Studio 60 is back (sort of)

So I’m watching some kind of Genesis tribute, and for some reason Robin Williams is introducing them. He’s just launched into full Robin Williams mode and I’m having flashbacks to Macworld Expo and fully expecting that any minute he’ll once again reach over and rip off Matt Saye’s scalp. But the real reason I’m laying fingers to keys this evening is the fact that, after a few months of being missing in action, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is finally back on the air.

Kind of anticlimactic though, seeing as how NBC just announced its fall schedule and Studio 60 ain’t on it.

That could change, but I suppose only if the ratings for these six new episodes shoot through the roof and cause the NBC execs to magically see the collective error of their ways. So going into this evening’s episode I was holding out some degree of hope that somehow it just might happen.

Then I saw the episode. Oops. It was loud, chaotic, messy, plotless, and all but entirely lacking in the intelligent dialogue that made Studio 60 so eminently watchable in the first place. Not to mention the fact that the show’s two main stars didn’t appear at any point in the episode. Alright, so I didn’t hate it. It was cool to see Allison Janney referencing the West Wing, particularly the part where she couldn’t remember the name of it and then had the name fed to her by the same actor her West Wing character ended up marrying. Okay, so it’s like the Gage Whitney reference, you get that kind of stuff or you don’t.

But for the most part the highlights of the episode were the sight gags, and that’s just sad. This was the first time in the (admittedly brief) history of the series where the episode ended and I wasn’t inclined to rewind it and immediately watch the whole thing over again. What bums me is that while I can live with one lame episode, tonight was probably the show’s one chance to build a wider audience and somehow squeak its way into a second season. But I think those hopes died with this episode.

Maybe I’m being overly harsh on this episode because I know that in all likelihood these characters will cease to exist in five episodes, without any of them having had time to be fully developed, and I no longer want to put any effort into becoming emotionally vested in what will ultimately go down in television history as half-formed thoughts. There have been other shows I’ve liked but immediately stopped watching when I heard that the plug had been prematurely pulled. That won’t be the case here, but these next five episodes just might be as painful as they are enjoyable.

This episode was written before the show was placed on hiatus, so I’m wondering if NBC had told Sorkin to start dumbing it down in order to reach a wider (dumber) audience in the hopes of saving the show. We’ll see if it gets any better next week, but in the mean time this has me seriously bummed all around.