Any review of a failed show will obviously contain spoilers about that show. So you are forewarned.
What killed "Studio 60"? There were a number of contributing causes, but here are the Big Five, in order.
1. Too much time spent on a "romance" that couldn't carry the show.
Matt and Harriet were splitsville before the pilot, yet nearly every one of the episodes that followed played the same song: "will Matt and Harriet get back together" without ever hitting any different notes. It was always Matt digs Harriet, she's not that into him. You'd think there'd be some variety after 12, 13, 14 episodes, but it wasn't there. It was the same drumbeat, week after week.
2. The show that was too smart for everyone thought that everyone was stupid.
For a show constantly trumpeted as smart, it made some awfully stupid assumptions about the level of intelligence of its audience. Anyone remotely connected with television or knowledgeable about television history (and that might be more people than the producers think) knows that a single writer can't write a 90-minute sketch comedy show all by himself week after week. Yet, for the first 6 or 7 weeks, we were asked to suspend disbelief and buy into the fact that Matt Albie could do what no other writer in history could do.
In "Nevada Day", the show had a character arrested and extradited to another state on the same day, without an attorney, and without being searched before the extradition. Instead of creating a realistic scenario where Tom Jeter ends up in police custody in Nevada on a state holiday wearing Simon Stiles' leather jacket, the producers apparently assumed that their viewers were stupid enough to believe anything. While there were many other instances of the producers taking their audience's intelligence for granted, this one may be the most blatant.
The irony is that the pilot began with a rant about the "dumbing down of television", yet "Studio 60" seemed to be just fine with ignoring logic or reality in favor of convenience, as long as it served a storyline.
3. Miscasting of the two key female roles.
Sarah Paulson is not believable as a woman with a genius gift for either comedy or song, and she had zero chemistry with Matthew Perry, staring at him in their scenes together as if he were a grocery store clerk who had just inquired "paper or plastic?" Looking at Harriet, you never saw any conflict in her eyes over her "lost love". She could not deliver the goods.
Amanda Peet was so dreadful as a network president that you have to wonder if there was any casting process at all, or if she was simply handed the role without having to audition. Her performance got better later, when the Jordan/Danny romance heated up. Personal interaction with a man seems to be her strong suit. But witty banter and corporate politics with the big boys (and girls)? She doesn't have the timing for the banter or the gravitas for the politics.
4. Too much Christian-bashing in the early episodes, for no apparent reason.
If the right wing were currently boycotting late night TV shows, getting people fired, and generally having a tizzy about all the immoral programming coming out of Hollywood, then the early episodes, which very heavily relied on bashing the Christian Right as a plot device, would be understandable. But the Christian Right is fairly quiet right now. These stories seem better set in the mid-80s than in 2006.
The Right versus the Media is an outdated, non-topical subject, and far too much time was spent on it. Yawn. In a recent episode Matt Albie marveled that a survey shows that nearly two-thirds of Americans actually believe in angels. If that is true, maybe Albie's creator shouldn't have spent so much time bashing that segment of the population in the earlier episodes. Why alienate two-thirds of your potential audience if there's no reason to do so?
5. A show about late night comedy with no late night comedy.
During the series run, a scant three sketches were shown mostly in their entirety, only one of which was funny. We saw premises, we saw gags on the fake news segment, but it didn't seem to be in the producers' power to actually do what late night shows do: make us laugh for 4 or 5 minutes with a comedy sketch. If you can't do that, why set the series behind the scenes at a late night comedy show? You could have told the same exact stories in any corporate setting, with the same audience results.
We also didn't see many guest hosts, and anyone slightly familiar with late night comedy shows knows that the show revolves around the host, who is there for pitch meetings, writing sessions, rehearsals, and so on. Again, a case of a supposedly smart show thinking that their audience knows less about the workings of a late night comedy show than they actually do.
"We don't need comedy or guest hosts," the producers seemed to be saying. "We have the thrilling Matt/Harriet romance to hold us up again, for the 8th week in a row." Sadly for the producers, that was not the case.
