I gather it’s getting a new time slot, never a good sign, but then Monday nights are -for some stupid reason - incredibly crowded. Maybe it could get better ratings on a Thursday?
Anyway, I’m really glad Perry got this part and showed that he can be a lot different from Chandler Bing or the Whole Nie Yards (whatever his character’s name was). I’d be glad to see him in other dramatic roles in the future.
Sadly, I got to see him reconciling (sorta) with Harriet this week and I was hoping that it’d go away, after the breakup last week. The lawyer chick (hey everyone from Invasion got a job, right?), anyway, the lawyer chick seems like just the right medicine for him and maybe she could be his new muse.
Of course, I knew Jordan would find out, but the head and eyes popping was still pretty funny.
The news is that tonight’s episode is the final one for this series. NBC will premiere The Black Donnellys in the same timeslot next week. (The Black Donnellys is written by Paul Haggis, who wrote Crash, among other things. I saw the pilot through Netflix and it looks good.)
From an article on the Entertainment Tonight website: "‘Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip’ has officially been dropped from the NBC schedule and will air its last episode tonight before it goes on hiatus. … Tonight’s episode is the last scheduled airing for the series. "
Doug Elfman, the Chicago Sun-Times: “[A]fter Monday’s episode NBC is sending it on indefinite hiatus.”
Tim Goodman, the San Francisco Chronicle: “Tonight might be the last episode of “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” Aaron Sorkin’s much-anticipated, then much-derided drama for NBC. The series, about the behind-the-scenes machinations of a television sketch show not unlike “Saturday Night Live,” was pulled a week earlier than expected after its season-worst ratings performance. It’s unlikely to be renewed for a second season. And if “Studio 60” comes back to finish its six remaining episodes, it will have everything to do with the respect accorded Sorkin and nothing to do with a last-ditch effort to save it.”
That’s that, then. But I’ll be surprised if NBC doesn’t burn off those last six episodes, maybe in the summertime. Or they’ll hold them back for the DVD release.
Yeah, at the very least they’ll get popped out on the DVD.
This episode was actually pretty good. We all knew Jordan would find out, but that was still a pretty funny way to do it. Ironically, I think you maybe WOULD have gotten a fling with the lawyer… if the series wasn’t facing its imminent end and a need for at least some sort of wrapup by the end of the first production season (whenever it might be viewed).
Really, though, I would even take episodes like tonight’s over the latest CSI variation. I just might not have that chance all that much longer, which is short of the shame, but eh, whatever. With how bad a couple of the worst episodes have been, it’s a little hard to defend a better fate.
Bastards. How dare they finally have another good episode and make it the final one. If they had cancelled it last week, I would have figured, “Oh well, at least it’s no longer suffering.” Instead Sorkin gives us this episode and we’re reminded how much potential was wasted.
Was this a good episode? Perhaps I haven’t been watching the series regularly enough to get a handle on it, but an actress and a writer who can’t concentrate on their jobs because of the unnecessarily tangled and screwed-up love they share? Decapitated dolls? I wasn’t especially impressed at any point in the episode.
I have to admit, I was also agreeing with the director who’d stopped caring. Maybe, like the judge John Goodman played, there will always be one character whose role is to be blasé about the knots the characters insist on tying themselves into.
So what was the deal with the lawyer and the deposition and the writers talking about Harriet and Matt and whether Matt would be a good witness? I completely didn’t get that.
Yeah, Max, that kind of threw me too. Mabe she wanted Matt to know ahead of time what the other writers were saying about Harriet, so that she could get him past that which would obviously piss him off and into the testifying for the network mode.
She seemed to know so much about Matt and Harry, in fact, that I spent the second half of the episode convinced she was another hallucination. Especially since they showed Matt popping the pills in the “Previously…” at the beginning.
The lawyer (and I assume the network in general) wanted Matt to testify in their defense: that she would never be fired for sexual harassment, that the writer’s room was within reason given what they were doing, that it was a fair working environment, whatever else they were looking for. Or at least not actively AGAINST them.
They needed to verify that this would happen given the circumstances of the case:
Neither Matt, nor Danny, nor any of his other close friends were named as defendants. In the media, “Studio 60” was being sued, but in a legal sense, it wasn’t really any of the people that mattered to Matt. The only exception to this being Wes, I would guess; that was the biggest hole IMO, knowing how Matt felt about Wes, they should have known that he’d defend him if nothing else.
Moreover, the people being named in the suit - Ricky, Ron, virtually everyone else in the writing room - were people that Matt actively DISliked. Again, the lawyer forgot to take Wes into consideration… though maybe she just didn’t scout it out well enough to know how strongly they felt about Wes as a mentor. Though that’s sort of hard to believe given how much she knew otherwise about Matt’s relationships.
The real problem: In the complaint, the things that were said about Harriet in particular were mentioned. More than anything else, they had to know that if Matt is giving his deposition, and the lawyer for the other side starts asking him about the things being said about Harriet, he won’t just snap. Like Sean Factorum just said, the most important part was to get him past that initial anger. They needed to have the conversation that they had BEFORE it was a matter of legal record.
They parallel Matt’s defense of Harriet, of course, with Harriet’s defense of Matt. It’s a little heavy-handed and blunt as a dramatic device when you think about it strictly in those terms, but I thought they pulled it off well enough, and certainly better than a lot of the things they’ve done on this show.
How ever much the director (Luke) said he stopped caring, it also looked like Harriet’s last little verbal jab hit home - that he was keeping her well after the time she was committed to the set just to aggravate someone who has once been his friend.
This episode reminded me, in general style/feel, to the episode of the West Wing in, um, Season 2 where they’re all staying super-late at night to write up a comedy speech the President is about to give. The episode isn’t about politics barely at all, except as the setting; it’s about the relationships between the characters. Nothing from Studio 60 has been that good so far, of course, but an episode like this - where the plot-writing is at least adequate, the dialogue writing is very good, where there are a few laughs, and where the characters interact in ways that don’t immediately spawn eternal hatred, even if it’s only tangentially related to the Studio 60 show itself - is fun enough to watch, IMO, and more than anything shows the potential that Little Nemo mentioned.
The impact of that is somewhat offset by the fact that the reason production took so long is because she kept screwing up, as well as deciding on the day of shooting that the script was historically incorrect. It’s like Sorkin wants it both ways - characters can be neurotic and quirky and free spirits, annoying the more straitlaced characters around them (who nevertheless accommodate the quirkiness), but as soon as the big revelation hits, the straitlaced characters are expected to instantly and politely step aside and let true love take priority lest they become the target of sparkling insightful dialogue about how much of a free-spirit they aren’t.