Studio 60: somewhat better
Well, much to my surprise, they have managed to significantly improve
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip with two simple changes:
- replacing all the awful attempts at sketch comedy with a few wisps of smoke and the occasional glancing reflection, creating the illusion that a sketch comedy show takes place somewhere in general vicinity of these characters, and that they are involved somehow
- delivering the romantic payoff for Bradley Whitford's character in a matter of episodes instead of dragging it out for what seemed like longer than the Bartlet Administration could constitutionally have remained in power
The show still has a long way to go to save par, but it isn't the
Ishtar-like embarrassment that it started out as.
Labels: Studio 60, television
I don't care if they picked it up for the full season, it's painful
"Cheeses of Nazareth" is the name of a comedy bit? That someone in the imaginary world of
Studio 60 thinks is funny?
Interesting, because in my world it's just painful.
OH MY GOD! They brought it back to the guy's brother in Afghanistan again! About how he's "playing Russian roulette" by doing multiple tours of duty.
This show is so horrid. It's just so pandering and sanctimonious and horrid. I'm only watching it to see if it can really get any worse.
Labels: Studio 60, television
One less blogging topic
[D]espite receiving an order for three more episodes on Friday, the Aaron Sorkin NBC drama "Studio 60 on Sunset Strip" is about to be put out of its misery.
Cast members are already confiding in friends that the end is near. It's likely NBC will pull the plug shortly I am told by insiders. - FOXNews.com, October 29, 2006
And let's not for a moment think the show was too "smart" to find an audience.
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"Studio 60's real problem is structural"
I seldom get to link to articles that
share my analyses of things, so please humor me.
Labels: Studio 60, television
Once more unto the breach
I'm going to watch
Studio 60 at 10 p.m. because I feel I am now invested in how bad it is. Afterward, I'll update this post with a short assessment.
Short assessment:
Well, as an ex-girlfriend's grandmother used to say, hit your head against the wall . . . it'll feel good when you stop. They left the atrocious attempts at sketch comedy out of this one, so that was an improvement.
But . . . dear God how insufferable Aaron Sorkin must be in person if he writes stuff like this. The rube parents from the heartland whose cast-member son turns out to have been funding body armor for his brother's military unit in Afghanistan, the whole clichéd business about finding a new black writer . . . that concludes with the black cast member, Simon,
informing the unsuspecting guy that he has just been hired, then giving him a condescending little "work hard" speech and throwing a "boy" in there for good measure. Charming. Normally the approach is to
offer someone a job—is it impossible to write an entertaining scene where they treat the guy like any other talent they would be trying to recruit? When was the last time someone trying to recruit you took the approach that they were doing you a huge favor? Exactly. I'm embarrassed for the writers of this show, I really am. The irony is that on a meta level this plotline provides its own best proof of the point it wants to make about the need for black writers—I really doubt black people were involved in creating the "you just got hired" scene. (Oh, and Simon would still be guilty of conspiracy to commit murder since he certainly didn't meet the standard for abandonment. Small detail.)
Unintended laugh line of the episode: "You're standing in the middle of the Paris Opera House of American television!"
Sacrebleu!Labels: Studio 60, television
A little more on Studio 60
I've been told that my criticisms of
Studio 60 miss the point, and that the unconvincing backdrop against which Sorkin's characters scurry about bantering doesn't matter that much. But I'm not alone in my basic assessment:
Every other scene seems to be Matthew Perry or Bradley Whitford congratulating each other on their genius or talking about the genius of Sarah Paulson's character. Paulson is fine in the role, but the sketches just aren't there. It's like a movie that spends all its time talking about the genius of a painter who only draws stick men. The Onion A.V. Club, October 17, 2006
Exactly! It's too bad the Sorkin crew couldn't do a better job. It's
obviously possible (granted, there's an element of parody to the underlying show there), though layering drama over comedy presents different challenges than layering
comedy over comedy.
And no, writing new lyrics to the ur-clichéd Gilbert & Sullivan number simply does not qualify as brilliant humor in the underlying show. For one thing, much of the humor comes from seeing the Major General's old corpse trundled out onto the boards for one more clumsy dance. For another, more inspired (and funnier) examples of retooled lyrics come to mind from my own personal experience. The "Law Revue" show's Billy Joel homage "We Didn't Build the
Toaster" is one (". . . Kendall Thomas is inane." Classic!). Then there was the tremendous Lewinsky-era reworking of Pink Floyd's "Have A Cigar" by the deceptively innocent-seeming calling-misser CLD ("And by the way, what's your name?" Poetry! You're not fooling me with that "mom who loves Polish pottery and berry desserts" routine, missy.)
Anyway, because I'm a positive kind of guy, I'm going to offer a suggestion to the Sorkin team, free of charge. After the
Studio 60 experiment is over, chalk those 13 episodes up to experience and move on to a new challenge: a contemporary one-hour comedy-drama reimagining of
M*A*S*H. It would be the perfect vehicle for the Sorkin treatment, with a built-in high bar he likely could actually clear, plenty of room for political commentary, etc. Think about it.
Labels: Studio 60, television
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.
Labels: Studio 60, television
