Watching Studio60

As feared, the Broadway stagehands strike has indeed postponed the official opening of The Farnsworth Invention, Aaron Sorkin’s new play about the origins of television. The show has been in previews for weeks, and was supposed to have its big opening night last night, Wednesday, November 14.

Now? Who knows. The fact that Broadway producers feel the effects of closed theaters much faster than TV and movie producers do with downed shows may help move things along. At issue is the number of stagehands that must be hired for any play or musical. Currently, the union sets that number at four, whether the production needs them or not. Producers would like to have the flexibility to hire however many stagehands they darn well please. The union also wants a raise.

Doesn’t this sound like the sort of thing that would have made a great Cal subplot on Studio 60 — having to explain to Danny that the stagehands union requires them to hire a bunch of guys they don’t need? I can hear Timothy Busfield rattling off the rules right now, with that sort of resigned sarcasm.

Their theater may be dark, but the Farnsworth cast (that’s the whole enormous bunch above) seems to be taking things in stride. A cute item in New York Magazine tells of cast members walking the picket line on their in support of their stagehands Wednesday, and swigging champagne in honor of their not-happening opening. “Because what do you do when your show’s not running? You drink.”

And do lunch. In a New York Times profile, Alexandra Wilson, a young actress who was to have made (and surely will make eventually) her fairy-tale Broadway debut with Farnsworth, reports that “On Saturday [the strike's first day] Aaron Sorkin took everyone out to lunch. Saturday felt like a snow day, but now it just feels weird.”

So it looks like the Writers Guild is going to go on strike, throwing TV into turmoil. Late-night talk shows and daytime soaps will be the first to suffer, but if this thing stretches into the New Year, it’s going to get hard for people who enjoy scripted entertainment to find much worth watching. Any chance NBC will put on some Studio 60 re-runs to fill all the empty time they’re going to have? No? Alright, then. We have our DVDs to keep us amused.

In reading about the upcoming labor unpleasantness, it’s hard not to think about what a really great plot this would have been for a Studio 60 arc. Basically, we’re talking about Matt striking against Danny, right? Granted, there aren’t a lot of show-within-a-show writers to walk out with him, but what would the show do in the meantime? Improv theater?

There’s lots of stories of the ripple effect these sorts of union actions have on everyone associated with the entertainment business, and Sorkin might be able to do a pretty powerful job of telling them. You’ve got Jack to articulate the network’s position; Matt to express the conflict of someone who lives to write but also requires respect, which in this particular venue equals money; lower-level writers like Lucy and Darius who don’t stand to get a windfall from a new contract but stand to lose their livelihood if a strike wears on; and lots of friends and loved ones and little guys caught in the middle, crossing picket lines or losing their own jobs and businesses as Hollywood shuts down.

I have my own very small story about the far-reaching effects of a strike. The last time the writers walked, in 1988, I was a writing a column for a magazine in the Los Angeles area. Before moving to the East Coast that August, I turned in my final freelance article, a rundown of the upcoming TV season … which never happened, at least not on schedule. Publication of that column never happened, and neither did my paycheck for that piece of writing. It’s hardly on a par with people losing their houses due to loss of entertainment revenue, but it gave me an excuse to buy the T-shirt above when all the nastiness was over. (Typed on the paper in the typewriter there is, “Let’s Do Lunch Again.”)

If you have some thoughts on the strike, some past experience with entertainment union actions, or maybe some great fan fiction about a strike on Studio 60, share it in the comments.

_{Photo by Terri Mauro}

Studio 60, NBC, writer’s strike

When the first reports starting coming out about Nielsen’s new “live plus seven” ratings, and the boost they’ve given to the numbers for Journeyman, struggling new occupant of Studio 60’s old spot, it made me wonder: Would this kind of appreciation have helped Sorkin’s show?

Journeyman picked up a million extra viewers in this revised estimate, making it one of the top beneficiaries, certainly among new shows. Does this mean that Monday at 10 p.m. is a hard time for many folks to catch a show live? Looks like it: According to a Media Life Magazine report from last November, “The live-plus-seven-day rating for NBC’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is 136 percent higher than its live rating in DVR homes.” That sounds like a pretty hefty ratings boost to me.

Would it have been enough to save the show? This blogger thinks so, and I’d like to believe it, too. But I don’t think it was just ratings that killed Studio 60, but the groundswell of critical lambasting and mockery it received, combined, probably, with its cost. Still, it would have been nice to have those numbers included and appreciated, and if they kept up this high throughout the season, who knows, maybe NBC would have given it some extra time.

What I’m really going to take away from this, though, is the feeling that if you really love a show, and you want it to succeed, and it’s struggling, and especially if you have a Nielsen box, for goodness sake, watch that puppy live. Record it if you must, for future rewatches and adoration, but make the time commitment to view it when it airs and talk it up right after. Barring a schedule snafu or night job, our enthusiasm for something as great as Studio 60 should probably make it impossible to wait a second more than one week to see what’s next.

