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Monday, October 16, 2006

Studio 60

I'm sure it sounded great in the pitch meeting, but do you suppose NBC is really going to run the full season of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip? I guess they're committed to 13 episodes, but there should be no shock about how the ratings have plummeted. The show combines the most tiresome pages of the Aaron Sorkin playbook (heavyhanded mockery of caricatured defenders of caricatured "traditional values") with uniformly painful representations of "sketches" and "comedy" that are to anything funny what eating a photograph of a steak is to eating the steak itself.

If the show respected its audience, the comedy bits would be of a higher quality. If the show respected the medium it is supposed to be depicting, sketch comedy, the comedy bits would be of a higher quality. But in actual point of fact, the comedy bits are dreadful filler that wouldn't have made it onto SNL at its Mary Gross nadir (which is saying a lot). Do Sorkin and company think that the audience can't detect that this material is dreck? That because people were willing to believe the White House operated any old way they wrote it, they will believe any old thing they write is funny? If they respected the medium of sketch comedy, they would hire some actual established comedy writers to create a fair approximation of it on the show. But it's painfully evident that they didn't do this, hubristically supposing they would be able to whip it up along with everything else they were writing for the show.

I think a big reason the ratings have tanked is that the audience resists identifying with the show's supposedly tops-in-their-profession characters because those characters don't recognize the sketch comedy bits as awful. Hence, they are not believable characters. Hence, no one cares about them.

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posted at 10:24 PM

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