Watching Studio60

I was looking on Kristin Chenowith’s IMDb page last night — wondering just how short she is after seeing her character as a former jockey on Pushing Daisies (four-foot-eleven, as it turns out, just an inch taller than my own short self) — and found a quote there about the Studio 60 character allegedly based on her, Harriet Hayes.

Here’s the quote, attributed to a New York Times story about her giving sometime boyfriend Aaron Sorkin permission to write her into his story: “I said O.K. I was happy to give him that gift. And I watch every week because I’m supportive of Aaron; whether we’re together or not, I love him always. I think it’s a genius show. But … it is weird when I see her behaving in ways that are different from me. I’m really not that judgmental girl. But you have to let artists go where they go.”

Yes, you do. And where else are they supposed to go than into their own experiences, thoughts, and beliefs? Writing is torture enough, if you can’t be allowed to use it to win old arguments or settle old scores or say those things you couldn’t quite think of to say in the moment, what the heck good is it? Plenty of sit-com writers have mentioned that they’ve recycled arguments with their significant others into dialog for the couples on their shows. Apparently, if you do that in a drama, you just get grief for using your art to air your dirty laundry. It’s nice that Chenowith has the grace to go with it; I wish critics had done the same.

Years ago, when I used to take creative writing classes, I had one in which the instructor offered the familiar maxim, “Write what you know.� But he added another one that’s too often forgotten by amateur writers: “Just because it really happened doesn’t make it interesting.� To write good fiction, or TV drama, you have to write what you know but turn it into a good story, and sometimes that means sticking to the truth of a relationship but not to the actual facts.

I have no idea what Chenowith and Sorkin’s relationship was (or is) really like. I suspect that, like most real-life relationships, it wouldn’t be that interesting to watch in actual fact. I did think the constant back and forth of Matt and Harriet was interesting. Though actually, if you had to tag one of them as judgmental, I’d have said it was Matt. If this was really the writer’s stand-in, then he was being hardest on himself.