Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing (19 page)

I was at a crossroads. What do you do when you are an actor, and you are rich and famous, but you are not interested in being rich and famous?

Well, you either retire (way too young for that), or you change it up.

I informed my manager and agents that I was now looking only for dramatic work.

I had dabbled in it with good results on
The West Wing
and
Ally McBeal
and
The Ron Clark Story,
so it didn't seem like a crazy move. I auditioned for some serious films, but I didn't get any of them. I shot a few indie movies that tried hard, but that didn't work out, either.

And then, a script came along that was white-hot.

I had never seen so much heat attached to a project—it was magnetic.
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,
written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Thomas Schlamme, was the follow-up to their little show called
The West Wing.
Between them they had like fifteen Emmys, so their new project caused a frenzy in the fall of 2005 unlike anything else. I had never seen a project that had so much power behind it before it had even started. NBC and CBS went at it like gladiators to get that thing, with NBC ultimately winning out to the tune of something like $3 million per episode. All that fall, wherever I turned, someone was talking about
Studio 7 on the Sunset Strip
(its original name). I was in New York finishing up
The Ron Clark Story
and staying at my favorite hotel in the world, the Greenwich, in Tribeca. I really wanted to read this hot script. Because I was on the East Coast, the script would not get to my hotel until 10:00
P.M.,
so I waited up.

Aaron and Tommy had changed the way America looked at serialized TV with
The West Wing,
and I had changed how America spoke English via the cadences of Chandler Bing. Seemed like a potent combination.

By 11:30
P.M
. I had read the script and decided to return to network television.

The lead characters were Matt Albie, the head writer of Studio 7 (and a role that apparently Aaron had written with me in mind), and Danny Tripp, his fellow showrunner, to be played by the kind and brilliant Bradley Whitford, both being brought back to save an
SNL
-like show called
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

Before a lick of it was filmed, it had “giant, Emmy-winning hit”
written all over it. It had Sorkin, Schlamme, and me. What could possibly go wrong?

The first problem was the money. I'd been making a tremendous nut on
Friends
and realized I'd struggle to get that number again, but even so, the fact that everyone in this ensemble show about a comedy TV program was being asked to accept the same fee.… The conversation went something like this (think of this in Sorkin-speak):

Me:
I really want to do this.

Manager:
Well, no one does this kind of thing better than Sorkin.

Me:
This would be my return to television—it's the way to go.

Manager:
The only problem is the offer.

Me:
The offer? What is it?

Manager:
The offer's what you get per episode.…

Me:
I know that. Thank you. I meant, what's the number?

Manager:
$50,000 per episode.

Me:
I got more than a million per for
Friends.
Can't we get them up?

Manager:
It doesn't look like it. They want this to be a true ensemble show and that is what they are offering everyone.

Me:
I can't believe I have to turn down the best television script I have ever read.

My manager, God bless him, didn't give up. He pointed out to the producers that even though
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
had indeed been conceived as an ensemble show, as soon as I stepped onstage it was going to be about my character, which is what ended up happening. With that argument in mind, after about six weeks of negotiations, we got them off their ensemble idea. I was to be billed as the star of the show, and we got them up to $175,000. Now, obviously that is an amazing amount of money to be paid a week, but three stages down, LeBlanc was being paid $600,000 a week to do
Joey
. But in the end, the writing
prevailed (every actor is just looking for good material), and I accepted the lowball number (and they hired my good friend Amanda Peet to round out the cast).

We shot the pilot, and I would hold up that pilot up against any pilot I had ever seen—it was that good. There was an energy to it, a crackle that's rare in TV, and fans loved it, too. It opened huge. (All my shows after
Friends
opened huge and then suddenly they weren't anymore.) The second episode of
Studio 60
drew literally half the number of people that the first one did. No one cared about the show. It took me years to figure out why.

There was a fatal flaw to
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,
one that no amount of good writing or good direction or good acting could fix. On
The West Wing,
the stakes were as high as you could imagine: a nuclear bomb is pointing at Ohio and the president has to fix that shit? People in Ohio would tune in to a show like that just to find out exactly what might happen if they were invited to kiss their own asses goodbye by an incoming intercontinental ballistic missile.

A very small group of people—myself included—know that for a sector of show business, getting a joke right is a matter of life and death. These are bent, weird people. But people in Canton, Ohio, watching
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
probably thought,
It's just a joke, why doesn't everybody calm down. It's not that big a deal, what is wrong with all of you people?
This was not the Monty Python bit about Ernest Scribbler who wrote a joke so funny it killed Nazis. (The Brits are immune to its power because they don't speak German. And the actual German of the killer joke is gibberish, which is also funny.) There might have been a devoted set of viewers in Rock Center or working the door of the Comedy Store on Sunset, but outside of that, the basic premise of the show didn't reach the levels of edge-of-the-seat stakes. Trying to attach
The West Wing
stakes to a comedy show could never work.

On a granular level, I also found the
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
work environment to be frustratingly unlike that of
Friends,
or even
The Whole Nine Yards
. Aaron runs a very tight ship—that's just how he likes it—to the point where there was someone on set with a script making sure that if the original reads “he is angry” and I, or someone else, shortened it to “
he's
angry,” we'd have to reshoot the entire scene—it had to be done
exactly as written
. (I nicknamed the production assistant whose job this was “the Hawk,” and honestly, what a horrible gig she had, having to be a hall monitor to a bunch of creative types acting their balls off.) Unfortunately, sometimes a take with a slightly different rendering of the line had been the best take of all, but still, the one that got used was the word-perfect one, not the
best
one. The Aaron Sorkin as writer / Tommy Schlamme as director system was never really actor centered, therefore it was much more about getting the text right, as though it were Shakespeare—in fact, I heard someone say on set that this
was
Shakespeare.…

I also had a different view of the creative process generally—I was used to pitching ideas, but Aaron didn't take any of them. I had thoughts, too, about the arc of my character, but they weren't welcomed, either. Problem is, I'm not just a talking head. I have a brain, especially comedically. Aaron Sorkin is a much better writer than I am, but he's not a funnier man than me (he'd kindly once said that
Friends
was his favorite show). And in
Studio 60
I was playing a
comedy
writer. I thought I had some funny ideas, but Aaron said no to 100 percent of them. That's his right, and it's no knock on him that he likes to run his set this way. It just left me disappointed. (Tom Hanks told me that Aaron did the same thing to him.)

