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Monday, October 23, 2006
Guest blog: What’s the matter with ‘Studio 60’?
ADDENDUM (Tues. a.m.): The guest blog (below) was written prior to last night’s episode, which was a definite change of pace. D.L. Hughley, for instance, got a lot more airtime, to largely good effect. Though I’m still not persuaded he’s a convincing sketch comedian, he demonstrated that, as an actor, he can hold his own with Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford.
Nate Corddry got a lot more exposure, too, though less effectively — he still strikes me as a bit whiny, and he was saddled with a hackneyed set of standard-issue midwestern parents (mom: hand-wringing, long-suffering; dad: stoic, uptight; both of them: humorless and culturally clueless) and a heart-tugging subplot that lacked an ounce of nuance or surprise.
I basically enjoyed the guest appearance by UT alum Eli Wallach (engineered, perhaps, by the show’s co-exec producer, UT alum Thomas Schlamme?), though, again, I saw the basic outlines of his story from the first five minutes.
But the big relief was the complete absence of sub-par sketches or overripe anxiety about how this week’s show was going to be put together. (The plot revolved around the cast’s weekly wrap party.) Without either of those elements, Sorkin was able to focus on character and storytelling, which he did with his usual flair (if not quite his usual knack for surprise). The most promising note was the hiring of a new writer for the show-within-the-show, which I hope will prompt Sorkin to spend more time portraying what goes on in the writers’ room. Right now, the show’s portrait of the creative process is Matt Perry sitting in front of a computer pulling out his hair.
Still, I’m not quite sure that Sorkin is quite sure what “Studio 60� is supposed to be about. This episode’s three main story lines found their sense of gravity outside of the world of modern-day show business – the Wallach story line harked back to the 1950s blacklist, the Hughley story line to inner-city violence and Corddry’s to, improbably, the war in Afghanistan. These are all worthy and weighty topics, but if they indicate the direction Sorkin is planning on taking “Studio 60,� then he’s offering us something I didn’t expect at all — “The West Wing� by other means.
GUEST BLOG: No new shows started the season with higher expectations than “Friday Night Lights” and “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” and no new shows have tanked so ignominously in the ratings. My colleague Diane Holloway does an excellent job of setting out why people aren’t watching “Friday Night Lights” in her TV column, so I thought I’d try to do the same with “Studio 60” — which has seen a steady decline in audience, drawing 13.4 million viewers for its debut but only 8.6 million for last week’s episode.
There isn’t one problem that explains “Studio 60’s” struggles; there’s a bunch of them. (And I say this as someone who likes the show a lot.) Diane has her own list that she might share with you if you ask, but here are four of mine:
1) The set. I’m told that in person, the theater where “Studio 60” is shot is big and impressive. But on TV, it looks dirty, dark and cramped. Is this a place where viewers want to spend an hour each week? The sense of claustrophobia is exacerbated by Aaron Sorkin’s writing style, what with all those people walking and talking, talking fast, talking over each other and talking sotto voce to themselves. The palatial environs of the White House gave the overlapping conversations on “The West Wing” some room to breathe, but on “Studio 60” you constantly feel as if you’re overhearing — and, often, only half-hearing — prisoners huddled together, whispering their escape plans.
2) The cast. Matthew Perry, Bradley Whitford, Steven Weber, Sarah Paulson and Amanda Peet are all terrific, but I have my doubts about the second tier of actors. D.L. Hughley is a talented enough comedian, and I remember liking him on the short-lived “The Hughleys” (and enjoying interviewing him on that show’s set years ago), but he has an odd voice — high in pitch, thin and grainy in timbre — that has trouble registering amid Sorkin’s trademark hubbub. I find myself hitting rewind and trying to simply hear the guy a lot of the time.
And what I do hear isn’t all that impressive; five episodes in, his Simon Stiles hasn’t really emerged as either a particularly strong character or a funny guy. In the second episode, Simon complained to Perry’s Matt Albie that he’s a Yale-trained actor, not the sort of guy who does “voices” (which he proceeded to confirm by doing a Bill Cosby imitation that’s about as good — or bad — as mine). You couldn’t help but wonder if this wasn’t a bit of unintentional honesty leaking out about Hughley’s miscasting as a sketch comedian.
