Studio 60 impersonators on Twitter (even if it's fake it's real)
February 2007 on this blog, about the demise of Aaron Sorkin's meta-television series Studio 60:
I'm hoping Sorkin finds another TV vehicle soon, lest our national broadcast airwaves go without their recommended weekly allowance of pediconferencing.
Sorkin didn't need to find another TV vehicle, since he found a social network and turned it into The Social Network. But via Graham Smith's zeitgasm (via booktwo.org) comes news of a group of people who have been playing the characters of Studio 60 on Twitter.
While our world’s Studio 60 was cancelled, the tweets imagine that the show-within-the-show is still going. ... They also made specific references to events from the show: Jordan and Danny getting locked on the roof, Matt’s brief drug addiction and hallucination, Jordan’s pregnancy, Jack’s meeting with Japanese businessmen, Peripheral Vision Man, and an endless procession of animals getting trapped beneath the stage. None of the tweets were particularly funny on their own or even as a whole, and unless you had a serious familiarity with the original, they would hardly make sense.
I have a serious familiarity with the original, so Jordan and Danny getting locked on the roof actually means something to me. Like Smith, I'd love to see Twitter used for more time-bound, character driven story telling. In the meantime here's a Twitter list (no guarantee of permanence) in case you want to pediconference in your mind along with Matt Albie, Danny Tripp and the rest of the unrealistically hyperverbal sanctimoniously fictitious television characters...now being impersonated by real people.
Because even if it's fake it's real.