When West wing was canceled I was very sad because TV had never been that smart, well written or well acted before. Studio 60 was more of the same. I think it absurd that such quality programing goes so swiftly into that dark night. Believe it or not I am really dissapointed. I am such a fan of good TV and so quickly board by trash! All I can say is thank you to the cast and crew!! I can't wait to see the last few shows

Gavin
Jerusalem Israel

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The blame for the show's failure lies with Aaron Sorkin and his choice to utilize an hour of network hour to get back at all the network execs and women who have done him wrong. Middle America is perfectly capable of recognizing quality and embracing it. They are equally capable of recognizing pretentious crap and ignoring it. Studio 60 is pretentious crap and was rightfully ignored by Middle America.

I'm from middle America and I loved the show. At first. Honestly, I was hoping it wouldn't come back from hiatus, not because of Crazy Christians or some other conservative religious belief, but because it started sucking. It went all after too many relationships at once, and none of them were very interesting. It started using too many quirky time altering devices. And they bloody went for a drug addiction to liven the drama.

It's not middle America that was the problem, is was a lack of quality programming.

As a Californian transplant to Texas, and a huge fan of The West Wing, I have to agree that Studio 60 was not really up to snuff. I've watched every episode of the show, but with each passing week it grew less and less interesting.

The West Wing was, in many people's eyes, a liberal apologetic. And, to a large extent, that would be an accurate assessment. But it was a brailliant liberal apologetic, with characters that snapped and dialogue that sparkled. And the fact that it was set in a political context made it palatable even to its most conservative fans.

Studio 60, on the other hand, was much less interesting. It seemed so much less interesting, and, yes, more pretentious. I will continue to watch the show until it ends, but I hardly think that its cancellation is a great tragedy for American television, and I wouldn't say that people are stupid for not watching the show.

I live in Columbus, Georgia. Yes, I live in the south, I don't talk with a redneck accent, I managed to use the internet with ease, and I love Studio 60. What does that make me? Maybe I am one of the few that "get it", but this show, like The West Wing, is top of the line television. It is and always has been smart, funny, and interesting. Too bad more people didn't watch. Too bad NBC killed it without moving it to a better suited night, like Sunday night. Studio 60 should have never been on after Heroes. The crowds are too different.
Thanks to Sorkin and all involved.

I happen to be one of those LA types as well as a West Wing fan and I didn't like Studio 60.
I expect Sorkin shows to be a little preachy so that wasn't my problem. My problem was the writing and the characters. The writing lacked that West Wing zing and the characters were flat and unlikeable.Plus, the whole "aren't we clever show biz insiders amazing?"tone of the show was vapid and lame.

I loved Studio 60, but could never get into West Wing....

All I want now is a Studio 60 DVD set.

RE: I feel the blame lies with middle America not knowing quality programming when they see it.

What a load of condescending horse crap! Most creative types in LA and New York are running away from their Middle American or otherwise hum drum middle class roots, and try to work with a huge chip of inferiority on their shoulders while also trying to convince their peers and the rest of the world that they are hipper than hip and cooler than cool. But "quality programming" is not the same thing as interesting, exciting, fun, or watchable programming. "Studio 60" started out good but quickly became a turgid, self-important, and worst of all -- boring -- mess. It wasn't funny. It wasn't good drama and it committed the sin of preachiness, or as a Hollywood movie mogul once said, "If I want to send a message, I'll use Western Union."

"Quality programming" is excreted by middle-brow clods who had lazy, insecure teachers who wrongly insisted that great art is like medicine, strong, slightly stinky and gagging stuff that is good for you because it is "meaningful." But great art makes you laugh, makes you cry, makes you want to scream. The quality comes from the deftness of execution even more than from originality or mere cleverness, and Studio 60 never rose above being merely ostentatiously clever.

RE: I can't help but take it personally after I defended middle Americans to my Hollywood friends.

No one should ever care what an artist takes personally. We only care whether you produce good work, not about the condition of your psyche. Artists used to create works about life. Now self-referential, behind-the-scenes navel gazing is all the rage of people who don't know anything that they didn't learn in film school, and don't know anyone but a small, snotty crowd of like-minded solipsists.


RE: This year several of my favorite shows were canceled (George Lopez, Crossing Jordan, Andy Barker P.I., Jericho, and Raines).... Well I was watching, but my tastes were never in line with middle America's.

Did it ever occur to you that your taste may not be very good?

RE: Some don't even watch TV.

This is part of the problem. If a novelist said, "I write great novels, but I don't read," most people would rightly laugh at such foolishness.

RE: Maybe Wes was right when he said, "There is a struggle between art and commerce. Well there has always been a struggle between art and commerce.

Well, no. Shakespeare wrote plays to make money. He wrote his narrative poems to impress the upper class. His plays throb with life, while his narrative poems (but not the sonnets) exist only to drive graduate students crazy.

I disagree that NBC gave it every shot. They put it in a bad time slot and left it to flounder...

But not all Christians are offended by Sorkin... I wrote an article after the Premier adressing that very issue I was published in a magazine called uncompressed. Here is the URL if anyone was interested in reading it

The time slot wasn't the problem. The show was the problem. NBC did everything they could to sell this show but the audience wasn't buying.

The show just wasn't that great. Period.

Sorkin is horribly overrated...along with the vast majority of tv shows, which are being sucked down by reality tv and gameshows.

The problem with the show was that it really came down to a group of wealthy, artistic people with no real problems whining about trivial things. They did nothing to make us care about them.

I didn't watch the show, but I noticed that every review used the word "Sorkin" as a noun, verb, and interjection. It seems like the show could only be viewed through the prism of West Wing. That's a sign of an unsuccessful spin-off.

This article fails to mention the big problem with 30 and 60: that no one is interested in late-night SNL-type shows. The format of SNL was somewhat novel in the 1970's (think of a slower-moving Laugh In, or Monty Python without the vision). In the 2000's, it's calcified. Fey and Sorkin wrote behind-the-scenes shows about a show no one watches. People would rather look behind the scenes of a Scranton PA paper company than SNL.

I'm sorry. I'm from middle America, and I thought the show was great. I didn't like it's time slot, or the fact that they didn't stick it out for the season. It was one of their best performing new shows, and hands and feet above Black Donnelly's, America's Got Talent, Age of Love (guessing but I hate those shows) etc.

It was smart reparte. Both sides were shown in a bad light and sometimes in a good light. There is drama, and quite a bit of smart comedy, and I'm not talking the skits, but everything that happens around the show. I think Aaron had a great show, but he went after too many people (blacks-Simon, hypocritical christians-Harriet, liberals-matt, execs-Jack). But it showed how those character flaws can be viewed in a different light and how people can fight to make these things right.
BTW, I am a Christian minister.

At least I got to see Sarah Paulson do her stuff. She does more without a line than anyone on the show does with them. I've become a serious fan and will look for her work in the future. I hope she gets involved with more things that have been as good as Studio 60.

I really enjoyed this show. I just found out it has been marked for cancellation. Man, I must have bad taste too (as one commenter noted); it seems like all the shows I like are getting the boot. It seems that unless a show has a sort of super cool, super-skilled, violent/mysterious character it seems to fail. I'd like less of today's crop of 24's and Hero's and CSI's and more shows like Studio 60. Interesting settings, mostly real-life and real-relationships, and funny w/ enough intelligence to keep it interesting.