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Saturday Night’s 6 Most Glaring Aaron Sorkin–isms

Every tic and flourish the SNL movie cribs from Sorkin makes it a fascinating showcase for all of the latter’s screenwriting strengths and weaknesses.

And just as President Bartlet’s staff picks up and drops six different conversations as they make their way from one engagement to the next in Sorkin’s The West Wing, Michaels walks around Studio 8H at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Saturday Night putting out fires one ten-second-long interaction at a time. In a famous scene from The Social Network — David Fincher’s 2010 movie about the origins of Facebook written by Sorkin — Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriend Erica tells the future tech CEO that she can’t keep talking to him because she finds it exhausting. From Donna Moss on The West Wing, who exists at times to be an audience surrogate to whom other characters can explain complex things, to MacKenzie McHale on The Newsroom, an accomplished war journalist who apparently gets flustered using her email, the women in his scripts are rarely well rounded.

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