If your audience is 136 percent more likely to watch your show sometime, later, whenever it’s convenient, instead of right when delivered, maybe that’s not necessarily such a good sign.

_{Photo of DVR remote by Terri Mauro}

Studio 60, NBC, DVR, Journeyman

Okay, underwear designed by the former Josh Lyman. But still!

Normally, a purchase of fancy underwear from a place like Frederick’s of Hollywood couldn’t be said to support anything but the body within. But Clothes Off Our Backs, the auction site to benefit children’s charities founded by Bradley Whitford (Studio 60’s Danny) and his wife, Jane Kaczmarek, is giving online buyers a chance to make frilly underthings philanthropic.

From now through November 5, nearly two dozen corsets will be on the auction block for charities like America’s Second Harvest, the Art of Elysium, World Education, and autism research. Among the offerings is the red number pictured here, designed by Whitford and Kaczmarek themselves. It’s described as “a regal corset in elegantly patterned snakeskin silk in fuchsia and chartreuse. Accented with pleating at the bust, hem and back, and finished with a halter neckline.”

There are currently no bids, but you have to start at $300 to open.

Also still awaiting their opening bids as of this writing are corsets designed by Ashley Olsen, Kidada Jones, Eva LaRue, Aisha Tyler, Ginnifer Goodwin, Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Patricia Arquette, Jeremy Piven, Ashlee Simpson and Mandy Moore.

Already garnering offers in the $300-plus range are Fergie, Debra Messing, Andy Garcia, Virginia Madsen, Kim Kardashian, Maria Menounos, Sophia Bush, Gabrielle Union and Nicky Hilton.

Surely some Whitford fan’s got a few hundred bucks hanging around to put a lacey unmentionable he helped designed into that company. Who’s got $300? My stock’s tied up in cheap undershirts and sports bras, or I’d totally pitch in.

Studio 60, NBC, Bradley Whitford, Jane Kaczmarek, Clothes Off Our Backs

That Steven Weber is one busy dude. The erstwhile Jack Rudolph on Studio 60 has a guest-starring role coming up on Brothers & Sisters. He’s got a Lifetime movie, More of Me, co-starring Molly Shannon as a woman who splits herself into three, coming up on November 17. He’s “a spewer of hyperbolic, liberal-leaning outrage” in a Huffington Post blog. And now, once again, he’s set to be a sit-com star.

According to TVGuide.com, Weber has been tapped to play the lead role in NBC’s Zip, about, to quote, “a Beverly Hills hanger-on who, with a colorful cast of accomplices, concocts one scheme after another to ‘make it big’ and provide for his three kids.” Wow. Is it just me, or does that sound terrifically unpromising? Sounds like something Jordan would make a joke about.

TV Squad reports that this is not the first time around for Zip, which was previously rejected by NBC as a pilot with a different cast. I think they made the right choice the first time around.

Weber has done the sit-com thing before, with Wings and Cursed. I don’t know that I’d say he should never do the sit-com thing again. But more recently, he’s been doing such a great job in more dramatic roles, with Studio 60 and Once and Again before that. I’m looking forward to see what he can do opposite Rachel Griffiths in Brothers & Sisters. A silly sit-com with a weak-sounding premise? Not so much. But maybe he’ll make it work.

Studio 60, NBC, Steven Weber

So I got an e-mail from BarnesandNoble.com yesterday informing me that my Studio 60 DVDs are delayed, and will really be shipping out any old minute now over the next five business days. Sigh.

Fortunately, I found a tiny bit of solace on YouTube, on which Warner Home Video has posted a minute or so of the pilot episode with commentary by Sorkin and Schlamme (see above, or click here). They’re talking about the set, and the fact that cast members were willing to come and just mill around to make it look like the real backstage of the show-within-a-show. Actually, didn’t I hear just about exactly that same commentary on the pilot episode of The West Wing? Sounds like a good excuse to get those discs out. While I wait.

In other DVD-related news, here’s word on an additional special feature: TV on DVD Buzz reports that, in addition to the commentary exerpted above, there’s a behind-the-scenes documentary entitled “The Evolution of Studio 60.” What kind of evolution, I wonder, and measured at what point? I mean, is it the evolution of the show from idea to completion? From hyped hit to perceived disaster? From entertainment satire to romantic comedy? There’s lots of evolution to be looked back on, you know? I’d probably enjoy watching something early and hopeful, but it’s going to seem a little sad, too, if it’s oblivious to the eventual outcome.

It’s a big Sorkin week this week, with The Farnsworth Invention opening on Broadway this past Monday for previews. According to an item in the New York Observer, the playwright got a standing ovation on opening night. I’ll gladly give him one myself when that S60 set gets here. If it gets here. Ever.

