Must Not See TV Fails
Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip was really simple to figure out. Yes, some of you loved it. Enjoy the obscurity.
It failed because
May 14, 2024
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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?
So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.
And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.
There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.
I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.
So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.
But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”
My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher
“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.
~ David Simon
Dave, where you been? Studio 60 died months ago when it was put on “hiatus.”
one of the reasons it died is that no one knew who the characters were. just the actors. i.e. bradley whitford was the former drug addict, not matthew perry.
Paul Haggis’s show was pretty dreadful as well, albeit in a much less self-centered way.
How long has it been since any character on television remotely resembled a real person?
As for the Black Donnely’s that just looked bad from the start, nothing but melodrama. It wasn’t helped by the network making it look like the most import television show EVER in all the advertising, that’s just setting it up for failure.
Dave, when STUDIO 60 first aired, you also commented that it didn’t bear any resemblance to what putting on an SNL-style weekly comedy show was really like. Not to be too flip about it, but is there any scripted show on television that bears any resemblance to what its profession is really like? Does the medical profession remotely resemble HOUSE or GREY’S ANATOMY? Is there a crime lab in the world that works like CSI?
I guess I’m confused by the rather unique standard you seemed to have set for the show.
That said, as clever as all the dialogue was, STUDIO 60 really was going nowhere.
it was worse than going nowhere. the last five episodes were about waiting. waiting for a kidnapped brother in iraq. waiting for amanda peet to live or die. nothing happened.
god knows, there wasn’t one jot of behind the scenes of a comedy show in any of those five episodes.
The Sorkin show, which I abandoned after a few weeks (that gratingly cutesy dialogue), tried to reconcile the gap between meddling corporate stooges and the soothsayer artist type in this town. Maybe DP’s loathe of the show is reflected by his website, which pretty much tries to do the same thing… comparing the muscle of weekend numbers in one breath and joy of cinema in the next. The difference is that Sorkin realizes what Poland has yet to… that box office/tv ratings can in no way harmonize with artistic integrity. If you were to care about one (like say Finke), you must disregard the other (in the way Ebert has).
The first point Dave makes is really the big (most obvious) one. A show about behind the scenes of a comedy show that wasn’t funny. And there you have it. The show wasn’t funny, the show about the show wasn’t funny.
And for me, I thought it was frankly miscast too. None of the leads grabbed me in anyway the way “West Wing” and “Sports Night”‘s did. Sure DP, DL Hughley is a big comic, doesn’t mean he’s a good ACTOR, which was pretty obvious after a few minutes.
I looked forward to this show, I got to about episode five and just lost interest. I hope his next one’s better. I hope Charlie Wilson’s War lives up to the hype.
And i hope Dave sticks with movies and not TV.
“any scripted show on television that bears any resemblance to what its profession is really like?”
actually I couldn;t think of any.
forensics people I know think the only resemblance CSI has to real life is that senior CSI workers are *especially* strange.
most cops I know think the most realistic cop show (at least at the offices) is what they’ve seen of Barney Miller reruns and that was a Looong time ago.
actually much of the 70s TV didn;t have the obnoxious slickness of many of present day shows.
etc
i was so annoyed by the fakey dialog (at times, sometimes ok) in the Sorkin show that it didn;t matter if it resembled real life or not.
I guess I don;t care if a show is ‘real’ to the profession as long as the characters are good and stories good (like Deadwood & 24 which I hope to hell isn’t REAL) but it is grating if it is your own profession on the screen since you can’t help but mutter ‘oh bullocks’ when a nonsense never-happen-in-a-million years situation comes up.
and no one on TV ever seems to have bad hair days and a pimple on their chin after a night of gorging on Zingers and vodka or something similar. Come. On.
well, I’m back to the gravity of real life rocket science now (baking a choco-cherry moscarpone cake).
Studio 60 failed because Sorkin never could get over 9-11 and his feeling of betrayal and anger clouded every episode.
he was still writing the West Wing but set it backstage at a comedy show.
Sorkin’s dialogue is highly overrated and schticky. I guess some people like schticky. Personally it made me want to slap the shit out of every smug character on the show.
Truly awful television, but fascinating to watch just what a guy with clout does when left to his own devices.
