Studio 60 and the Sunset Stalkers

Fans of the West Wing and Studio 60 being the wealthy, intelligent bunch that they are have taken over the old West Wing bulletin on nbc.com to vent their frustrations over the show and display their undying fealty to their Josiah Bartlet incarnate. This cryptic post, however, can only lead us to wonder, "What happened on that Studio 60 board?!"

"I will say this softly because I don't want it to lead to the slugfest that was supposedly responsible for the demise of the S60 board..."

Hm, I bet that belligerent Tom Jeter took his hatred of homosexual street thugs STRAIGHT to the web.

Heroes, Zeros and Weirdos

There have been many things I've been meaning to post about in the past month. How much NBC's "Heroes" blows (or does it?). How far NBC's "The Office" is slipping in quality and substance (told you so). How far above expectations NBC's "30 Rock" is consistently delivering (F the haters). And how far up its own butt NBC's "Studio 60" continues to crawl each week (BS site but whatever he agrees) .

With all that out in the open to be harped on again soon, I instead turn my attention to a larger question about the current state of Television as we wrap up the 1st quarter of the viewing season. Specifically the age old quandary of why bad shows out-perform good shows and why good shows have to get cancelled (See: Dateline to replace Friday Night Lights on Tuesday).

Let's start with this year's honoree as "The Best Show You're Not Watching," a dubious achievement formerly awarded to FOX's "Arrested Development." For 2006, it's NBC's "Friday Night Lights." One of the primary reasons I started these posts was to flex my Words Per Minute and defend shows like Friday Night Lights and "Kidnapped," which were clearly too good for network television to sustain. FNL's got its full season pick-up, however, and Kidnapped is wrapped for good after 13.

Another surprisingly solid show hitting its comedic stride during its second season is CBS's "How I Met Your Mother." Even after co-star and scene stealer NPH came out to People a few weeks ago, the show is still pulling in mediocre ratings (despite "Let's Go 2 the Mall" by Robin Sparkles somehow), which begs the question: how bad does a show have to be in order for it to be considered good?

The Office, Heroes, Criminal Minds, NCIS, Two and a Half Men, the list goes on and on of mediocre shows that find mass audiences through their watered down, accessible substance. Who's to blame? The networks for not sticking by fledgling franchises? The networks for not putting enough corporate muscle behind the commercial promotion of new, edgier shows? The public for not caring enough about television to waste time to wade through the bevy of new shows and gravitate toward the best and brightest? The writers and producers themselves who are too out of touch to be both relevant and engrossing?

Who knows. All I know is Seinfeld was successful and remains one of the greatest shows in the past 20 years. Who knows where it would stand in today's TV climate. Who knows how many times I'll say "who knows" in succession as a poor attempt at parallel structure? If it were to air today Seinfeld probably wouldn't receive the acclaim of "Worst Show For Some Reason You Are Watching." Nope. That shit would still go to Heroes.

Ummm, I think it's called nausea?

With Grey's Anatomy moved to Thursday nights and Desperate Housewives relying far too heavily on Eva Longoria's semi-clad tiny torso for ratings bumps, the only TV left to consume on Sundays is sports.

Sure, there's LPGA, MLS and NASCAR racing offered on networks major enough to only need a single digit but what Sundays in October really come down to are football and post-season MLB. The Sunday sports viewing sesh can be broken down into 3 segments: Morning, Afternoon and Night.


Morning's obviously noon pregame coverage for a 1:00 game. Afternoon's the second game of the afternoon at 4:00 EST. And Night is usually NBC's new Football Night In America and, for today, MLB on FOX's presentation of Game 2 of the World Series.

CBS and FOX have had standard Sunday football packages for the past several years. 2006, however, saw NBC break back into the football business by launching its own primetime Sunday football showdown to usurp the network share lost by Monday Night Football's move to ABC affiliate ESPN. NBC celebrated the launch of it's new sports show franchise with the lamest name it could possibly come up with: Sunday Night Football and its associated analysis program Football Night In America. Right when it seemed NBC couldn't get any whiter they spice up their promo video with a rap song lacking so much melanin that the unacknowledged perpetrator could only be MC Powder.

NBC's shortcomings as a sports network are only reinforced by a terrible presence in the field of digital media. Though its SNFONNBC website boasts pretty bad-ass graphics, it's really nothing more than a Flash window with sound effects ripped straight out of Tecmo Bowl. It's now week 6 of the NFL and NBC's football home page still hypes a Manning Bowl that took place two months ago.

MLB on FOX = Huge DB's on FOX

This weekend also saw the start of the World Series on FOX with Joe Buck, Tim McCarver, Ken Rosenthal and Chris Myers handling the live game coverage. A new addition to the pre and postgame coverage, however, is guest analyst Eric Byrnes, formerly of the Oakland A's, whom we have the pleasure of seeing every time the series returns to Detroit this year. If anyone saw the coverage they'll understand that the picture posted to the right does not nearly do justice to how big of a douche bag Byrnes actually is. Like, I don't know of any dictionaries that actually have pictures but, you know, if there happened to be one that existed and if it actually chose to water down its credentials as the only dictionary to have pictures by including definitions and illustrations for words like "douche bag" then I'm sure Eric Byrnes would be smugly staring back at us between entries for "doubtless" and "dough."

FNL, SNL, WTF?

Kyle Chandler stars in this Peter Berg television adaptation of the Peter Berg film adaptation of the Buzz Hissinger Book of the real-life-story "Friday Night Lights."

Let's try to clear things up. Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip airs on Monday nights and is about a sketch-comedy show that films on Friday Nights. Saturday Night Live IS a sketch comedy show that airs on Saturday nights, however, without its former head-writer, Tina Fey, whose new show mocks Saturday Night Live on a Wednesday Night, which is the day after Tuesday night when NBC has decided not to confuse anyone and slot Friday Night Lights. On a Tuesday. Night.

The Big 3 companies (not counting Mack Brown who throws his own weight behind the show's desperate plea for authenticity) behind this production are NBC Universal Television (obviously), Imagine Television and Film 44. Brian Grazer is the bigwig of Imagine Television and is responsible for a slew of critically and consumer acclaimed shows such as Arrested Development, Playmakers, Sports Nite and Felicity. Film 44 is Berg's new production company and has 4 projects slated to bow by 2007, FNL the first.

In addition to the pedigree of David Nevins and Brian Grazer, Friday Night Lights has the music of he who seems to be the de-facto NBC in-house composer as of late, W.G. Snuffy Walden who's work on NBC shows is prominent on three series this fall - Studio 60, Lights and Kidnapped. The real question is, though, why didn't Berg stick with the original team that scored his feature version of Hissinger's book? Music credits on the film go to Texas-based instrumental group Explosions in the Sky and Brian Reitzell and David Torn of Evolution Music Partners. Snuffy, however, takes what seems like the same signature sound of the motion picture and mimics the shit out of it. Why? Hopefully a myspace message to Texas Band can clear things up.

explosionsinthesky@yahoo.com wrote back:

they ended up using a couple of songs for the first
episode. they may follow up and use some in the next
as well. we got lucky to be a part of the movie and
now it looks to have spilled over to the t.v. show.
thanks for thinking of us and i hope you like the
program.

take care of yourself.
explosions in the sky

So looks like the makers of music young men want to clay-shoot to are still involved in the creative process of the series, and this blogger spun conspiracy from an end credit for no reason.

Maybe Peter Berg can clear it all up here.