Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Swan Song for Studio 60

I don’t watch a whole lot of TV. And not because I’m some snobby, “TV is the scourge of modern life” fellow. TV may indeed be the bane of modern life, but it’s still pretty entertaining. So no, I don’t watch a lot of TV, but it’s because I have limited time to sit and watch TV. And no, I’m not out healing puppies or doing anything particularly productive, but merely having a family as large as ours, (17-20 kids at last count), demands a decent chunk of time every day. Plus all this episodic TV (Lost, Heros, 24, etc.) requires a fair amount of concentration and you can’t just mindlessly watch that stuff. You really do have to pay attention. But Jon, you say, “TiVo will fix that for you! Que up the whole season and you’ll be set!” True, but then I’d still have to find free time, wrestle control of the TV away from the kids who are playing video games or watching educational programming (read: the Boomerang channel, which seems to play awesome old skool Hanna-Barbera cartoons, 24/7) and watch the programs I’d recorded. And who has time to beat the kids into submission so they don’t all gang up on me and steal the remote?

So TV just doesn’t happen in my life that often. Seriously, I had the last FOUR episodes of Heros—a show I enjoy quite a bit, being the huge geek/nerd that I am—DVR’ed and waiting for me to watch for WEEKS after the season finale before I finally got around to watching them. What kind of nerd/geek am I? For shame! And don’t tell anyone, but I don’t watch Battlestar Galactica in real time, either. I usually end up waiting for the DVD to some out. (Bad nerd! No Star Wars for me for the rest of the year!)

But occasionally I notice a program that I know I must watch. And I will go through all kinds of hoops to make sure I can have it in my life.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was one of those programs. I was initially drawn to it because it was written, created and mothered my Aaron Sorkin, he of West Wing fame. I like the West Wing a lot, but I really liked Sports Night. And it seemed to me that Studio 60 was going to have a Sports Night vibe more than it was going to be West Wing-ish.

The thing that Sorkin seems to do very well (besides pages and pages pages of overly witty dialog) is get inside something (like a live sports show or the White House) and tell a story from within that framework. So the show has great insider feel to it. Plus it makes you empathize with the characters. I’d hoped it would “explore” the creative process of the Head Writer (the Matthew Perry character, Matt Albie) a bit more than it did, but I was still hooked. Plus, I have small crush/fascination on Amanda Peet, so that helped. (Don’t worry, Jen, I’m still there for you, babe, but look at Amanda’s teeth! They are huge! How did they get so big? It’s a source of never ending curiosity to me.)

So I was pretty stoked for Studio 60. And it didn’t disappoint me. Unlike the rest of America, who felt that another iteration of CSI (CSI: Miami, The Hot and Humid and David Caruso’s All Sweaty Edition) was just the ticket to Monday night joy, I liked the show and I faithfully banished all noisy people from the living room when it came on. Heck, I even bought the iTunes Season Pass for Studio 60, just so I’d make sure and get my fix. Flakey DVRs being my specialty, after all.

But, as I predicted way back in November of 2006, the show did not find an audience. And NBC’s schedule is barely on life support these days so they couldn’t afford to let it float along until viewers wised up. Which, frankly, given the nature of the show, the acting and the writing, wasn’t going to happen; you either liked it immediately or loathed it instantly. There was no in between where you thought, “this is intriguing and kind of engaging, I wonder what happens next week? Maybe that woman with the big teeth will start eating people with those huge choppers!” Plus, each episode Studio 60 must have cost a fortune to make. The sets were ginormous and the show had some pretty large salaried folks in it. You think Matthew Perry or Bradley Whitford come cheap? I’m guessing “no” on that score.

Tomorrow night is the season/series finale. NBC had to buy the whole season in order to get the thing in the first place and since they are canceling the whole she-bang, they have been burning off the remaining episodes this summer. I’m a bit sad about this of course, because in the end, I did end up caring about the characters. And that’s exactly what I want in my entertainment choices. I know, I know, the sketch comedy show within the show wasn’t really all that funny ("Pimp my Trike!” I mean, come on…), but I liked rest of it. And Bradley Whitford is excellent. And Steven Weber did yeoman’s work as the somewhat scrungy network exec. Certainly Amanada Peet’s mouth should get a Best Supporting Actor Emmy. And the camera work! Outstanding. Because the sets were so huge and Sorkin seems to like to have his characters walking all over creation, there were these amazingly long camera takes. I watch them and wonder how the steady-cam operator didn’t trip and break their face during every take. Just fabulous production values in that show.

One thing I end up noticing about Sorkin’s character’s is that though it seems like they are walking around all the time, they really never go anywhere. Plus, extras or minor characters are always handing them meaningless pieces of paper, which they glance at (while walking purposefully to the other end of the set) and then deposit in some other meaningless location. Maybe I’m just being persnickety, though.

What will be interesting to me is what happens once the DVD of the series comes out. I know, it’s only one season, only twenty-two shows, but these are network executives at NBC Universal we are talking about. Of course, they will release it to DVD. Anything to continue to reap even meager moolah from their intellectual property. Because once it hits DVD, the long tail will kick in. People who buy Season Z of the West Wing or The American President on Amazon or rent via Netflix will get a recommendation, “Hey, you might also like this!” and it’ll point to Studio 60 (and Sports Night, or course). And the show will find its audience and those people who never saw it on broadcast television will say, “Oh man! This is good stuff! Why did they stop making it? How moronic! TV is so dumb, no wonder it’s the scourge of our society.”

That’s my prediction anyway.

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