Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
The show actually is almost impossible to understand. But I don’t think that has anything to do with how insular it is.
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Consider what happens in the pilot episode. The producer of the show-within-the-show (Judd Hirsch) has a meltdown when the network censors force him to cut a controversial sketch. He goes on the air live and denounces the network for showing garbage and then denounces America for watching garbage. This causes a huge uproar in the media, and then the new head of the network (Amanda Peet) has a brilliant idea: she fires the producer and brings back the show’s original creative team (Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford), who were themselves fired years ago for being too hip and edgy. The network head’s boss (Steven Weber) goes along with this scheme reluctantly but tells her that if it doesn’t succeed, “It’s all on you.”
I haven’t even gotten to the backstage drama. So far it’s mostly focused on why one of the writer/producers has broken up with his girlfriend, who is both the star of the SNL-ish show and a Christian singer. He says she’s pissed at him because he didn’t show up when she sang the “Star Spangled Banner” at a baseball game. But that’s just a cover story. The real reason is that he can’t forgive her for going on The 700 Club to promote her new CD of Christian music.
The first problem is its alleged subject–which isn’t so much insular as irrelevant. Nostalgia for the golden age of Saturday Night Live–why bother shedding a tear? I miss Michael O’Donoghue and Phil Hartman as much as anybody, but you can get humor just as subversive and snarky on The Colbert Report any weekday. And besides, I’m not even sure that the makers of Studio 60 actually give a damn about SNL.
Those were the days. Today we live in a completely balkanized cultural scramble; everything comes through, nothing is filtered, and nothing goes away. There’s no need for anybody to censor the truth, because we get too much truth: the signals are all so loud and clear they’ve become indistinguishable from noise. That’s the problem with the old-fashioned and sentimental Studio 60: it’s misty-eyed about the days when it was still possible to believe that somebody could go on TV and tell the truth and it might make a difference.