What killed "Studio 60"? There were a number of contributing causes, but here are the Big Five, in order.
1. Too much time spent on a "romance" that couldn't carry the show.
Matt and Harriet were splitsville before the pilot, yet nearly every one of the episodes that followed played the same song: "will Matt and Harriet get back together" without ever hitting any different notes. It was always Matt digs Harriet, she's not that into him. You'd think there'd be some variety after 12, 13, 14 episodes, but it wasn't there. It was the same drumbeat, week after week.
2. The show that was too smart for everyone thought that everyone was stupid.
For a show constantly trumpeted as smart, it made some awfully stupid assumptions about the level of intelligence of its audience. Anyone remotely connected with television or knowledgeable about television history (and that might be more people than the producers think) knows that a single writer can't write a 90-minute sketch comedy show all by himself week after week. Yet, for the first 6 or 7 weeks, we were asked to suspend disbelief and buy into the fact that Matt Albie could do what no other writer in history could do.
In "Nevada Day", the show had a character arrested and extradited to another state on the same day, without an attorney, and without being searched before the extradition. Instead of creating a realistic scenario where Tom Jeter ends up in police custody in Nevada on a state holiday wearing Simon Stiles' leather jacket, the producers apparently assumed that their viewers were stupid enough to believe anything. While there were many other instances of the producers taking their audience's intelligence for granted, this one may be the most blatant.
The irony is that the pilot began with a rant about the "dumbing down of television", yet "Studio 60" seemed to be just fine with ignoring logic or reality in favor of convenience, as long as it served a storyline.
3. Miscasting of the two key female roles.
Sarah Paulson is not believable as a woman with a genius gift for either comedy or song, and she had zero chemistry with Matthew Perry, staring at him in their scenes together as if he were a grocery store clerk who had just inquired "paper or plastic?" Looking at Harriet, you never saw any conflict in her eyes over her "lost love". She could not deliver the goods.
Amanda Peet was so dreadful as a network president that you have to wonder if there was any casting process at all, or if she was simply handed the role without having to audition. Her performance got better later, when the Jordan/Danny romance heated up. Personal interaction with a man seems to be her strong suit. But witty banter and corporate politics with the big boys (and girls)? She doesn't have the timing for the banter or the gravitas for the politics.
4. Too much Christian-bashing in the early episodes, for no apparent reason.
If the right wing were currently boycotting late night TV shows, getting people fired, and generally having a tizzy about all the immoral programming coming out of Hollywood, then the early episodes, which very heavily relied on bashing the Christian Right as a plot device, would be understandable. But the Christian Right is fairly quiet right now. These stories seem better set in the mid-80s than in 2006.
The Right versus the Media is an outdated, non-topical subject, and far too much time was spent on it. Yawn. In a recent episode Matt Albie marveled that a survey shows that nearly two-thirds of Americans actually believe in angels. If that is true, maybe Albie's creator shouldn't have spent so much time bashing that segment of the population in the earlier episodes. Why alienate two-thirds of your potential audience if there's no reason to do so?
5. A show about late night comedy with no late night comedy.
During the series run, a scant three sketches were shown mostly in their entirety, only one of which was funny. We saw premises, we saw gags on the fake news segment, but it didn't seem to be in the producers' power to actually do what late night shows do: make us laugh for 4 or 5 minutes with a comedy sketch. If you can't do that, why set the series behind the scenes at a late night comedy show? You could have told the same exact stories in any corporate setting, with the same audience results.
We also didn't see many guest hosts, and anyone slightly familiar with late night comedy shows knows that the show revolves around the host, who is there for pitch meetings, writing sessions, rehearsals, and so on. Again, a case of a supposedly smart show thinking that their audience knows less about the workings of a late night comedy show than they actually do.
"We don't need comedy or guest hosts," the producers seemed to be saying. "We have the thrilling Matt/Harriet romance to hold us up again, for the 8th week in a row." Sadly for the producers, that was not the case.