With May Sweeps officially over and rerun season in full swing (moment of silence please) we at theTVaddict.com thought we’d get in the spirit of things by re-running a post of our own. In honour of STUDIO 60’s triumphant return to television tonight at 10PM on NBC, we give you “What Went Wrong With STUDIO 60”
You can’t buy the kind of buzz NBC’s STUDIO 60 had in the weeks before it debuted. So why is the show now fighting for its life? We have our theories…
The show is too limited in scope. Could things have been different had STUDIO focused on the operations of the network as a whole as opposed to behind-the-scenes mechanics of a single show? Guess we’ll never know. But it seems hard to imagine that the president of the network and that company’s chairman of the board spend every waking moment thinking about their failing skit show, let alone that the fate of the network seems to ride on its success. If NBC’s fate were tied to that of SNL, the network would have gone under long ago.
SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE ain’t the White House. Sorkin’s previous hit, THE WEST WING, swept us up in an idealized version of politics. It gave us a president who was everything we could want in a leader and filled even the least politically minded of us with a spirit of unbridled patriotism. But with SNL as the ostensible backdrop, there’s no way to recapture that sense of unity. And more importantly…
… The skits aren’t funny. Sorkin is, without a doubt, primetime’s best dialogue writer. (For those curious, his daytime counterpart would have to be Patrick Mulcahy.) Unfortunately, Sorkin can’t seem to write a skit to save his life. And since STUDIO’s backdrop is a show specializing in skit comedy, that’s a fairly major flaw.
Too many plots feel forced. Are we really supposed to believe that a woman as smart as Jordan McDeere would allow herself to become a food-obsessed buffoon as a result of a pregnancy? Frankly, it would have made more sense for the show to explore a career-driven woman’s decision to abort a child she is not prepared to have. It’s far too early in the show’s run for Matt Albie to fall back into the pill-popping habit. And Danny’s attempts to “romance” Jordan came off as stalkerish.
Don’t get us wrong. STUDIO 60 is brilliant television. At its worst, it is better than practically anything else on the network airwaves. But as we’ve learned time and time again, being good – or even great – isn’t all it takes to succeed in television. If it were, VERONICA MARS wouldn’t be fighting for its life and THIRTYSOMETHING would have lived long enough to require a name change. Something at STUDIO isn’t working for the audience. We’ve told you why we think that might be… what’s your theory? 
