Aaron Sorkin's Crack About Television

"Studio 60" writer Aaron Sorkin's slip of the tongue incited mad blogging by critics. (By Reed Saxon -- Associated Press)

Manic blogging.

And, just when you thought it couldn't get any trippier, Sarah Paulson, whose Harriet Hayes character on the new show is based on "West Wing-er" Kristin Chenoweth, and Amanda Peet, whose Jordan McDeere is a thinly veiled portrait of ex-NBC exec Jamie "formerly McDermott" Tarses, told critics they're not basing their characters on any living person.

(Paulson said, "I'm not basing my character on any living person"; Peet contributed, "Me, neither -- next!" Peet also can be quoted as having contributed "Me, too!" when Perry, asked why he returned to series TV so quickly after "Friends," said it was because of how good Sorkin's writing was "and how bad 'The Whole Ten Yards' was.")

Sorkin jumped in and confirmed that Peet's character had sprung from Jamie Tarses, "of whom I'm a big fan" because when she was ABC programming chief she put on his "Sports Night." Tarses is a paid consultant on the series, Sorkin added.

But he said it would be a "red herring" to examine the show "like the cover of 'Abbey Road' to see what's real and what's being done in code."

Peet became chattier when recounting for critics -- by way of sucking up to Sorkin -- how she'd insisted her manager rush over a copy of the pilot script. Sorkin lapped it up.

Then, to demonstrate what a challenge it is for her to play a really smart woman on the series, she said after reading the pilot she wasn't sure she wanted to do it. So she asked her fiance, David Benioff -- the guy who wrote the screenplay for "Troy" -- to read it. She says he told her to "follow the writing" -- yes, that old cliche.

But, just in case you think she had the corner on Stupid Pills, Sorkin said he was confident NBC would not try to censor the show, which nicks the network repeatedly in the first episode, because when NBC and CBS were in a bidding war on the project, he made the network chiefs give the pilot script to their standards departments for notes. And, golly, each network reported back it would have no problem airing the pilot as is at 9 or 10 p.m.

Sorkin was notoriously taken off his biggest TV hit, NBC's "West Wing," after its fourth season; lateness of scripts, almost all of which he wrote, was cited as the cause in news reports.

Asked about it during the Q&A, Sorkin paraphrased David Mamet -- who is doing "The Unit" for CBS these days -- who recently said writing a play or a movie is like running a marathon, but doing a one-hour TV series is like "running until you die."

This time around, Sorkin says, he's been writing scripts since January, so he'll be "able to bank some scripts; hopefully, that will at least prolong a little bit of time before the wheels come off the wagon."

Manic blogging.