Studio 60

I hate NBC right now. I will get over it, but right now their executives are the lowest forms of life.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was, in my mind, the best show on the box. It was funny, charming, engaging, and felt genuine. Studio 60 is a big reason that I started watching network television again after nearly 10 years of going out of my way to avoid reality programming. And just like that - poof - it is gone

Maybe it's me. Maybe because I felt so strongly for the show I jinxed it. I haven't felt this strongly for a show since Firefly, and that ended prematurely as well.

Or maybe it is the viewing public. I have believed for quite a while that the western world is being dumbed down. Perhaps we just weren't ready for a program without black hat bad guys. Is it that the general public doesn't understand conflict if it appears that neither side is 100% right or 100% wrong? In the pilot, the executive producer rants on live air how the media has lowered it self to "pandering to 12 year old boys.....and not even the smart ones...."

I normally love irony, but this seems to be too close to the mark.

It is easy to see the conflict in a show like Studio 60's successor, the Black Donnelys. I didn't watch the premiere, and I won't watch any episodes of it, but I can pretty much tell you the story of it. Please tell me I'm wrong, but it has been laid out in all the trailers and teasers leading up to tonight's show - 4 brothers, 1 steals money from a mob boss, gets caught, and beaten within an inch of his life, and the oldest brother must now heroically hold the family to together while at the same time exact revenge for his brother. Sounds like it would have made a good feature film, but not a long run television series...the plot isn't open ended enough to carry more than 2 or 3 episodes.

And perhaps this is what the television audience is looking for: the only thing cerebral about it is the target for a baseball bat.

I will mourn the passing of Studio 60. It is a real shame they couldn't have put it in another time slot. On the TV landscape right now, there are 3 CSI's (more if you count NCIS, Crossing Jordan, Medium, and any other find the bad guy shows), 4 Law and Orders (and more if you count other police/courtroom dramas), still a full plate of gladiatorial reality shows, and very few original ideas.

NBC, shame on you for giving us more of the same with a shiny new bow on it.