Watching Studio60

According to the More4 site, “The Disaster Show” was the episode shown on Thursday in the U.K.; it originally aired in May 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

For those of us who saw “The Disaster Show” six months ago, and are West Wing fans, this one should still be easy to remember. It’s the one on which the great Allison Janney appeared as the guest-host of the show-within-a-show, and renewed all that wonderful chemistry with Timothy Busfield that we remember so fondly from when she worked at the White House and he was a member of the press.

Janney, playing herself, has picked a bad night to host the show: The prop and cue-card guys are on strike, so pretty much everything that can possibly go wrong? Does. Cal is a continuously reassuring presence, in the way that the Titanic employee telling you that the ship’s really just making some minor adjustments would be. He’s delivering a good line to us, the viewers, too, distracting us with charm and wit so that maybe we won’t notice that three of the leads are completely missing from the episode.

That’s right — no Danny. No Matt. No Jordan. They’re mentioned, they’re somewhere around, maybe, but not anywhere the camera is. I’ve never heard any explanation for why these three actors were missing; does anybody know? It made for kind of an off-kilter episode, but that was kind of the point, perhaps. Everything’s supposed to look wrong, after all.

With the major players MIA, there’s some sub-plot goodness for Simon and Tom, who plan a trip to Hawaii with their girlfriends. Tom’s got Lucy, and Simon’s got … a problem, since his girlfriend dumped him. He manages to find a replacement for the trip just as his girlfriend decides to take him back. Oh, the wacky hijinks!

The best parts of the episode, though, are the ones in which Allison Janney pays Aaron Sorkin back for her years of great West Wing scripts by making an absolute fool of herself, repeatedly. And conveniently enough, somebody has distilled all those Janney scenes into one YouTube presentation, below or at this link. Enjoy!

Studio 60, NBC, The Disaster Show, Allison Janney, Timothy Busfield