Terrible title.
Pretty good show though. I have a hard time imagining that I will care for these people and admire them in the way I cared for and admired the characters of The West Wing.
And it’s easy to make that assumption b/c so much of the WW cast is duplicated here. As an example, Matthew Perry’s guest stint on West Wing as the chief clerk (or something) for a hospitalized, dying Supreme Court Justice was great. He won an Emmy for it, I think. It had some gravity and walked a nice balance between something we can all relate to – someone dying we care for – and something most of us will never relate to – preserving massive political power for as long as possible. How can something like that be carried off in the setting of a sketch comedy show?
Sorkin has said something along the lines that the fictional show is modeled on Larry Sanders as much, or more, than on SNL. I’m not sure I buy that. SNL seems so over… so irrelevant, that I have a hard time thinking I can care about a show that’s modeled on it. I’m certainly willing to watch more of it, b/c Bradley Whitford is still really good. And Steven Weber was surprisingly good as the foil.
Is there anything else worth watching this season? I’d watch The Wire if I could, but no HBO.
I watched “Smith” last night and was surprised by how much I liked it. It has style and a great cast (Ray Liotta, Virgina Madsen, Simon Baker, Amy Smart, etc.). I’ll watch it again. I liked “Studio 60” as well though it seems suffused with a certain kind of onanistic heat. Time or Newsweek writes that Tina Fey’s new SNL-inspired half-hour comedy is even better, smarter, and funnier than Sorkin’s (which said writer also admired greatly). I’m also up for “The Nine.” “The Wire,” by the way. is fucking great this year.
Yes, ‘The Wire’ is indeed fucking great. Why are we even talking about the emotional and creative desert that is network TV?
sunhee is watching the wire. i’m waiting for season 1 to come around again on ondemand.
Studio was pretty damn engaging tonight. I get suckered in by the sheer pacing of Sorkin’s lines…. I suppose if I stopped and thought too much, the impact might fade, but it’s fun while it goes.
And I’m going to catch up on The Wire‘s first 2 episodes tomorrow night or the next. Thanks be to Jeff Turner.
And I’ll throw this out, probably on deaf ears: Battlestar Galactica is, after Sorkin’s, the network show I’m most keen to see. Its first two seasons had some fantastic moments, and it ended its second with a helluva twist, reimagining the very center of the plot. Its dialogue isn’t as witty, and it’s definitely bound by the constraints of basic cable (and the endless commercial breaks SciFi inserts), but… it’s worth watching.
I’ve been impressed with some of the new pilots this season. I’ll watch the morally ambiguous “Smith” again. It may be Scorsese-lite but last week’s debut packed some punch and the actors reveal hidden character depth without striving too hard. I also liked “Brothers and Sisters” this past Sunday. The reviews had been mixed so I turned it on thinking I would flip away, but I was pulled in and was totally engaged by the end (Ken Olin is a great tv director). And “Heroes” last night was pretty damn entertaining. I’m clueless as to how all the elements will pull themselves together but I enjoyed it immensely. And another shout out to “Studio 67.” Last night’s finale was hilarious. Matthew Perry is really impressing me. Could it be he is the one Friend who knows how to act? Finally, the pre-credit sequence on “The Wire” this past Sunday was brilliant.
Yeah. Omar going out for cereal in his pyjamas with the local kids scattering as he approaches was priceless.
“Heroes” is being re-run tonight at 8:00pm EST on NBC. It’s silly but fun; X-Men filtered through “Lost.” This article may be of interest.
“Heroes” is good fun and getting better and better each week as our genetically enhanced superhumans slowly start to make connections. It’s a comic book but I know some of you like comic book movies and this television show deserves a look. Onto “Studio 60” . . . Reynolds bad-mouthed this in class the other day (cue someone to tell me how right Reynolds is), but I think it’s still a strong series. What I like most is the way Sorkin seemingly equates running a television studio to running the USA. Is there a difference? And Matthew Perry, Amanda Peet and Sarah Paulson (who played the nanny from hell on a few episodes of “Deadwood”) are doing some good work. Ernest Dickerson directed tonight’s episode and Sting played the lute–what more can you ask from Mondays at 10, 9 central?
You know what I like about Studio 60 now? It proves Andre Bazin’s famous adage about the necessary ambivalence of the show about the making of a show, where the enactment of the “comedy sketches” are themselves not comedy but a complex deconstruction of any such thing as comedy. The show’s performative mise-en-abyme, this making of “great television” which is so patently bad television, enacts a complex erasure of the very product it ostensibly celebrates. Ah, Sorkin– c’est magnifique.
I like Studio 60 because it proves the adage that I read in something written by someone who was referring to Freud: “sometimes bad television is just bad television.”
I saw the 2nd episode of 30 Rock last night re-ran on Bravo, and I laughed more at it than at any other TV show i’ve seen in a long time.
And so there’s the ineviable comparison between these two shows, which I shouldn’t be interested in spurring in the least. I’m also annoyed with Studio 60, but there’s nothing else I’m bothering to watch with any regularity this season, and I’m always home by 10 on Mondays, so I keep watching it.
30 Rock though: It’s got to be disheartening for DL Hughley to watch Tracy Morgan be twice as funny on this show as he ever was on SNL (with the exception of his Brian Fellows character). Hughley meanwhile, like the rest of the cast, is completely unconvincing as even being familiar with the concept of humor, let alone actually being funny.
Baldwin and Fey are simply two of the funniest people who’ve ever appeared on SNL, and it carries over here. Rachel Dretch has popped up in small roles in each episode, and while I’m sorry she got axed as a lead in 30 Rock, I hope they keep including her in random unrelated roles each week.
