Watching Studio60

Hey, there’s finally a trailer out for Charlie Wilson’s War, the upcoming movie written by Aaron Sorkin, directed by Mike Nichols, and starring Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman as a congressman, a socialite and a CIA agent who conspire to arm Afghans in the wake of the 1979 Soviet invasion. Check it out above or on the YouTube site.

Well, okay, at the moment, it’s not so much a “trailer” as “a segment of Entertainment Tonight that someone recorded and put on YouTube.” Despite the presence of prattly ET commentary, there’s still plenty of opportunity to watch Hanks and Roberts wrap their best Texas accents around Sorkin’s dialog. Looks like plenty of the zingy kind of lines we know and love, putting a sarcastic spin on political process.

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Happy birthday number 48 today to Bradley Whitford, who played producer Danny Tripp on Studio 60. Whitford was born on this day in 1959 in Madison, Wisconsin, making him three months and ten days younger than myself.

Looking for a way to honor the former Josh Lyman on his special day? Here’s one possibility: Bid on something at Clothes Off Our Back, the site he founded with wife Jane Kaczmarek to raise funds for children’s charities. Fellow celebrities donate clothing items to be auctioned, ranging from award show finery to autographed accessories. There are a number of auctions on the site that are closing today or tomorrow, so it’s the perfect time to swoop in and pick up something special. Your options:

• 6th Annual Emmy Auction (ends tomorrow)
• Teen Choice Awards Auction (ends tomorrow)
• Little Black Dress Celebrity Dress Auction (ends today)
• Celebrity Signed Cuffs and Wallets (ends tomorrow)
• MTV Video Music Awards Auction (ends tomorrow)
• Gift Bags and Celebrity Swag (ends tomorrow)

According to the site, proceeds go to “America’s Second Harvest (the nation’s largest charitable hunger-relief organization), The Art of Elysium (which enriches the lives of artist and critically ill children), World Education (focusing on girls’ scholarship programs in Africa) and autism research.”

And if E! Online is to be believed, Kaczmarek personally tucks each auction-bought garment into pretty tissue paper so that whoever bought those gowns and shoes and bow ties will get a pretty package.

Of course, if you don’t have a couple of hundred or thousand to drop on some celebrity’s cast-offs, you can also buy logo beanies and scarves on the Clothes Off Our Back site.

Or just honor the birthday boy by hunkering down with your West Wing DVDs and watching some of his greatest hits. Have to wait ’til next week to do the Studio 60 marathon, though.

Studio 60, NBC, Bradley Whitford, Jane Kaczmarek

Can we start talking about a “Studio 60 curse”?

Not a curse on the cast. It’s too early to tell if all these jobs they’re getting post S60 will be successful or not, but since the show had a short run and none of them are as identified with it as, say, the Seinfeld cast was with that show, there shouldn’t be any lingering doom. Besides, no one is trying to headline a show of his or her own, and that’s where the problems usually come in.

No, what I’m talking about here is a curse on the timeslot.

Studio 60’s ratings drop got it booted midseason last year for a round of The Black Donnellys, which flopped. Studio 60 came back but didn’t get the ratings NBC wanted either, so it was cancelled. And how is NBC’s new hope for that 10 p.m. Monday timeslot doing? Why, not so very well either. Ratings for Journeyman weren’t great starting off, and have gotten less great from there.

Now, I have nothing personally against Journeyman, although it sure sounds a whole lot like a Quantum Leap rip-off. My husband has been watching it and enjoying it, and I’m sorry to have to tell him that he shouldn’t get too attached. I’m sure the show’s cast and crew are working hard and getting hopes up and trusting NBC to keep the faith.

Nonetheless, I wish the show a swift and painful death.

Ditto the show that follows it in the timeslot. And the show that follows that. I’m hoping nothing does well for NBC at 10 p.m. Mondays for a long, long time. The “Studio 60 curse” has a nice ring to it.