You know, it’s funny: I was talking with a fairly well-known actor-filmmaker the other day — never an Oscar winner, or even a nominee, but as I say, fairly well-known, and pretty damn good at his job — and he observed that theater was a medium for the actor, film was a medium for the director — but TV was a medium for the writer-producer. Can’t say I disagree.
Count me among the few, the proud, the Studio 60 fans. One thing I’ll always remember about the show was its fantastic holiday episode, especially the “Oh Holy Night” finale. Definitely one of the best hours of television all year. It’s basically the only reason I intend to buy the season when it comes out on DVD. Well, that and Nate Corrdry, one of the most underappreciated performers on the show (until the last few episodes, that is, when he was saddled with lame material). Loved the episode when he was stuck in a lobster suit. Can’t say I entirely disagree with your criticism, Dave, but I do think half the episodes were better than people gave them credit for.
Speaking of Paul Haggis, Due South was kind of entertaining, in a cheap Canadian kind of way. Excellent performances by Gordon Pinsent and Leslie Nielsen.
And my wife was rather fond of Paul Gross in that Mountie uniform….
A dramatized version of any profession will naturally be inaccurate. That was not my beef.
The Dick Van Dyke Show, for instance, got the spirit of a writer’s room, even if it didn’t stick to pure reality.
Something as broad as Monk (or Columbo, etc) obviously does not try to duplicate the on-scene methods of investigation… but it gets the spirit of a pursuit.
Studio 60 was very clearly about an hour-long drama… every structural conceit fit hour-long perfectly and live comedy not at all. The idea of one person being responsible for the voice of each week’s script. The idea of talent hanging around waiting for pages and the relationships that develop that way, as opposed to the weekly all nighters of live comedy shows. The importance of the show to the network, which has never been the case, even with SNL. One major story element after the next was about one kind of experience… but the show kept being about something else.
Of course Quincy, ME was acting like a detective instead of a Medical Examiner. It was laughable in that regard. But the show became an investigator with medical insight… a light CSI precursor.
Of course the White House is not really like The West Wing… except in that spirit of this crew of like minded people being challenged to both work the machine and keep their integrity week after week.
Studio 60 was like Mr Ed being set in a NY penthouse, a poverty striken Batman on a bike, or The Jeffersons spending each week explaining why they stayed in the ‘hood. Sure, you could find a way for these ideas to work… but they are fighting against a tide of basic drama.
Thank you, David, for pointing out what everyone else seems to have missed: STUDIO 60 was a drama, not a comedy. It wasn’t funny bcause IT WASN’T SUPPOSED TO BE.
Sorkin has zero to apologize for. The mouth-breathers who’d rather watch “Real-Life Wedding Crashers” do.
I watched every single episode – but not because I liked it. I … just … couldn’t … look … away!
The show was such a massive failure on multiple fronts, but such an interesting one. We’re meant to buy that Matthew Perry’s character is a comic genius, and yet none of his work inspires the least bit of confidence (and the other characters appear deluded when they think he’s dong a good job.) We’re meant to spend the last five hours worrying about multiple story lines, only to have them all solve themselves within about five minutes and damn near end the show on a “Police Squad”-style freeze frame. And, oh my God, worst of all, we’re expected to believe Harriet Hayes is not only a comedienne (she’s not funny), but is the next big movie star.
And I think if she had done a freaking Holly Hunter or Juliette Lewis (how timely!) impression one more time, I would have hunted her down and strangled her to death.
I have a quick question (and before I go any further, neither show has made it to this side of the Atlantic yet)… but wasn’t Syudio 60’s fire eventually stoeln completely by the critical success of 30 Rock? It seems to me, from critic and viewer reviews, that even though Tina Fey’s show started out as something of the red-headed stepchild of the two, it eventually proved itseld much smarter and funnier (probably because Fey has actually worked on SNL)
I watched the show, several times, waiting for it to kick in and get good. There were only a couple of truly entertaining episodes that really focused on the running of the show and were genuinely funny in spots.
It really was very misguided. My wife and I kind of found all the 9/11 references truly jarring. And there was just such self-importance to it.
