Friday, February 17, 2006

Why blog about West Wing and Aaron Sorkin?

I wanted to explain why I spent so much time "obsessing" about a stupid little show and a minor incident that happened five years ago. There's a couple of reasons.

1. Preservation of a good story. The Sorkin history at Twop is just a really interesting story to me. I was in a graduate-level class in Georgetown Unversity that was called "Critical Theory Approaches to Television" and we were talking about fans and television. How fans change TV essentially. How TV talks "back" to the fans (Lost is notorious for this). Its not insane to imagine TV writers, TV actors, TV producers hunting down fan sites and Twop message boards to see what people have written about them. In many cases Twop is the only place someone can read audience comments about their show.

Anyway in this class of mine another student actually referenced the Sorkin-Twop-U.S. Poet episode. She clearly knew the history. You know, I wound up talking to her after class but I sensed that, while she lurked on the boards, she wasn't that much of an active participant.

2. Practice blogging. Another reason I wanted to write out the story was just to give myself some practice in long-form blogging. Particularly something that took a little time to compose and research. (I even had to draw up a timeline for myself as much for "other" readers, and that's when I noticed the disparity between my memory and what Ihad from mjforty.)

So I'm not obsessed with The West Wing or Aaron Sorkin. I'm not obsessed with a TV show(s) that aired four years ago. Its just a little bit of practice for myself in blogging as well as storytelling.

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