Maybe NBC can have Journeyman go back in time and reverse that ill-fated cancellation decision.

Studio 60, NBC, Journeyman

Here’s where you’ll be seeing some of your Studio 60 favorites in upcoming TV shows and movies:

Sarah Paulson (Harriet) nabbed a major role in Will Eisner’s The Spirit, a comic-book movie directed by Frank Miller. Amid a cast of femme fatales played by Scarlett Johansson, Eva Mendes, Paz Vega and Jaime King, Paulson will play the true love of the film’s titular hero (played by Gabriel Macht), who comes back from the dead to fight crime. Her character is also the daughter of the police commissioner, and seems likely to be in frequent peril, but we’ll have to wait until the film comes out in 2009 to find out.

Bradley Whitford (Danny) will be appearing in a four-hour miniseries about global warming, according to a report in Variety. Looks like this is one of his weaselly bad-guy roles — he plays an oil-industry lobbyist opposite Neve Campbell as an oil-company worker who’s in clandestine cahoots with (gasp!) environmentalists. No indication of when, or on what network, it will turn up.

Merritt Wever (Suzanne) has a small but pivotal role in Michael Clayton, the legal drama starring George Clooney that opens nationwide in the U.S. this weekend. She’s also in Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, which debuts October 19.

Steven Weber (Jack) will appear as a love interest for Rachel Griffiths’ Sarah in Brothers & Sisters, ABC’s Sunday night family drama (and the other show I blog about for 451 Press, conveniently enough). His character, Graham Finch, will start out as a consultant for the Walker family business and then apparently moves on to personal consulting for Sarah, who’s recently separated from her husband. According to TV Guide’s Ausiello Report, Weber’s character may Have a Secret. Now that he’s in with the Walkers, though, he’ll find that secrets don’t stay secret for very long. (And if that’s not enough to get you to try Brothers & Sisters, did I mention that Rob Lowe stars as a senator? A Republican senator, okay, but he still gets lots of West Wing-y speeches.)

Studio 60, NBC, Sarah Paulson, Bradley Whitford, Steven Weber, Merritt Wever

There used to be a forum on the Television Without Pity site titled something like “You know you’re watching too much The West Wing when …” I had one of those moments yesterday when I saw this headline go by on my blog reader: “Naming trends: out of 20 boys, there are five Joshes and four Sams.”

And I immediately thought, “Of course! People were naming their children after Josh Lyman and Sam Seaborn!”

It turned out the story in question was about a school class in New Zealand with a preponderance of Joshuas and Samuels. I don’t know if The West Wing was big in New Zealand, and it doesn’t specify the age of the boys, although they look about right to have been conceived during the show’s run. But it seems like such a sweet coincidence, doesn’t it?

Out of curiosity, I checked the Social Security Administration’s listing of popular U.S. baby names, and while “Joshua” has been in the top 5 for the past 15 years, “Samuel” has been in the 20s, and “Josh” and “Sam” as names all by themselves were well down into the multiple hundreds.

Interestingly, “Matthew” and “Daniel” are both top-ten names, although we probably can’t claim those for Studio 60 at least until the 2007 tallies are out. “Danny” is back down in the over-100s, though, and “Matt” as a freestanding name has apparently not been in the top 1,000 for the past 15 years.

Giving it something in common with “Harriet.” Are those two meant to be, or what?

_{Photo: NBC.com}

Studio 60, The West Wing, NBC

According to the More4 site, “The Christmas Show” was the episode broadcast last night in the U.K.; it originally aired last December in the U.S. For those who want to read what was written about this episode when it was first broadcast, here are links to reviews, recaps and forum discussions on:

• Entertainment Weekly
• TV Squad
• Television Without Pity (recap)
• Television Without Pity (forum - R/O)
• Studio 60 Guide

To refresh your memory, “The Christmas Show” is the one where Matt wanted a Christmas show but the writing staff took delight in shooting down every holiday tradition; Cal tried to make snow out of coconuts; Harriet got a role in Luke’s Rolling Stones movie; Jack decided to take on the FCC over a soldier’s battlefield expletive; New Orleans musicians played; and Danny told Jordan he’s coming for her.

