Sigh

TV Ratings:

-Yesterday’s Losers (excluding repeats):
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (NBC)

Unfortunately, the news remains bleak for NBC at 10 p.m. with week four of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip at a distant second-place 6.8/11 in the overnights, 8.76 million viewers and a 3.8/ 9 among adults 18-49. The one piece of good news for Studio 60: it beat ABC’s competing What About Brian.

-Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (Mon. 10 p.m.): Losing steam every week.

There's a musical called Merrily We Roll Along, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, which is one of the more famous underperformers-I'm being generous-in Broadway history. By all reports (I've never seen it staged) it has never fully worked succesfully, either in its original run or in a couple of revivals. Even though it contains one or two of Sondheim's best songs. "Not A Day Goes By" alone is worth a couple of shows.

I remember once reading someone speculate that one of the reasons it never worked is because the audiences didn't relate to the characters. Merrily We Roll Along, as I recall, is about a man who starts out wanting to write for Broadway and ends up "selling out" by writing commercial, pop music.

Well, this person speculated, not wanting to write for Broadway may be the worst betrayal Sondheim and his longtime directing partner, Hal Prince, could think of...but it's not a given that even a Broadway audience is going to care that much.

I wonder whether one of the reasons Studio 60 is doing so poorly (compared to, say, West Wing) is because: There simply aren't that many people to whom the running of a TV show is as interesting as, say, the running of the country.

No matter who's writing it. I mean obviously, they've got people like me-even if if this wasn't a Sorkin show, as a writer a show about a writer would interest me. But how many of us are there?

(Apparently, 8.76 million of us)

About last night's episode specifically: Last week a few of us were discussing over on Sherman's blog whether or not within the world of the series, Harriet's religious beliefs were well known. Enough so that they could be referred to on the show-within-the-show. Sherman wasn't sure, I thought they were.

I am much less sure that in this world or any other, a writer/director/producing team coming back to a late-night TV comedy show is cover story fodder for Vanity Fair. I mean, come on. How often do you see people like Lorne Michaels or even Al Franken (back before he launched his second career as a comedian) making like Jennifer Aniston?

Finally, it may interest those of you who watched to know that last night's plot was, presumably, based in part on a real incident. In his book about his time spent as a writer/performer on Saturday Night Live, (you could read my review here) Jay Mohr cops to having plagarized a sketch and being found out. If memory serves he did not, however, have the "get out of jail free" card Sorkin provided his characters at the end, a final twist I kinda wish they'd left out.

It's a weakness as well as a strength of Sorkin's writing that sometimes, he can't let people be too angry with each other for too long. The strenth of this is that all his characters are too well-rounded to be one-dimensional villains (or heroes). The weakness is that sometimes he lets conflict, or even potential conflict, dissapate too quickly.

Well, come hell or high water, I'm in with Studio 60 until they shut the lights out. I just wish there were more of us.