That is why you should give Aaron Sorkin a free pass. Sure, sometimes it doesn’t work, but when it does it is sublime.
That didn’t work for me.
The best part of the episode was the “Ask Jeeves” commercial where they promised that not only could their search engine find porn, but it could find specific fetish porn. Faster or more accurately than other search engines, I guess.
The “We can’t be funny this week” show didn’t work for me, because I remember that “The Onion” (which I’d put into the same category of humor as SNL or S60) put out one of its best issues right after September 11. The S60 writers room should have been able to come up with something a month later.
The Harriet & Matt show didn’t work because it never works.
The Jordan & Danny show didn’t work because he’s a jerk and she’s stupidly blind to it. Also, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this before - except then, it was placenta previa.
The Tom show came close to working except (1) the network news division is not a hospital or the military or the government “this room is for family only.” What? What the hell? It’s a television company. They were acting like they were the joint chiefs advising the president - not a network giving publicly available information to one of its employees. Why wasn’t Simon allowed in the room? That was just stupid. (2) My kid has just been captured? I do not get on a plane for four and a half hours to go to a city that I hate (away from family, friends, and other support systems) to wait around for news. I don’t think I leave my living room. It makes way, way more sense to private jet Tom to them.
There were parts of the Cal/Matt/Jack/Mary dialogue that were ok. But not enough to make up for the parts that really didn’t work at all.
Sublime? Hardly. It’s yet another chapter in a series that affects far more gravity than its premise can support.
Would a lawyer working a sexual harassment suit, even for a big firm representing a major TV network, really have a line to hostage extraction guys? That seems just a bit outside of her specialty.
And I’m so freaking sick of the tedious romance between Funny Der Trihs and Blonde Gal Polycarp. NOT INTERESTING.
The Harriet and Matt thing, while never good, was not as bad as it has been in the past.
Why didn’t anyone point out to Matt and Danny that it is possible for comedy, even great comedy, to have a topic other than politics or religion?
I agree that it makes no real world sense to be flying the Jeters to Los Angeles.
Who is the real life counterpart to Luke? The guy that presumedly dated Kristin Chenoweth and that Aaron Sorkin is apparently still mad at?
Is there some contractual thing involving appearances in an episode? I’ve noticed that many of the leads are either prominently featured or completely absent (like D.L. Hughley was in this episode). It would have been easy to have him briefly appear in a scene or two, so they must have consciously avoided it. Is there maybe something about future residual rights involved?
But overall, not a bad episode.
I don’t have any facts to back this up, but since the series wasn’t renewed and the production of the episodes was delayed, it’s possible that the actors had taken other work and weren’t available for the episode when it was filmed.
I will confess, I liked the brief montage of Matt and Harry’s arguments about religion through the years of their acquaintance. I have been on Matt’s side of such arguments many times, with many people, through the years.
The ongoing Matt/Harry story continues to fail to engage.
I find it very hard to believe that being the brother of a member of an ensemble show that airs in late night in the U.S. would have any effect at all on Mark Jeter’s status.
Similarly, I find it very hard to believe that the Air Force colonel would be so glib in Tom’s presence.
Did anyone notice that the actor who played the colonel is the same guy who played the chief of surgery in Jack’s “flash-forward” in the Lost season finale?
Tape it…will post later.
They’ve suggested that Tom is a pretty well-known star. Dana Carvey, Mike Myers, and Will Ferrell (to name a few) were all household names during their last few years on SNL, so he’s probably famous along those lines. He wouldn’t have to be a big-time celebrity for the news outlets to make him a big feature of the story.
Tom’s fame may not make as much difference to Mark’s captors as his Muhammed sketch, if they see it.
Sorkin lost me completely with the line about manipulating the female audience with a “pregnancy in jeopardy” story. See, up until that point, I had been manipulated. As tedious and annoying as I find this show, I had perked up at that plot and started to think, “Even if this show is self-centered, boring, and non-sensical, Aaron Sorkin does have a way of getting to you.” Then he had to point out to me that he had added that whole storyline only as a way of manipulating me. I’m sure he finds it terribly amusing to toy with the emotions of the viewers and then oh so cleverly explain how he does it, but to me it’s just cheap theatrics and shows how creatively bankrupt he is. Bleh!
