I have no idea why the programming geniuses at NBC decided now was the time to air two prime time TV shows about the behind-the-scenes turmoil of fictional shows clearly patterned after Saturday Night Live. After all, NBC insisted SNL executive producer Lorne Michaels slash his budget or face cancellation this season. Is that the kind of exciting backstage drama NBC wants to showcase?
In any event, of these two shows, 30 Rock, exec-produced by Michaels and created by and starring SNL's former head writer, Tina Fey, is so awful it's a wonder it ever got on the air. The premise: Fey plays the producer of a female-centric late night comedy show who is forced by a ruthless network exec to hire a volatile, possibly crazy, black comedian as the new star of her show. The conception of the comedian's character is seemingly based on Martin Lawrence's well-documented crackup of...what? Six, seven years ago? Pretty cutting edge stuff.
NBC's other SNL-based show is, of course, the heavily hyped new Aaron Sorkin drama Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip. I have been watching this one--the pilot was terrific, and it has a great cast. But each subsequent episode has been less interesting than the previous one, and some serious problems are arising.
For instance, we're told repeatedly that the character played by Sarah Paulson, as a cast member of the show-within-a show, is some sort of comic genius, that even with lame material, she can "make it work." But the glimpses we've seen of her performances reveal community theater-level comic chops. It makes you wonder if all the characters on the show are deluded, or just really stupid.
Similarly, the whole premise of the show seems phony to anyone with any knowledge of real-world TV production: Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford play two former scribes for the show who have since gone on to greater things, but circumstances pull them back in, and they're given free reign to do whatever they want. In the space of one week (!), they completely turn the show around, and it's a smash hit both commercially and critically.
Right.
First of all, anyone with knowledge of SNL history will remember the dreadful 1980 season, the first season after Lorne Michaels' initial departure. The show was nerly cancelled, but NBC (somewhat inexplicably) brought in certified comedy genius Michael O'Donoghue to run the thing. He was given carte blanche, at least initially, and his writing staff included the likes of Mitch Glazer and Terry Southern. But he was still saddled with a cast that was already in place, and still had to deal with network execs.
And the show still sucked.
In TV, noting gets turned around that fast. Yeah, I know Studio 60 is fiction, but it's fiction based, rather transparently, on a known entity, and I can't imagine why anybody would watch it unless they had some interest in, and knowledge of, the subject matter. Every episode seems to depart farther from any kind of reality, and rather than deepening, the characters seem to become less interesting as we go along. For now, I'm still watching, but I suspect that soon I'll "forget" an episode, and then another, and then...
As for the show that inspired all this, Saturday Night Live is in possibly the worst shape it's ever been in, a guest that refuses to leave, a festering sore, a vague annoyance. Simply put, there's no reason for it to exist anymore; with cable and the internet, there's a world of comedy out there, highbrow, lowbrow and in-between. Back in the seventies, SNL was a revelation to many of us, dispatches from another world, a glimpse at everything TV comedy could be. But it has become the mainstream, an embarrassing collection of stock characters that nobody cares about, and talented cast members who are only allowed to bloom once they leave the show. It's time has long ago passed, and it's impossible to care anymore, about the show or its fictional incarnations. Let it go, NBC.
