murgatroyd
10-31-2006, 02:39 PM
Why another thread on Studio 60, you ask?
[Edited to add: hey, we don't have a new episode to talk about this week, so why not? :p ]
I wanted to toss out some ideas about the whole of the show, as we've seen it so far.
There's been a lot of talk about the intelligence of the show and the intelligence of the viewers and yada yada yada, yet no one has commented on something that seems really obvious to me.
Studio 60 is a show about live performance, written by a guy who started out as a playwright. Therefore, the obvious question to me is not, 'are Studio 60 fans smarter than other people", it is "are you a theatre person, or not?"
Plays are designed so that actors have character development over the course of the play. They build slowly, yet deliver a big punch at the end.
Many (not all) TV shows have very little character development. Many (not all) fans of ordinary episodic TV don't want to see character development. They want their favorite character to be the same, week after week.
More and more, it seems to me, TV is 'Short Attention Span Theater'. A show has to be instantly good, or it is yanked. People have talked about how the networks don't give shows a chance to find an audience, but I say the problem is also with audiences that are too impatient to give shows a chance to build up intricate material in the same way a play can do, only longer.
I'll use a sports analogy. Imagine you are a fan of auto racing, particularly Formula One or CART or Nascar. You like long races, like the Daytona 500, Indy 500, (fill in your favorite Formula One race here).
Ordinary TV is getting to be more and more like drag racing.
There is nothing wrong with drag racing -- I like that, too -- but you just don't see the same strategy unfolding in it that you do in an endurance race.
What I'm seeing in the remarks about Studio 60 is that people watch the first few episodes where Sorkin is doing a lot of setup, and they are not willing to see where he is going with it, so they bail.
I, on the other hand, was interested in seeing what Matthew Perry and Brad Whitfield and Timothy Busfield were going to do on the show, and that kept my interest through the parts that I wasn't sure were working so much.
Meanwhile, D L Hughley, Sarah Paulson, Nathan Corddry, Amanda Peet, and Ayda Field have also turned some fine performances. So I'm hooked now. I have to watch.
I can't help thinking about:
1) how bad some parts of Babylon 5 seemed to be, until I re-watched parts of it in Season Three, once I was more familiar with the characters and the whole setup of the B5 universe. The weak parts were still weak, but stuff didn't seem nearly as bad. Part of it was, B5 had a different way of doing things than other shows (e.g. Trek) and it took a little bit to get used to it. But I stuck it out. And boy, howdy, did that pay off -- especially watching the extraordinary performance over five years by Andreas Katsulas, who got the role of a lifetime on that show.
2) how some of us hung in with Firefly, just because it was Joss, even though the show was being aired every which way, and how so many people have discovered it and loved it while watching it via the DVD set, where they can see it in order, but also, watch more than one epsiode at a time, thus making it easier to see where things are going.
I watched Buffy as it aired. I didn't care so much for Season Four. But a friend of mine tells me, apparently a lot of fans who watched Buffy on DVDs really like Season Four. It's their favorite season. (Note also that she watched B5 in daily syndication and hated it, while I watched as it aired and could barely wait for the next week's episode to see what new thing would be revealed.)
The way you feel about a show can change drastically, depending on how you experience it. Even with the same person, some shows are better when you see them all at once, some better when you have to wait for that new episode. And there's no way to tell at first glance which way will be best for you.
I think a lot of people don't take this into account when judging whether a show is 'any good' or not. And certainly with the way TV ratings are set up, there is no way for them to record the people who have just watched X many episodes in a row and are now caught up and crazy about the show.
Your thoughts?
Jan
[Edited to add: hey, we don't have a new episode to talk about this week, so why not? :p ]
I wanted to toss out some ideas about the whole of the show, as we've seen it so far.
There's been a lot of talk about the intelligence of the show and the intelligence of the viewers and yada yada yada, yet no one has commented on something that seems really obvious to me.
Studio 60 is a show about live performance, written by a guy who started out as a playwright. Therefore, the obvious question to me is not, 'are Studio 60 fans smarter than other people", it is "are you a theatre person, or not?"
Plays are designed so that actors have character development over the course of the play. They build slowly, yet deliver a big punch at the end.
Many (not all) TV shows have very little character development. Many (not all) fans of ordinary episodic TV don't want to see character development. They want their favorite character to be the same, week after week.
More and more, it seems to me, TV is 'Short Attention Span Theater'. A show has to be instantly good, or it is yanked. People have talked about how the networks don't give shows a chance to find an audience, but I say the problem is also with audiences that are too impatient to give shows a chance to build up intricate material in the same way a play can do, only longer.
I'll use a sports analogy. Imagine you are a fan of auto racing, particularly Formula One or CART or Nascar. You like long races, like the Daytona 500, Indy 500, (fill in your favorite Formula One race here).
Ordinary TV is getting to be more and more like drag racing.
There is nothing wrong with drag racing -- I like that, too -- but you just don't see the same strategy unfolding in it that you do in an endurance race.
What I'm seeing in the remarks about Studio 60 is that people watch the first few episodes where Sorkin is doing a lot of setup, and they are not willing to see where he is going with it, so they bail.
I, on the other hand, was interested in seeing what Matthew Perry and Brad Whitfield and Timothy Busfield were going to do on the show, and that kept my interest through the parts that I wasn't sure were working so much.
Meanwhile, D L Hughley, Sarah Paulson, Nathan Corddry, Amanda Peet, and Ayda Field have also turned some fine performances. So I'm hooked now. I have to watch.
I can't help thinking about:
1) how bad some parts of Babylon 5 seemed to be, until I re-watched parts of it in Season Three, once I was more familiar with the characters and the whole setup of the B5 universe. The weak parts were still weak, but stuff didn't seem nearly as bad. Part of it was, B5 had a different way of doing things than other shows (e.g. Trek) and it took a little bit to get used to it. But I stuck it out. And boy, howdy, did that pay off -- especially watching the extraordinary performance over five years by Andreas Katsulas, who got the role of a lifetime on that show.
2) how some of us hung in with Firefly, just because it was Joss, even though the show was being aired every which way, and how so many people have discovered it and loved it while watching it via the DVD set, where they can see it in order, but also, watch more than one epsiode at a time, thus making it easier to see where things are going.
I watched Buffy as it aired. I didn't care so much for Season Four. But a friend of mine tells me, apparently a lot of fans who watched Buffy on DVDs really like Season Four. It's their favorite season. (Note also that she watched B5 in daily syndication and hated it, while I watched as it aired and could barely wait for the next week's episode to see what new thing would be revealed.)
The way you feel about a show can change drastically, depending on how you experience it. Even with the same person, some shows are better when you see them all at once, some better when you have to wait for that new episode. And there's no way to tell at first glance which way will be best for you.
I think a lot of people don't take this into account when judging whether a show is 'any good' or not. And certainly with the way TV ratings are set up, there is no way for them to record the people who have just watched X many episodes in a row and are now caught up and crazy about the show.
Your thoughts?
Jan