Review: The Last 23 Minutes of Last Night's Studio 60

After seeing 23 whole minutes (minus commercials) of the critically acclaimed new series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, I'm ready to pronounce judgement: meh. It's ok, but it has the same problem shows like Gilmour Girls have: all the characters are too clever (and talk too fast) to exist in real life. This is good for ratings, but it does nothing for me. I can't invest emotionally in these people, because they're not like the rest of us. I don't know people like this, and if I did, I wouldn't like them because they're too pithy all the time.

So the question remains out there like a bug in a steel sheath that cannot be zapped -- why do people continue to enjoy not just Studio 60, but all "too-clever" TV dramas? You've got House, CSI 1-3, L&O 1-4, Grey's Fricking Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, and even my beloved LOST dominating the ratings these days. Comedy is dead, and dramady is standing above it smoking gun in hand. I blame Ally McBeal. Do you realize that crap won an Emmy for Best Comedy? And now its progeny are all over the place, usually helmed by Aaron Sorkin. Funny has been replaced by cute.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not saying a show like Studio 60 is horrible (especially compared with shows like, oh, Matt Houston from the 80's), I'm just saying it's got cutesy pink barriers to entry I just can't get past. On top of that, the show hates Christians, and by extension, me. So why would I want to watch that?

Last night the end of the show centered on a plagiarized joke that wound up making it into the show-within-a-show's fake SNL-style newscast. That sentence did make sense. Oh, and btw -- Studio 60 isn't a fictional SNL since SNL exists in its universe (as Amelie Gillette has pointed out so brilliantly many times on The Hater), which is probably why NBC allows it to exist on its network. Anyhoo, this plagiarism threw the whole network into a tizzy, and the show definitely had that ER-style "a bunch of hectic crazy crap is going down at once, but after tonight we're never going to talk about it again because the same thing happens every week" vibe going on. Matthew Perry eventually fixed it with a little help from bad acting Amanda Peet and the fact that it turned out to not be plagiarism after all. It left me a little disappointed, actually. I wanted to see that bald guy from Sex and the City or that other guy from She Spies get canned. In fact, I'm not going to watch this again without knowing that somebody's going to be fired from the show.

Now that's realism.