Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

Against my better judgment, I’ve decided to stick with Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip through the end of the season.  It’s going to take some energy on my part.  Last week’s episode, which I’ve just watched, was almost torture.

Matthew Perry and Sarah Paulson?  You have no chemistry.  You loved each other years ago but split over religious differences?  I don’t believe it for a second, and any dialogue that addresses your conflicted love/hate carnival ruins what would otherwise be a lovely show for me.  It’s far too early in the show’s run for me to really care about such a tortured romance, and it just drags down an otherwise entertaining hour.

Bradley Whitford and Amanda Peet?  You have even less chemistry than Perry and Paulson.  Honestly, I love Bradley Whitford.  He’s what happens to the boy next door when he grows up and possibly goes to Yale.  Amanda Peet, though, I still find neither charming nor believable.  Danny Tripp’s romantic overtures to Jordan come off more like stalking than courting, and I refuse to believe that this could ever work in real life.

Timothy Busfield, however, deserves an Emmy.  His subplot, if you can believe it, is that a snake used for an indoor shoot has gotten loose in the vents of the building.  He must now conspire with the animal wrangler to retrieve the snake without letting anyone else know that a highly poisonous serpent has gone missing.  This eventually involves 1) a ferret to eat the snake and 2) a fox to eat the missing ferret.  The Humane Society gets involved, and his lies to the staff get more elaborate, culminating in having to rip up the stage to get rid of what he claims is MOULDE, in the face of some beautiful protests from Mark McKinney (”What?  You can’t just shut down the stage.  There’s poisonous spores everywhere.  It’s the asbestos of the 21st century.  You breathe that stuff in and you die.”  It was actually hilarious.  Every second of it.  More of this, please.

Lastly, Steven Weber as Jack Rudolph, chairman of NBS.  I love virtually every sentence out of this man’s mouth.  Weber plays it like a shark, and unlike most of the other main characters, you actually believe that this man could rise to the head of a major TV network.  “Things I don’t care about!  THINGS I DON’T CARE ABOUT!”

Wow, looking back on what I’ve just written (and thinking about the things I left out, like the drunk jail-bait Chinese viola player on which the fate of a major business power play hangs), Studio 60 comes off like an absolute train wreck.  It’s really held together by the excellent writing and the non-Harriet/Matt moments of the show.

Oh, and the Big Kiss betwixt Danny and Jordon?  Contrary to NBC’s intolerable promos, I was not talking about it the next day.  In fact, it’s all I can do to push the creepy image out of my mind.