No, but I did notice that it was James Lesure, who is one of the members of the ensemble cast of Las Vegas. I wonder why he does these types of cameo roles, since as far as I can tell, he appears in every episode of Las Vegas.
Yes, but will Sorkin go the formula route and have him stick with Harry after all or will he finally ditch her and go for the much more interesting lawyer? I’m hoping he won’t go for the same old saw - but then I hoped Grey’s wouldn’t either and they disappointed.
I don’t see if that way. I figured it was Sorkin’s way of acknowledging that a lot of viewers were going to be thinking he was using a cliche, so he essentially said “yes, I know it’s a cliche but I’m using it anyway.” He did the same thing recently when he had one of the characters complain about Harriet and Matt’s relationship angst. You have one of the characters say what the audience is thinking to acknowledge your awareness of the issue and by doing so you imply you know how to handle the issue.
Well, the initial guy in the room with Tom and Jack was apparently a government guy, though they did a piss-poor job of establishing that fact. After they realize that Mark Jeter has been connected to Tom by the local LA station the guy is heard the background saying “get a Compass Call in the air”, an actual Air Force electronic attack aircraft (ostensibly to jam Taliban communications).
So why this apparently civilian upper-echelon Defense Department guy was in a network control room in Los Angeles is beyond me. I guess Sorkin had “Compass Call” left in his bag of inside baseball tricks from the West Wing and needed an excuse to use it.
As others have said in this thread, the whole Matt/Harriet storyline is just so incredibly grating. They love each other! They can’t stand each other! We get it. Bah.
Well, I liked it. I liked the proposal, I liked the flashbacks to October 2001, I liked the Matt and Harriet arguments.
I did NOT like the whole “Let’s offer them a ransom” crap. You do not negotiate with terrorists, and I’m sure the Air Force would be righteously pissed off if some private security firm starts waving money around in front of the kidnappers. Not to mention the fact, as Tom pointed out, there was no talk hardly of the other two airmen. Is the ransom only to rescue Tom’s brother?
I hope that dies a quick death.
Much as I dislike Harriet, I think Matt would be trading down if he went for the lawyer.
There is a bit of a continuity problem raised in this episode. The flashbacks show Matt and Danny running the show in 2001 between the September 11 attack and the October 7 invasion of Afghanistan. But it’s been previously established that they were fired because Matt made a comment in support of Bill Maher’s comments about terrorist bravery, which were made on September 17. But even if we argue that he wasn’t fired immediately, this episode made no mention of this supposedly huge public relations controversy they would have been in the middle of at the time.
I don’t think that’s quite right. I think Randy and Ron (or whoever the two writers were that went off to make Peripheral Vision Man as a sitcom on another network) were the ones who said that. Or one of them said it and the other one didn’t disavow it. I’m pretty sure Matt was disgusted with them because he didn’t think they could write comedy.
I have been watching the threads on this series from the beginning. I am disappointed by how much grief that has been given to this series. Many of yu act as if this is the worst tripe that has ever been aired on TV. You need to judge this on what it is. NOT on what Sorkin has done in the past. Is it up to his best standards? No. But it is better than most of the crap that we do get on TV. Survivor, Amazing Race, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, Hells Kitchen, The Black Donnelly’s, etc, etc, etc,… Do you really think that the Cavemen are going to be a better show than Studio 60? Can he do better? Yes. I believe that he should be given a chance to improve.
I watch Studio 60. And I enjoy it. IS it great art? No. But it is fun to watch. Occasionally it is inspired. The Cristmas show with the New Orleans Musicians was great. IF it can get back to that level it will be a great show. If it doesn’t it can be a fun show. Give it a break and don’t judge it by West Wing or Sports Night.
Well, it’s a moot point now. But take my word for it, after the last show, there will be the usual suspects criticizing the closing credits.