regarding studio 60 and america's love of really stupid television...

The following is a response posted at Slate.com's "Fray" to this article by Slate's Dan Kois:

The writer here focused way too much on the sketch comedy portion of the show, which isn't necessarily going to be a regular part of the show. Tonight's episode for example featured no sketches, only a bit of stand-up at the Improv which I assume the show wrote. It wasn't terribly funny, but that served the plot.

I think the point here is that this is a drama about making a television show which happens to be late-night sketch comedy. It could have easily been a news show and we wouldn't even be having this discussion. However, I believe the reason Sorkin picked a sketch comedy show is because of its pop-culture legacy. Even when it isn't that good, it is memorable because they dare to take shots at anyone, but especially our so-called leaders. Making it about that kind of show creates the platform to go after the kind of issues Sorkin wants to sermonize about.

Clearly some people tuned in week 1 thinking it was going to be 40 minutes of sketch comedy in prime-time and 10 minutes of behind-the scenes filler. Obviously if that is why you tuned in you made a mistake. So before you criticize the show for doing a bad job at creating sketch comedy moments, look more carefully at the real show, which incidentally is a drama. The sketch comedy doesn't have to be that great to be reminiscent of SNL, KITH, or MPFC, which is all it takes to serve its role as a plot device!Hopefully NBC isn't so dense as to think this show won't help pay the bills for the next 8-10 years.

Peace,

Brian

Oh and another thing, I seem to remember some of the dialogue on the show being ABOUT Matt-the-character's shyness to write really cutting edge political satire.The way I see it, the show is clearly meant to evolve. Tonight DL's character accused Perry's of being afraid to write good black comedy (African-American that is). So I think we are missing the point if we think the sketch comedy is supposed to be terrific already. I think the show is a work-in-progress, and I think the show-within-a-show is also a work-in-progress.

Peace,

Brian