The thing I like most about Aaron Sorkin on 30 Rock is the extra-textual nature of his appearance on the show that kicked his ass. When Tina Fey launched a show set behind the scenes of a Saturday Night Live (but not really) sketch comedy program, her 30 Rock was in direct competition with Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, created by an acclaimed, award-winning, television heavyweight. Aaron Sorkin's show was set behind the scenes of a Saturday Night Live (but not really) sketch comedy program.
Media chatter didn't indicate much hope for 30 Rock. Sorkin had done a TV behind-the-scenes series before (Sports Night was critically adored even if the ratings didn't win the show longevity), and he was at the height of his TV powers post-West Wing. The market wasn't going to bear two shows about the same thing, and there was no way some former SNL writer was going to stand up a show that opened with a dynamite, Network-style tirade that got everything right.
“You're familiar with my work. The Social Network, The West Wing, A Few Good Men.”
“Studio 60?”
“Shut up.”
“Studio 60?”
“Shut up.”
And then Tina Fey kicked Aaron Sorkin's ass up and down the block. The beating was bad enough that his guest spot on 30 Rock probably couldn't have happened without 5 years distance and a Social Network Oscar salving his ego.
A lot of people saw Studio 60 was in trouble from the start with an unbelievable premise: a genius comedy team shunned from an industry run on coke and controversy due to drug addiction and scandal. I'm no industry insider, but if you ban all the comedy writers with coke problems, you're going to be scrambling hard after you fire 50% of your workforce. (Is that figure too low? 75%)
Even if our hard working, genius protagonists were in the doghouse for their failures many years back, Studio 60 also somehow thinks a comedy show's audience would care. It's a fair guess that less than 10% of Saturday Night Live's audience could name one of the show's producers or writers, much less tell you if they had a dark history. The only writers of a sketch show that people generally recognize are ones that get in front of the camera-- I found out Bob Odenkirk wrote for SNL after watching him on Mr. Show, and never would have known Tina Fey's name if she hadn't starred in 30 Rock.
Worse, Studio 60 was a workplace drama (Sorkin's stock in trade) that made the crucial mistake of showing the efforts of his characters' skills: if this was a team of comedy geniuses brought in to resurrect a failing sketch show, why are their sketches so painfully unfunny? Saturday Night Live might be floundering, but it does at least try to make jokes... I can't imagine anyone mistaking the Gilbert & Sullivan parody on Studio 60 for comedy, much less finding it funny.
Comparatively, 30 Rock is, in and of itself, very funny, and shows very little of TGS. When we do see the show Liz Lemon and company are putting on, it's lowest common denominator (“Someone put too many farts in the fart machine!” or the Robot vs Bear Sketch) and accepted that the writing and producing team are far from geniuses... but 30 Rock and its behind-the-scenes of an unfunny show is damn funny.
30 Rock got its licks in early, too; in its first season, with Studio 60 still competing with them, the list of bad sketches included a Studio 60 reference (“This is worse than that Gilbert & Sullivan parody we did”), a sly dig that TGS could have done a sketch that bad... but no one in the writing room or the audience was going to claim it was the work of geniuses. They also take a shot a Sorkin's style, albeit in the most conventional way possible (“Kenneth, can you walk and talk?” “Gee, I've never thought about it before.”)
As both programs are ostensibly about comedy writers for a comedy show, it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that the funny one is coming back for a 6th season and the drama is a TV history footnote... but Aaron Sorkin's appearance of 30 Rock made me think back to the time when he was in direct competition with Tina Fey in real life, and no one thought he could lose that fight.