http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/TV/05/14/tv.newseason.ap/index.html
I must admit, I didn’t watch it after the first three episodes, and having looked in on several S60 threads here since then, it doesn’t look like I missed much. What do you think about the cancellation? Did the show’s initial hype get audience expectations too high? Has Sorkin lost his touch? All musings welcomed.
The cancellation is no surprise. It was expensive to produce and lost viewership throughout its run. The preachy sanctimoniousness that seemed well-suited to the White House wonks in “The West Wing” just seemed out of place in a backstage-at-a-comedy-show setting. The last un-aired episodes will be burned off after sweeps, I understand, so die hard fans can, well, die hard, I guess.
I gave it a shot. I watched nearly half the season and just couldn’t stand it. I wanted to like it. It was just so flawed.
I love the cast. I love concept. I love showbiz.
But this show squandered all of that.
Sorkin is pretty out of touch. The whole red state/blue state divide is a media invention that Sorkin seems to buy. To make that the hook of the show really missed the boat.
Too bad, because Matthew Perry is a great talent.
I forgot to watch. It wasn’t The West Wing. I just didn’t care about the characters or their situations. 
+1
I liked it well enough to watch it. I don’t guess I’ll miss it much.
I liked the show, and I’ll miss it. BUT, I am not surprised, nor will I shed a tear, like that time I heard they cancelled Arrested Development.
Not surprising. It was an eminently frustrating show. Myself, I can enjoy a dumb show. But this was a show touting itself as smart, trying to be smart, and yet being monumentally dumb, with no sense of humor about it. It’s the attempted gravitas, paired with the painfully stupid stuff that killed this. It’s too bad, because some of what they reached for could have been great, and there were some truly entertaining bits, and lots of fun snappy dialog. Oh well.
If there’s any bad news to this announcement, it’s that it’s likely to feed Sorkin’s martyr complex, where he imagines himself as a self-appointed savior of Quality Television who is let down by a fickle and undiscriminating public.
The problem, of course, is that the show was bad, not particularly clever, and incredibly full of itself. The public was right in being discriminating enough to know when a program is simply full of hot air.
I saw the first 5 eps before I had to bail. As talented as some (but certainly not all) of the actors are, they were given nothing but vapor to work with in terms of their characterizations. Perry in particular deserved better.
The show didn’t work for so very, very many reasons.
The big ones for me were:
[ul]
[li]It wanted to be a “smart” show - but it assumed a dumb audience. Good “smart TV” assumes that I’m going to get it (whatever “it” is) and moves forward (see, for example, Deadwood). S60 would do something, and then spend the next 5 minutes explaining what happened and how brilliant the writer/character/plot was to the audience for the next 5 minutes. Those moments (and they were frequent) were annoying, obnoxious, and boring and was not good television.[/li][li]S60 was supposed to be a beacon of hope and light amidst the darkness of bad tv and characters would frequently go off on how horrible certain tv trends were and how awful tv in general was. Problem was, most of those trends ended several years ago and tv is actually pretty good these days. Sorkin’s lack of awareness of current popular culture was very distracting.[/li][li]Most of the main characters were awful. There was the brilliantly funny, enormously talented, singer/actress who couldn’t sing, never did anything even remotely humorous, and couldn’t tell a joke. Plus, she was dumber than dirt.[/li]There was the drug-addict/stalker.
There was the obsessive, but still super brilliant!, comedy writer who never wrote anything funny and, as it turned out, was also a drug addict.
There was the wunderkind tv executive who had very little understanding of television, profits, ratings, and had absolutley no media savvy. She was merely as dumb as (not dumber than) dirt.
There was the guy who stole his past from Boyz N the Hood, except he went to Yale instead of Morehouse.
Watching these people was not a pleasant way of spending 42 minutes.
[li]The soapbox lacked subtlety. I know that certain parts of American culture (and often certain parts of “American culture as imagined by Sorkin” which have very little resemblance to reality) really piss Sorkin off. I just really didn’t need to hear about it every week from characters who had no eartly reason to discuss those particular subjects.[/li][li]And finally, I didn’t need to be Sorkin’s couple’s therapist. Those scenes were incredibly uncomfortable.[/li][/ul]
Plus, the plots weren’t good, the sketch comedy wasn’t good, the drama wasn’t good, and the “romantic comedy” elements were painfully bad.
I will admit that there were some good dialog moments.
And I think I might have laughed harder “standing in the middle of a field in Afghanistan” than any other thing I saw on TV this season. (If only it had been intentionally funny)
I viewed Sorkin as a good writer for a long time. I liked A Few Good Men, for example. I liked Sports Night, and I do feel he is rightfully to this day a bit ticked off that it wasn’t received well. It’s a good example IMO of a good show not being appreciated because it was too nuanced for most of the viewers. I loved The West Wing, and especially liked the first four seasons when Sorkin was with the show. And I’m a pretty dyed-in-the-wool conservative, and the preachiness of some of the characters honestly never got to me, because all of them were characters you became attached to and learned to love despite political differences.
But Studio 60 was virtually unwatchable, I was extremely disappointed. Moreover, I’m starting to think Sorkin’s wide range of personal “issues” are going to be an insurmountable obstacle to him having further success.
I agree with all the points amarinth made and I’d add a couple more.
*Sorkin didn’t create any tension between the characters. They all loved and respected each other way too much. A little dramatic conflict would have been realistic and improved the series.
*Speaking of realism, there was never any feel of it in the show. Which is surprising, considering Sorkin really is a television producer/writer and was essentially writing about what he does for a living.
*Sorkin added way too much of his two favorite subjects: politics and Aaron Sorkin. Neither fit in with the concept of the show.
I won’t say Studio 60 was unwatchable. I, for one, watched every episode and I’ll watch the remaining ones. But I can’t argue with the decision to cancel it.
Will not miss this show one bit. Characters were all too smug and not particularly likable. At the end, you just didn’t care. Bradley Whitford just carried his character over from West Wing. Matthew Perry essentially played a “grown up” Chandler and just seemed out-of-place IMO. There were a few interesting shows, but not enough of them to justify staying on the air.
My thoughts exactly
amarin and little nemo pretty much covered it all. Personally, I like the premise (with 30 Rock different enough for them both to survive), but would have preferred more melodrama – the coked up craziness of the past, not the boring dorm kids and family-types of recent seasons.
Thirded.
It’s particularly disappointing only because it was so predictable. There was so much there to work with, so many different ways that it could go… and yet, from the first step through every one we’ve seen so far, it’s just been obvious, obvious, and more obvious.
Maybe NBC will replace it with that United Nations pilot that Jordan green-lighted.
Where were all you guys in this thread, when I said nobody would be upset if the show got cancelled and I got slagged? :mad:
I’ve suggested in a couple of previous threads that Sorkin really needs to do that United Nations series. It’s everything he wants to do and everything he’s good at, as good as he was bad in this show.
Remember at the beginning of the season when people were wondering whether Studio 60 or 30 Rock would be better? Well, 30 Rock got it right. What a surprise that the person who lived it did a better job of bringing that world to life.
I stand by what I wrote in that thread. The series as whole was disappointing but that last episode before it went off the air was good.
I was all broken up for at least two or three microseconds, there.