Danny’s declaration, and the phone calls and faxes that followed, struck some critics as stalker-ish behavior. I don’t know; I thought it was kind of cute. But I do think that the pregnancy storyline, brought on by necessity due to Peet’s pregnancy, changed the course of Jordan’s character from not entirely trustworthy corporate shark to sympathetic and embattled romantic heroine.

And me? I’m okay with that. I thought Jordan and Danny made a cute couple, and for all their bantering and stalking and fake-baby breaking, a more mature counterpart to Matt and Harriet’s endless on-and-off dance. I wonder, though, what the show would have looked like if Jordan had stayed childless and focused on network politics. What do you think — better? worse? Definitely different. Jordan and Danny’s romance feels to me like maybe a Season 2 plotline that got moved up, fast.

Studio 60, NBC, The Christmas Show

Unless there’s a great sweep of cult interest in Studio 60 sometime in the near future (and I’m up for that, how ’bout you?), it’s probably just a pipe dream to think about a movie version of the show. It would be a pretty neat fit, though, wouldn’t it? Great cast and writing, beautiful production values, two romantic-comedy-ready couples. I’d line up at the multiplex for that, and I’d bring a friend.

We’re lucky that, despite the fact that we got just one season, there was some resolution at the end. But that doesn’t mean there’s not some fuel for a feature-length plot. Which would you choose: Danny and Jordan juggling parenting and network domination? Matt and Harriet finally finding a way to stay together for more than five minutes? Jack jousting against censors on the one hand and the creative types who keep stirring the censors up on the other? Everyone rallying to keep the show-within-the-show from imminent cancellation?

The creator of the YouTube video below picked a Danny-Jordan angle with a trailer for “Coming for You,” which conveniently accommodates snippets of movie-announcer-voice from other sources. Make your own pitch in the comments.

Studio 60, NBC

Today continues a recurring feature for this blog: brief profiles of Studio 60 cast members. I’m gathering these on a page for easy reference, but introducing them one at a time here.

Name: Amanda Peet
S60 Role: NBS president Jordan McDeere
Birthdate: Born January 11, 1972, in New York City
Stats: 5 feet 8 inches tall; married to David Benioff since 2006; one child
Best Known As: The dental assistant turned aspiring hitwoman opposite Matthew Perry and Bruce Willis in The Whole Nine Yards and The Whole Ten Yards
Other Notable Roles: Diane Keaton’s daughter and Jack Nicholson’s initial love interest in Something’s Gotta Give; one of various identities in Identity; Jack in the TV series Jack and Jill, which also featured S60 co-star Sarah Paulson
Memorable Moment on YouTube: Emergency room proposal
Sites to See: + IMDb listing + Wikipedia + Amanda Essence

What would you add to this list? Share your favorite Amanda Peet roles and info in the comments.

_{Photo: NBC.com}

Studio 60, NBC, Amanda Peet, Jordan McDeere

Tonight at 8 p.m. marks the debut of Pushing Daisies, a show that sounds really quite a bit too quirky for its own good. But it’s also a show with a Studio 60 connection in the person of Kristin Chenowith, the sometime Sorkin sweetie who was allegedly the model for Harriet Hayes.

Chenowith — who also appeared on The West Wing, though after Sorkin’s tenure, as PR maven Annabeth Schott — stars as pie-shop waitress Olive Snook in the fantasy/detective series, in which a young man has the power to bring people back from the dead just by touching them, but if he touches them again they go back to being dead.

That’s convenient when he’s helping a PI solve murder cases by asking the briefly re-animated corpse whodunnit, but not so convenient when he brings the love of his life back around and can’t touch her again lest he kill her for good.

