Writer for stage and screen. Sorkin’s work shows a degree of brilliance seldom found in television, particularly broadcast television, where advertising and content restraints are harsher than for cable originals.
Sorkin’s [writing] is marked by several details, which can be discussed more thoroughly under the headings of his various projects, but some of the quasi-universal features are:

Dialogue
As Sorkin and many others have observed, his work is dialogue-driven, not plot-driven; plots are merely vehicles for dialogue. However, this does not mean that his shows can be reduced simply to amusing chatter (though they do include plenty thereof); Sorkin’s notion of good dialogue encompasses not merely witty banter but complex intellectual and moral debate, and a full emotional register. Thus while plot is an epiphenomenon of dialogue, the nature of the dialogue tends to produce good plot. Sorkin’s characters tend to utilize a certain kind of language ([Sorkinglish]) that is marked by a grammatical sensitivity (not accuracy mind you), a concern for diction and vocabulary, and a tendency to abuse placeholders like “the thing.”
h3. Moral sense
Sorkin is unusual among modern television writers for incorporating a sense of civic good and evil and a nuanced, dialogical moral quest into his work. Typically television morality tends to fall out into the meaningless niceties of sitcoms, the self-congratulatory crypto-fascism of police and legal dramas like “[Law and Order]”, titillation passing for moral complexity on legal dramas like “The Practice”, and the uncritical repetition of high-handed traditional values we find in, say, “Seventh Heaven.” Sorkin searches for something which is almost unrepresented on television (even the news media): the soul of the educated [liberal]. Political virtue, social responsibility, the public good, manifest as personal deeply personal concerns for Sorkin’s characters in their everyday—throughout his work, not merely on [The West Wing]
h3. Emotional Range
There is a general incentive today for programs to classify themselves in advance for their viewers as presenting a certain segment of the emotional range, usually either “comedy” or “drama”. And when a show wishes to break from its niche, it must somehow mark off space to do so (i.e., the “very special episode”—(see [Clone High]). Sorkin’s writing refuses to fall cleanly into either comedy or drama, for he insists on portraying the subtle admixture of comic and the tragic as they manifest in life.
For some (i.e., me) Sorkin represents the Last Best Hope for television becoming something more than just, you know, television. For more on this, see the entries for CategoryTelevision, [Sports Night], [West Wing], and [Sorkin and William James].
h2. Quotes
bq. “I love writing but hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says, ‘You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, giftless. I’m not your agent and I’m not your mommy, I’m a white piece of paper, you wanna dance with me?’ and I really, really don’t. I’ll go peaceable-like.”
h2. Works:

Revised on August 21, 2005 16:24 by Nick Shere