I’m not much more impressed with Nate Corddry’s Tom Jeter, who seems like a pretty thin character — high-strung, insecure and eternally put-upon. And Ayda Field’s Jeannie Whatley has made no impression whatsoever. A show like this needs to be filled with charismatic, larger-than-life actors who make being a sketch comedian seem like the greatest job in the world. But in five episodes, have any of these people elicited a single laugh? Which brings me to …
3) The skits. The fake Gilbert & Sullivan number that climaxed the second episode was pretty audacious, but since then we’ve been subject to some terribly unfunny skits-within-the-show. “Meet the Press with Juliette Lewis”? “Nicolas Cage, Marriage Counselor”? Beside having a somewhat 1995 feel to them, they’re the sort of random, cut-and-paste humor that Albie is supposedly saving the show-within-the show from. I don’t watch Nancy Grace, so some of the bit’s finer points may have been lost on me, but last week’s parody of her CNN show seemed to go on, mirthlessly, forever. A handful of posters to imdb.com suggest that the skits are supposed to be bad, but this seems untenable to me — every week, we see Albie struggling to crank out some comedy genius on deadline, and each week the results are lauded as such. (If, on the other hand, Sorkin holds the entire genre of late-night humor in contempt, then this show has bigger problems than I can enumerate here.)
My guess is that writing sketch comedy is something that Sorkin is not very good at (it requires different skills than character-based humor, at which he is brilliant) or maybe he’s just stretched too thin to switch back and forth between modes. In either case, he needs to loosen up his legendary stranglehold; Sorkin should hire experienced — or young and hungry — sketch writers and let them run wild. Even if they do, though, I think the show has problems with …
4) Tone. The sense of portentousness that Sorkin perfected on “The West Wing” — his ability to spend an hour hinting that something important is buried beneath all that smart chatter and then, at the end of the episode, unveil a secret that tells us something unexpected yet true about a character and a situation — doesn’t play quite as well when the stakes are so much lower. This is show biz, not foreign policy, so when Albie realized at the end of the third episode that it was Danny who inserted a provocative question into a focus group study (really, I’m making it sound more exciting than it was), it resulted in a shrug rather than the force of revelation Sorkin was going for.
It’s not that we’re incapable of caring about the fortunes of show-biz types; the success of everything from “Entourage” to “Entertainment Tonight” suggests that we care very much. It’s that our relationship to celebrity is a two-faced one; build Britney up one day, tear her down the next. The whiff of saintliness that emanated from President Bartlet on “The West Wing” wasn’t realistic, but it worked as a form of wish-fulfillment; we’d all like our politicians to be that virtuous. But does anybody care if exorbitantly well-paid TV producers are martyrs for their art?
If somebody told me that Lorne Michaels is a genuinely good guy who stands up for his employees, I’d be happy for the people who work for him. But it’d be a lot more entertaining to hear stories about what a crass opportunist he is.
Permalink | Comments (10) | Categories: Ratings
NBC changes: Is the Peacock croaking?
I’m still trying to make sense of NBC’s announcement last week that part of its new cost-cutting plan includes replacing scripted programs at 7 p.m. (Central Time) with reality and game shows.
Compared with reality shows, scripted comedies and dramas are way more expensive. We’ll concede that. But making some kind of across-the-board change in the early prime-time hour seems shortsighted, to say the least.
For one thing, reality and game shows are rarely repeated, so NBC will get a one-shot profit — assuming the shows are successful. For another thing, this reality obsession is going to burn itself out eventually, and when it does, NBC will have a Monday-through-Friday schedule with gaping holes at 7 p.m.
Ratings analysts and TV experts weighed in last week that NBC’s announcement, along with staff cuts in the entertainment and news divisions, smacks of desperation. No kidding. The network is in a crash-and-burn period at the moment in prime time, finishing fourth in the ratings behind CBS, ABC and Fox most weeks.
But the plan to stack reality shows into one time period every night of the week just seems wrong.
The highest-rated new series this season is ABC’s “Ugly Betty,” and it airs Thursdays at 7. CBS’s “Jericho” is doing well in the early time slot on Wednesdays, and veterans “NCIS” is a certified hit on Tuesdays, along with “Prison Break” on Mondays.
If dramas, like the fabulous but under-rated “Friday Night Lights,” aren’t becoming breakout hits at 7 p.m., move them later and spend some money developing comedies. Sitcoms are in a slump right now, but all it takes is a couple of good ones to revive the genre. And in the long run, they’ll be more successful than reality shows because they live on in reruns. … and because we’re not ashamed to admit we watch them.
Permalink | | Categories: Entertainment
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