Studio 60, NBC, DVD, Aaron Sorkin, Thomas Schlamme

There was a time, not so very long ago, when you could still go on NBC.com and find some material on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Sure, the section of the site dedicated to the show had been stripped down some since cancellation. Most of the video links led to an ad for the DVD set. The photo section was disorganized and poorly labeled. And the entry page seemed to be serving as an ad for Saturday Night Live as much as S60. But at least it was there, bearing witness to the fact that at one time, on NBC, there was a show featuring those actors and that writer and that storyline and that title.

Not anymore.

The Studio 60 pages are gone, cancelled, wiped from the face of the Web. Go ahead, click here and see. Or click on that “NBC Official Site” in my blogroll — it worked when I put it there, honest. Or Google “Studio 60 NBC” and click on the link for the NBC site. “We’re sorry. The file you have requested is no longer available.” That’s what you’ll see, before the page redirects to NBC.com proper.

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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

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

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?

_{Photo: ABC.com}

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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I saw this potential casting nightmare in a Liz Smith column this morning, and all I can say is, no. Just … no.

“Matthew Perry is said to be ‘attached’ to an NBC sitcom tentatively titled Occasional Wife, about a guy who persuades a young woman — ‘a wacky artist’ — to pretend to be his wife, the better for his career. … Some high-ups at NBC think Britney Spears has the right quality to play the free-spirited girl who helps Perry put over his charade.”

So apparently, by “free-spirited,” they mean “a complete train-wreck.” I’m not unsympathetic to Spears, and I hope that one day she will get the help she needs and be able to resume some sort of a career. But a sit-com? Now? With an actor I’d like to see stay on TV for more than one season? In a show that doesn’t turn his career into a train-wreck, too? No, no, no.

This sounds like a stunt somebody would pitch to Jordan, and she would dismiss it with a withering reply. May somebody in the NBC hierarchy have the good sense to do the same.

Studio 60, NBC, Matthew Perry, Britney Spears

Bradley Whitford will appear on tonight’s edition of Living With Ed on HGTV at 10:30 p.m., and again tomorrow at 2:30 a.m. Set those TiVos!

The “reality green show” stars actor and environmental activist Ed Begley Jr., described by HGTV as “the greenest man in Tinsel Town,” and his wife, Rachelle. Here’s the description from the Living With Ed site for the Whitford portion of tonight’s episode, “West Wing Actor Sees Green”:

… Soon the time comes and the Begleys had to be on their way, they have Bradley Whitford stopping by their home. Ed and Rachelle are going to teach Bradley how to be green.

The Begleys get home and Bradley is there. Bradley and Ed have done a lot of work together in the past. Bradley enters the house and right away Ed begins to take him on a grand tour. Showing him the compact florescent lights, the energy star thermostat, his energy star dishwasher, and also his compost. Bradley is kind of shocked with how much Ed actually does to be green. Ed is overexcited to show Bradley everything he has; he even lets Bradley take a spin in his new electric truck.

Bradley was nice enough to even get Ed a brand new computer chair made up of 100 % recycled materials. Bradley feels deep down that Ed doesn’t really want to get rid of his old computer chair from the ‘70s, but he’s trying to persuade him that it’ll be OK.

Has anyone out there ever watched this show? I watch House Hunters on HGTV at 10 p.m. lots of times, but must never have hit it on a night when Ed’s holding forth.

_{Photo: HGTV.com}

Studio 60, NBC, Living With Ed, HGTV, Bradley Whitford

He’s been in every previous Aaron Sorkin production (most notably as Jeremy on Sports Night and Will on The West Wing), but Joshua Malina never did turn up on Studio 60, though I kept looking for him. So where the heck was he?

Interviewer John Kubicek asks that question for us in an article on Buddy TV. Here’s the portion of the interview, with questions in bold and Malina’s answers following.

“You also mentioned Aaron Sorkin earlier, and I think anyone who appreciates quality television knows that he is responsible for probably two of the greatest shows of the last 10 years, if not ever.

“My money, he is the guy, I don’t think it gets any better.

“Exactly. And now, you appeared in everything he did, but you didn’t show up in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. And I’m just wondering, why not?

“I know, and I’m terribly sad that a record is broken. It’s true, actually. It certainly wasn’t for lack of trying, to be perfectly candid, I lobbied him hard. But alas, no, I didn’t make it, I would’ve done a cross in the background.

“Just to keep it going.

“Yes, well, no. The truth is, actually, I don’t really care about the streak or the record or whatever. I actually love his writing, and we’re good friends, I couldn’t be more fond of him personally, so I want to be in everything he does, just because I think everything he does is great, so I want to be part of it one way or another. But I couldn’t wheedle my way onto this one.”

The rest of the interview is worth checking out for news on Malina’s new show, Big Shots; the fate of Celebrity Poker Showdown; and an idea on how ABC can atone for the death of Sports Night.

Studio 60, NBC, Joshua Malina