Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip Eulogy

I've been on a West Wing kick the past few days. I grabbed my DVDs of the fourth season, been watching it in the background of my computer while I've otherwise mindlessly surfed the internet, no doubt reading about the Detroit Tigers latest blown save or following Daniel Negreanu in the World Series of Poker. As I began writing this entry, I was watching "Evidence of Things Not Seen", one of my all-time favorite West Wing episodes. While President Bartlet tries to convince the Russian President to allow the US to recover a crashed spy-plane, and the rest of the staff plays some poker, Josh Lyman interviews potential Deputy White House Counsel Joe Quincy. It was the first television interaction between Brad Whitford and Matthew Perry, who four years later would reunite with man who wrote "Evidence of Things Not Seen" and the rest of the first four seasons of West Wing, Aaron Sorkin, on NBC's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

Tonight, Thursday, at 10:00, the final episode of the first and only season of Studio 60 will air. After loving Sports Night, and watching every episode of West Wing multiple times, another Aaron Sorkin show, with the one of the best actors from West Wing and the best actor from Friends, and Amanda Peet and Steven Weber and DL Hughley, I can't remember looking more forward to a show than Studio 60. And then even the people I hadn't heard of (like Sarah Paulson and Nate Corddry) turned out to be great And then, it turned out like it did. It was a ratings failure. It was a failure with critics. And it even failed with me, for the most part. So as the time ticks down to its last episode (though, an October DVD release will allow people to enjoy the show forever) what the heck happened?

I think the show failed for a lot of reasons. The early word, and what a lot of critics are still clinging to, is that the show was too much "inside baseball", too much behind-the-scenes goings-on that nobody cared about. And maybe to some extent that's true. Some of the storylines with the fictional network, NBS, were pointless (such as the building of the casino in Macao and the fights with the FCC) but there are many, more apparent reasons for the show's failure.

First off, Studio 60 wasn't funny. Not the NBC show, which, at times, was funny, but the fictional Studio 60 broadcast on NBS. Saturday Night Live may have its ups and downs, but it isn't easy to do what they do, and Aaron Sorkin, one of the premier television writers of his generation, proved that. The skits on Studio 60 just weren't funny. In the entire run of the show, I think there was one funny skit, where a take off on Dateline NBC's Chris Hansen accosted Santa Claus for visiting young children in the middle of the night in a "To Catch a Predator" spoof. Other than that, it was pretty brutal. And it was hard to take Matthew Perry's character seriously as a brilliant writer when his writing wasn't any good.

Another problem was that the first season of Studio 60 felt more like the eighth season of West Wing than its own show. It wasn't just that Brad Whitford was on both shows, but the subject matter was all West Wing. Studio 60 was supposed to be about a behind-the-scenes look at a sketch comedy show. And we got storylines on international trade, gay marriage, the power of religion, the Iraq war, and more. And some of those storylines were compelling but they felt as if they didn't belong in the mouths of the characters on studio 60. They belonged being discussed by Toby and CJ and Leo and Josh on West Wing.

All of that said, and even though I am both disappointed that the show failed and that I did not enjoy the show as much as I was hoping, I'm not happy the show is ending either. Watching tonight's episode after the NBA Draft will be bittersweet, and I'll buy the DVDs and watch the series again at some point. And when I do, I'll probably feel the same regret I do now about the show not working out.