Life After Studio 60

Despite our endorsement, Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip will not see a second season. I've been struggling to get through the last few episodes via iTunes, which is hard for a Sports Night and West Wing enthusiast like me to admit.

But one little bump in the road won't knock me off Sorkin's bandwagon, which is headed back to Broadway. The Farnsworth Invention, his first new play since A Few Good Men in 1989, opens later this year.

From Playbill:

The Farnsworth Invention concerns the battle for the patent for the invention of the television set. The race pitted a young genius, Philo T. Farnsworth, who came up with the idea as a high school student, against David Sarnoff, the head of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA).

Sorkin's work has always been a vehicle for trivia, like Andrew Jackson's 1,400-pound block of cheese, the Gail-Peters Projection and Bill Russell's elbow-throwing on national television. And perhaps my favorite Sorkin-written moment referred to his play's protagonist, Mr. Farnsworth (transcript here).

To paraphrase another Sorkin quote, the length of this post may be way out of proportion to your interest in it. So let me close by saying The Farnsworth Invention sounds like a good way to spend an evening. Field trip?