I don’t know. I’m usually up for a good offbeat piece of business. But this one sounds like it’s being offbeat just for the sake of being offbeat, and that rarely comes to good. I may give it a chance due to Chenowith’s involvement, but it better deliver something worthwhile, quick.

I notice that ABC’s Pushing Daisies site has a feature called “Plant-a-Daisy” in which you can enter the name of someone who has died and write one question you’d ask. Maybe we should all write in Studio 60 and say that we’d ask for one more darn season. Just how good is this guy at bringing stuff back to life, anyway?

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Studio 60, NBC, Pushing Daisies, ABC, Kristin Chenowith

Tickets went on sale yesterday for The Farnsworth Invention, Aaron Sorkin’s second foray onto the Broadway stage (the first being A Few Good Men, more than a few years ago.) If you’re close enough to New York City to go see the thing, ticket prices range from $101.50 to $51.50, with the top price being an Orchestra seat for an evening performance or Saturday matinee after November 14, and the bottom price being the back of the Mezzanine on a Wednesday matinee during previews. According to the blog NewYorkology, there are also last-minute $26.50 tickets available if you want to stand or can prove you’re a student.

Previews start October 15 at the Music Box Theatre, 239 West 45th Street.

The play looks at the beginnings of television, and specifically the clash between Philo T. Farnsworth and David Sarnoff, chairman of RCA, to be known as inventor of the medium. The promotional video-bit above is also on the website for the play, which has gotten a facelift recently but still appears to lack some content, such as bios for anybody other than the major players. For now you can read about stars Hank Azaria (Sarnoff) and Jimmi Simpson (Farnsworth), as well as Sorkin and directer Des McAnuff. You can also read up on showtimes and ticket prices, and order the tickets.

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Most of the networks’ new shows have now premiered. Have you seen anything you’re crazy about yet among the fresh offerings?

I did a little sampling last week. The first-but-really-kinda-second episode of Private Practice is still hanging out on my DVR. It’s great in theory to be able to record things that are inconveniently scheduled and reserve them for later viewing, but I have a lot of trouble then actually finding the time to view. And the longer I wait, the less enthusiastic I am about watching. Especially if I’ve read reviews that were none too pleasant.

But I’ll watch Addison and her new crew one of these days, and I’ll watch the Grey’s Anatomy premiere that’s keeping it company. (I hope they’re not fraternizing there on my hard drive. Could get a nasty virus.) Two shows I did catch up with this week in actual real time were Back to You and Dirty Sexy Money.

I watched Back to You mostly to see how Ayda Field, Studio 60’s Jeannie, did in her part as weather girl. Excuse me, bimbo weather girl, because surely that is written into the character description somewhere. Called on to act mostly with her chest, Field (pictured above with co-star Fred Willard) did a respectable job. It ain’t Sorkin, but I bet it’s easier to get those lines memorized. I’m not going to rush to watch it again, but if I find myself with work to put off around 8 p.m., I might tune it in.

I watched Dirty Sexy Money mostly to see how Peter Krause, another Sorkin stalwart from Sports Night, would do in his new gig. Plus, the show shares some creative DNA with Brothers & Sisters, another show I blog about, and I wanted to see if this was worth losing Greg Berlanti for. Krause was his usual winkingly charming self, and I thought Donald Sutherland did a masterful job as a man of means and menace. But the rest of the cast? Ugh. Critics blasted Studio 60 for having unlikeable characters, and now they’re praising this thing? Fortunately, unlike Krause’s character, I can turn these folks off.

This week brings the debut of Pushing Daisies, a quirky number that’s also got a lot of critics singing its praises. To tell you the truth, I’m a little afraid to watch it. Either I’ll love it, and it will bomb and disappear; or I’ll hate it, and it will be the Next Big Thing. Really, the way I’m feeling lately, producers might want to think about paying me not to love their shows. The things I get really excited about seem, more often than not, to have a short shelf life.

What have you been watching, and loving, or hating? Share in the comments.

_{Photo: Fox.com}