One side story has the Amanda Peet character being dragged into scandal by a best-selling tell-all book by her ex-husband about the scandalous life of a network exec. Come on! I know we live in a celebrity culture, but Sorkin expect us to buy that? And another featured an interview with New Yorker where the reporter expressed amazement that here we are in a red state/blue state America, truly divided, and YET against all those odds, the Matthew Perry and blonde actress (forget her name) could find romance.
I have always found Sorkin’s writing to be completely overcooked back to A Few Good Men, but he really pushed it with this show. Everybody talks, REALLLY fast, while always walking fast and always about how important they are to the world around them.
oh and apologies for the disastrous spelling in my last post – that will teach me to preview before I post!
“Thank you, David, for pointing out what everyone else seems to have missed: STUDIO 60 was a drama, not a comedy. It wasn’t funny bcause IT WASN’T SUPPOSED TO BE.
Sorkin has zero to apologize for. The mouth-breathers who’d rather watch “Real-Life Wedding Crashers” do.”
Amen.
I’ve been catching up with 30 ROCK in repeats and it just keeps getting better and better. I’m glad it got renewed and I feel a little sorry for not watching it more during the regular season.
Never watched a single episode and STUDIO 60.
Ah Josh Mashey, you kneejerk elitist reactionary. thank you for being such a cookie cutter stereotype in your post.
I’ve heard the argument a hundred times. Studio 60 failed because people just didn’t get it, the ‘mouth breathers’ were just too dimwitted to grasp it.
bullshit.
There was nothing to get. There were a couple of episodes that stood out to me as being what people would perceive as ‘intellegent’, but were so poorly handled that it was laughable.
One time, Nate Cordry’s character is showing his parents around and the Father spends the whole episode looking angry. Finally, in the most comical of scenes he blurts out “YOUR BROTHER IS IN AFGHANISTAN!” almost out of the blue.
In another, Timonthy Busfield’s character (the only likable one on the show) finds an old man trying to take a picture off the wall. Within 30 seconds i knew right where the plot was going. Of course he was a blacklisted writer that worked there during the McCarthy witch hunts. Every character on the show had some kind of stupid one note drama they were dealing with. There was Danny and the drugs, then Matthew Perry’s character and the drugs, the religious girl, the black guy, the guy with his brother in Iraq, etc etc etc.
The problem with Studio 60 was that these people weren’t characters, but one note stereotypes only given a single avenue to explore. Everyone had a socio-political-religious axe to grind, and it got real boring, real quick.
You could see hints of what could have been. I watched Mark McKinney on that show playing the downer writer who lost his wife and kid. That would have been far more interesting to explore, in my opinion, than another religious bullshit mushroom induced Sorkin fit about his feelings on organized religion. Because that character had a story that didn’t involve a soapbox.
Sorkin is predictable and boring these days.
Sorkin’s been going downhill ever since James Brolin uttered the immortal “Crime. Boy, I just don’t know.”. Before that, the staffs at West Wing & SportsNight were loveable losers who didn’t have time to sit around and act sanctimonious because they were too busy getting beaten by Republicans and/or ESPN. Even in A Few Good Men, Caffey still loses on the Conduct Unbecoming charge.
Once Sorkin decided to paint the opposition as inept stooges who couldn’t tie their shoes much less win, there was no more drama. You knew that Sorkin’s self-appointed heroes would prevail. In Studio 60, Matt & Danny were hailed as show-saving geniuses before they had ever written a single sketch. And all the folks who might think otherwise (protesters of “Crazy Christians”, Tom’s hick parents) were characterized as cartoonish buffoons.
cadavra, i don’t think sorkin has anything to apologize for either. it’s just a tv show. it failed. it happens.
but to characterize the difference in not liking this show to liking “real wedding crashers” is nuts. i chose to dislike them both. howabout that?
and i watched every episode of “west wing” i mean “studio 60.” hell, the only remotely funny sketch in the show was the x-mas episode (santa in a “to catch a predator” sketch).
no, the show was not a comedy, but it is set in a comedy show. we were told from everyone how funny these two guys were, how brilliant. then we’d see glimpses of the sketches. everyone still said how funny/brilliant they are and i’m thinking, really? so, now i’m questioning the character’s perceptions, which takes you out of the show.
i also didn’t like the latter conceit that perry could write the show high. i’m not a big “war on drugs” guy. and i’ve been around people who were high. if you’re not high too, a lot of what they think is funny, isn’t so funny.
