports Night on DVD. There are a great number of motifs from this which I can identify as also appearing in The West Wing, as well as actors and themes. I have to say it’s great to see Robert Guillaume work, as Isaac Jaffee.
I can definitely see a sparkle in this Aaron Sorkin show that suggests the promise of what The West Wing delivered. The back stage drama of a television show also seems to have been heavily sourced for what I know of Studio 60, from the only the pilot.
The familiar motifs remind me of a book I never read about Mozart that claimed Mozart’s music contained words and patterns in notes that repeated and spoke in a personal language. There’s a sense of more meaning there than just the notes themselves because there’s a full, rich language being used, communication of a higher order being transmitted. I don’t mean to suggest Sorkin is the new Mozart. I’m just talking about the notion that great communication uses familiar and personal motifs.
(What was that book? I picked it up at Powell’s … must have been around or slightly after high school. At the time it was in the new book section and explored Mozart’s music using, I remember, statistics to develop the theory that Mozart was writing music in a language of his own. I don’t think Musical Languages can be that book, but it was something like that. I wish I could remember.)
(As I was looking to see if I could find the book in my memory, I almost got lost on a safari looking at the use of gesture, topic and trope in music studies …)
Also, I posted about the word chyron a while back, and heard that word in use on a few episodes.