‘Studio 60’ doesn't take comedy seriously

One of the popular pastimes of the fall season has been discussing the high-profile foundering of “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” (NBC, Mondays, 10 p.m. ET). Headed by Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme, who had critical success with “Sports Night” and both critical and popular success with “The West Wing,” and starring Matthew Perry, Bradley Whitford, and Amanda Peet, “Studio 60” began with good reviews and a large pilot audience.

Since then, however, the audience has dropped weekly, cancellation rumors swirled for a while, and critical response has become substantially more mixed. Talk of cancellation was squelched last week when NBC confimed it was picking the show up for the full season. But this is a project in trouble, despite a quality pedigree and an aggressive marketing campaign on multiple fronts.

One of the most popular explanations of the show's woes is that “Studio 60” tries to take comedy too seriously, or that’s too “inside.” “The West Wing,” some say, succeeded because it treated with appropriate gravity the important issues facing a president and his staff. But you can’t treat a “Saturday Night Live”-style show with the same gravitas and expect to be successful, both because the seriousness is out of place and because no one cares that much what happens in putting together a comedy.

This theory may be popular, but it's also wrong. The problem isn’t that “Studio 60” is taking comedy too seriously. It’s that the show isn’t taking comedy seriously enough. Despite aiming for intelligence and meaning, the show simply shows no signs of knowing enough about comedy to be credible.

Television and the internet are all full of beloved comedy institutions analogous to the fictional one in the show. Obviously, there is “Saturday Night Live” itself, but don't forget “The Daily Show,” “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” and other outlets like The Onion. Even a moderately media-savvy viewer has read a lot about them. Every time Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert is interviewed, every time we see the endless list of writers when Conan’s staff is up for an Emmy, and every time another book about “SNL” is released, we learn a little more about what these environments are like. And what have we learned? They are explosively creative, collaborative, jealous, and fixated on one thing to the point of madness: being funny.

Too many Model U.N. alums, not enough pizza boxes
Nobody who works on the fictional “Studio 60” seems to spend a lot of time on being funny. Nobody on “Studio 60” seems to even worry that much about being funny. It’s been noted in plenty of places that the sketches we’ve seen have been painfully dull, which certainly detracts from the believability of the fictional universe. But even more destructive than the bad sketches is the fact that the environment portrayed on the show does not reflect any understanding of comedy writing or the people who do it.

The failure to delve deeply enough is a huge missed opportunity. It’s no secret that the world of comedy includes an enormous number of deeply damaged people. How does a project like the fictional “Studio 60” not have one genuine cynical misanthrope on the entire staff? Why does everyone working on the show seem likely to have attended Model U.N.? Where is the manic energy? Where are the pizza boxes?

The fictional show’s writers, other than Perry’s suspiciously Sorkinesque character, Matt Albie, have been mostly written off as a collection of hopelessly untalented hacks who needed Albie to step in and perform miracles. This essentially creates a world in which what is “Saturday Night Live” is being written by one erudite guy sitting in a nice, clean, room.

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