I also dig the Bravo instant reruns. I’m never home by 8 on Wed. and I’m not about to buy a videotape, so I like their recycling plans. They should however yank off the West Wing re-runs from last season, cuz Studio 60 sucks in comparison.
OK . . . ten minutes in last night and I was getting itchy. Then Eli Wallach showed up and I knew my time with “Studio 60” was coming to an abrupt close. So I switched to On Demand and watched next week’s episode of “The Wire.” “Heroes,” however, continues to entertain.
you can watch an episode of ‘The Wire’ that airs on Sunday October 29, now? How does that work? I pay for HBO. Actually I pay for 10 channels of HBO, but I have to wait. I take it that HBO On Demand costs something, right?
I think it depends on your cable company and if they have made the proper upgrades, etc. I know it requires digital cable boxes. You/I don’t pay anything extra for On Demand (it is a service that hopefully will pay off when customers can download any and all media content through a digital cable connection). My brother had access to it in Louisville, KY long before we got it up here in Saint Paul. See: http://www.hbo.com/hboondemand/
jeff, we have digital ondemand, but we have not yet mastered the art of seeing something before it is aired. you’re probably just a week behind without knowing it. hbo has its own ondemand schedule (available on their site)–new episodes don’t become available on ondemand till the monday of the following week.
I called my cable company and it still does not have “on demand” services, despite the fact that I have digital cable. I used to be proud that our quirky local cable company was an independent cooperative, and that we elect the board. Now I see the advantages of a conglomerate.
I can tell you what happens next week if you’d like . . . actually, you can only access the next week’s episode of “The Wire” on Mondays. HBO pulls it off for the rest of the week. You can ask Mike as I’ve been recording for him and he has often received eps ahead of the HBO Sunday “premiere.” For more, go here.
my apologies, jeff. i don’t watch the wire and assumed that ondemand works the same way for it as it does for the other shows–which only come to ondemand the monday after they air.
chris, you’re better off without ondemand: there are way too many crappy action movies available for free with it–apart from hbo, we get encore ondemand for free, and there are also free movies on demand from many other channels.
Arnab, good point: I need to keep temptation at bay. I had just watched the three episodes of ‘The Wire’ that I missed while in Sweden back-to-back and was so blown away by the quality that the idea of getting a jump on the next episode was almost irresistible. But I’ll wait, though thanks for the offer of a plot summary, Jeff.
For devotees of the West Wing, the last few episodes of ‘The Wire’ dealing with the Baltimore mayoral primary might offer a fix of dense insider politics.
Anyone seen any movies lately?
I keep meaning to post on The Queen and Three Times, but I haven’t carved out the space and time to actually get my ideas down into some coherent form.
Yesterday Time Warner replaced he Turner Classic Movies channel with the Golf Channel. Other decent channels are also gone, including I think C-Span 2.
Mark, switch to Knology.
Is that a religion?
No, it is simply the largest and most active organization devoted to the practice and promotion of Knolog. I’d be happy to send you a pamphlet. What is your address?
30 Rock is the funniest show on TV.
You disagree? I read somewhere about how, for people who already thought Alec Baldwin was the funniest person on SNL for the past decade, that the show is like a weekly hit of crack. And no doubt Baldwin is the funniest thing on it. But last night’s episode had a few scenes that are making me tear-up even now: Rachel Dretsch with her “self-sufficient ferrett farm,” Alec Baldwin putting a sandwich in his pocket for later, and Tracy Morgan’s “You know, the usual, invisible motorcycles…” Then there’s Tina Fey unconsciously kidnapping a child in the space of a jump cut.
That is funny.
I think I like it even more because it doesn’t rely on the kind of humor that the “funniest” shows of the past few years have relied on: There’s no squirm-factor here, no embarrassment that worked fine in the original Office, Ali G, Curb Your Enthusiasm and so on. Instead of that, we get sharp funny jokes, well-written and delivered like pros. As great as Arrested Development was, I think I admire the pure number of big laughs this show has even more.
Oh yeah: Mahnola Dargis, a critic I generally don’t agree with, picked the latest Guy Maddin feature, Brand Upon the Brain!, as one of her best films of the year. Not only is it in black and white – it’s silent! Awesome. So, it’s just a chance for me to encourage people here to go see Cowards Bend the Knee; about hairdressing, hockey, murder. It’s also silent, also b/w – and really quite good.
There was an episode of “30 Rock” a few weeks back where Baldwin films a promo or a commercial or something; I don’t remember the details but he flubs take after take after take, and the entire sequence was one of the funniest things I have seen on network television in a long, long time. The show is superbly crafted and well-written–the funniest new show on television. And is no one watching “The Office”??? Am I the only one who finds this show to be one of the greatest half-hour sitcoms in my adult lifetime (for the record, that would be 26 years of adulthood both faux and fully-realized). Finally, a few good words for “Friday Night Lights” which is a soap opera, yes, but one of the best hour long dramas of the year.
Hey, here’s the YouTube clip of Baldwin cracking under the pressure. Hilarious!
I avoided the American version of ‘The Office’ until now on the (plausible) grounds that it could not possibly be anything but a pale imitation of the British version. I have just watched the (short) first season and almost all of the second season on DVD and it really is very good. It duplicates the texture and feel of the British version but still manages to be an almost completely original American comedy. So many of the minor characters manage to be well-formed, and the Pam-Jim love story has real depth and poignancy, and is considerably better than the British version. Dwight’s use of a Mussolini speech at a sales conference is the funniest comedy moment I can remember in a long while.
I will stop posting random comments now. We are snowed in here, and I have nothing else to do while I wait for the driveway to be plowed and watch the kids built fortresses in the snow.