IMO the reason Studio 60 failed were:
1. It was about a comedy yet not funny
2. Sarah Paulson was awful, and so was every single plot line concerning her, which was half the show
3. Sorkin lost his mojo – bad casting, and many many corny storyline – he’s an oldfashioned storyteller and has become the opposite of hip
4. 30 Rock is fabulous – which circles back to point #1
Having watched every episode of the show, and watched it get worse and worse and cornier and cornier, I’m still sad to see it go.
But I have to disagree with Dave about the idea that “it isn’t how SNL works” or whatever. That might matter to people that work in the biz that would actually know, but it’s totally meaningless when talking about TV viewers as a whole. People don’t now and don’t care about “how accurate” it is. What they want is to be entertained. Unfortunately, Studio 60 didn’t.
I’m am a HUGE fan of the West Wing by the way, my favorite recent show (with apologies to The Wire).
At the risk of making David go all Bruce Banner on us: The Emmy nominations are announced tomorrow. How many noms do you think Studio 60 will grab, in what categories? (Let me hasten to add: I don’t have a dog in this fight, ’cause I’ve never seen the show. As I posted elsewhere: I’m like the kiss of death for new series. Except for House, every new series I started watching on a regular basis in recent years — Peacemakers, Raines, Law & Order: Trial By Jury and others — earned a quick cancellation.)
can i tell you what shows not to watch, joe? just so they stay on the air.
I wished you watched FRIENDS from day 1.
that last one to Leydon, the Executioner of TV.
Don’t really care about Emmy Awards, Joe. If it gets a single nomination it will be too many. And if 30 Rock doesn’t get at least six, it will show how out of touch Emmy voters are… as always.
It’s not unlike the Oscar thing. I have never taken the position that Oscar voters get it right. I liked last year’s five more than any year in memory. But that is the odd event, not the norm.
And ratings? No accounting for what America likes. No matter what happens, the top four films of the summer will be shitty Spider-Man 3, crappy Shrek The Third, bloated Pirates 3, and infantile Transformers. Inversely, the legs of Knocked Up shows that people really do like the movie… and that there were very few decent alternatives for people who didn’t want to watch CG.
David: OK, let me get this straight — you’re admitting that Knocked Up will reach an audience beyond “middle-age” moviegoers? And you were wrong? (Just like I was even wronger to insist that the over-30 crowd would show up in droves for Flags of Our Fathers?)
Hendhogen: Look, sometimes all I have to do is think of looking at a show, and it’s doomed. Case in point: I thought Twenty Good Years sounded interesting, and told myself I’d watch it sometime. Never got the chance.
well, start thinking about “grey’s anatomy” please!
“It failed because
Anghus: Uh, what? Were you really reacting to my post, because if you were, it didn’t make a lick of sense. We seem to agree on many points, in fact.
Get a grip, son.
Even with all it’s faults, I still liked Studio 60, mostly because Bradley Whitford can do no wrong and had great chemistry with Matthew Perry, who was excellent and doing his best work, often with some shaky writing.
And Steven Weber was as good on Studio 60 as any supporting actor I’ve seen on TV in a long time. As good as Alec Baldwin has been on 30 Rock. Which is Emmy-worthy work.
Not really, Joe. Like Prada, it became the only must-see amongst the older set and played like it.
And what was that about Studio 60 and the Emmys? 2 guest stars, pilot directing, casting (hah! and the only non-pilot season is grey’s anatomy), and cinematography. Love those side bets!!!
Is the ‘older set’ capable of powering a movie to $150m?
Prada – $125m
Knocked – $140m and counting.
David: Are you really so sure that Prada played only to the “older set” last year? I seem to recall the presence of an actress named Anne Hathaway, whose Princess Diary films are beloved by the under-30 crowd. And all the TV spots and trailers I saw emphasized her as much as Meryl Streep. I know Streep got most of the ink and all of the Oscar love, but… I wonder how many people who bought tickets to Prada had never seen her in a movie before.
Oh, and BTW: David, would you please define what you mean by “middle age”?