More than anyone else behind the camera at any other broadcast television series, writer-producer Aaron Sorkin is the star of his shows.

Starting with “Sports Night” and continuing on without a breath into “The West Wing,” Sorkin has dependably written compelling, distinctive TV characters who recite, sometimes at breathtaking pace, TV’s sharpest dialog.

Sorkin’s first series, which aired for two seasons on ABC, looked behind the scenes at an all-sports TV network. On NBC, “The West Wing” took the same whirlwind walk-and-talk backstage tour of the White House.

In “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” debuting Monday at 10 p.m. EDT on NBC, Sorkin returns with a show about a show – NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” though not by that name – and the people who put it on.

Who are, who? And why? Those are the “Studio 60” questions.

“Saturday Night Live” has a rich history of launching some of its players to wider stardom, but is the comedic drill press that gets that show on the air each week all that interesting to people who otherwise struggle each week to stay awake until “Weekend Update”?

The caveat that “Studio 60’s” mostly positive preseason reviews uniformly mention is that its stories might be a bit too inside.

“Whenever I hear that question, I just think, “Isn’t “CSI” a little inside the coroner’s office?”‘ said Bradley Whitford, a “West Wing” alum who with Matthew Perry (“Friends”) play the writer-producer duo put in charge of the fictional show, and who, with Sorkin and several other cast members, met with TV critics in July in Los Angeles. “It’s an advantage, because you’re taking an audience to a place that is different, and you’re humanizing the people who are dealing with that new place. I don’t worry about it.”

Director Thomas Schlamme, Sorkin’s production partner on both “Sports Night” and “West Wing,” recalled one “West Wing” story line that hinged on trouble at the Census Bureau.

“That’s pretty inside,” Schlamme said. “That’s not what you would sort of pitch – an episode about the census.”

But the census story was actually a springboard to explore the interpersonal interaction between the show’s characters. The episode was about the census the way “The Honeymooners” was about sewer workers and bus drivers.

Like the failing Continental Sports Channel and the White House, Studio 60 is a workplace.

“At its heart, “Studio 60′ is the same thing that “The West Wing’ was at its heart, and the same thing “Sports Night’ before that was at its heart: It’s about a group of people committed to professionalism, committed to each other, committed to what they’re doing, and hopefully, we enjoy watching them every week,” said Sorkin, who before writing for TV, wrote plays (“A Few Good Men”) and always-on-cable-somewhere feature films (“A Few Good Men,” “The American President”).

“As far as any inside baseball, I’m not concerned about that at all. Anything the audience needs to understand, they will. Anything they don’t understand, what they’ll understand is (that) these characters know what they’re talking about, in the same way you’d do a medical drama or a legal drama or a cop show or anything like that. Or a White House show.”

JL END WALKER

(Dave Walker is television columnist for The Times-Picayune of New Orleans. He can be contacted at dwalker(at)timespicayune.com)

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