I guess I was lucky that I'd already learned that being on a successful TV show didn't fix anything. The show went out the gate gangbusters, the pilot pulling down a cool thirteen million viewers and a fourteen share, which was solid. The reviews were positive, too.
Variety
said, “It's hard not to root for
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,
a series that
weds Aaron Sorkin's crackling dialogue and willingness to tackle big ideas with a beyond-stellar cast.” The
Chicago Tribune
went even further, writing me a love letter and saying, “
Studio 60
is not just good, it has the potential to be a small-screen classic.”

But the problem remained: it was trying to be a serious show about comedy and quality TV, as though those two things were as important as world politics. I recently read one really instructive critique about
Studio 60
on the
Onion
's A.V. Club vertical. Its author, Nathan Rabin, writing a few years after the show aired, agrees that the pilot was a special piece of work.

Along with much of the public, I watched the pilot in a state of feverish anticipation the night it premièred on September 18, 2006. When it was over, I couldn't wait to see what happened next. I re-watched it … a few months back [and] what I responded to most profoundly upon a repeat viewing was its infinite sense of possibility.
Studio 60
could go anywhere. It could do anything. And it could do it with one of the most remarkable casts in recent memory. The pilot for
Studio 60
still radiates potential the second time around, even if it was doomed to go fatally unrealized.

But Rabin also points out that the show probably took itself too seriously, given that it was supposed to be about gags, and that Sorkin's absolute control of the show left no room for anyone else to breathe.

The show's arrogance extended to having Aaron Sorkin write every episode. Oh sure, staff writers got a “story by” credit here and there, but
Studio 60
was ultimately a one-man show. Sorkin's voice dominates.… [I]n its own strange way,
Studio 60
endures, albeit as an epic, intermittently fascinating folly rather than as a magnum opus
.

Times had changed, too. We aired right as TV had morphed into a different animal. “Appointment TV,” like
Friends
or
The West Wing,
was starting to crater. People were recording shows to watch later; this affected ratings, which in turn became the story of the show, rather than the show itself, which was otherwise really good.

By the end of the first—and only—season, viewers had tended to agree with Rabin's assessment, and we were down to four million viewers, and only 5 percent of TVs were tuned into the show.

We were doomed.

I wasn't devastated by the lack of success—as I said, I knew a hit TV show couldn't fill my soul. And in any case, something else was filling my soul.

The two years of “friends with benefits” had morphed into love. This was one of the most “normal” periods of my life. True, occasionally I'd have little slips, taking maybe two OxyContin, from which I'd then have to detox for six days. But the relationship had deepened to the point where there was now a question I urgently needed to ask her.

One day, I said, “I think we should stop kidding ourselves. We love each other,” and she didn't disagree. I did love her, very much. That said, our intimacy issues were being sidestepped by the fact that we were both really into working. My fear of her leaving was still deeply in place, too, and who knows, perhaps she was scared of me leaving her.

Nevertheless, the moment came.

For Christmas, I'd paid a huge amount of money for an artist to paint the two of us. Our relationship had always been both sex- and text-driven—at least for the first four years—and I had found out from my business manager that we'd exchanged something like 1,780 texts. So, in the painting, on the bottom right corner, there she was, sitting down with a copy of
The New York Times
and some bottled water, as
she always did, and on the bottom left there was me, wearing a long sleeve T-shirt with another T-shirt on top of it, which is what I'd always wear, holding a Red Bull and reading a
Sports Illustrated
 … and all the while, we were texting each other. The artist had added 1,780 hearts, one for each text, and had smushed them all together to make one huge heart. I had never spent that kind of money on a gift before. I loved this woman, and I wanted her to know it.

My plan was to give her the painting and then ask the question. You know the one; I don't need to tell you how it goes, especially because … well, I never asked it. I gave her the present, and she was really moved by it, saying, “Matty, my little heart—what you're doing to my little heart.”

And it was time. All I had to do was say, “Honey, I love you. Will you…” But I didn't say it. All my fears reared up like a snake, the snake I feared was coming to get me the year before I'd met her, the time when I'd seen God but managed to learn not enough from him.

I immediately went into Chandler fucking Bing mode.

“Hey, hey, hey!” I said, to her consternation, “look
at
this!” bringing that fucking Chandler cadence back one last time.

I had missed the moment. Maybe she'd been expecting it, who knows. I'd been seconds away; seconds, and a lifetime. I often think if I'd asked, now we'd have two kids and a house with no view, who knows—I wouldn't need the view, because I'd have her to look at; the kids, too. Instead, I'm some schmuck who's alone in his house at fifty-three, looking down at an unquiet ocean.…

So I didn't ask. I was too scared, or broken, or bent. I had remained completely faithful to her the whole time, including the last two years, two years in which for some reason I didn't want to have sex with her anymore, two years in which no amount of couples therapy could explain why I'd never asked the damn question, and why now I just looked on her as my best friend only. My buddy; my
best
buddy. And
I didn't want to lose my best buddy, so I tried to make it work for two years.