Watching Studio60

We’re taking a second look at “4 A.M. Miracle,” the sixteenth episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Following up on yesterday’s review, here’s a recap of the episode. Still to come: memorable lines from the episode, and five questions about it.

It’s 10 o’clock at night, and a lawyer who’s seriously into racking up billable hours is questioning Danny about an employee harrassment situation that happened when he wasn’t even with the show. A female writer is suing NBS claiming that she was fired from Studio 60 for not being one of the boys. As opposed to being fired for being a bad writer, which is Danny’s take, even though, as he’s pointed out a bunch of times during their conversation, he wasn’t there.

Matt’s there, at 10 o’clock at night, and the writers are there. Yet there are no good sketch ideas happening between them. Matt’s counting on a 4 a.m. miracle, a brilliant inspiration that will dawn when sleep deprivation removes their internal sensors. He and Suzanne banter a bit about ideas and work schedules and making fun of soft porn, and just as he’s sharing his fantasy of a woman in a business suit with glasses, who should walk in but Mary Tate, the lawyer who was talking to Matt and the image of Matt’s naughty businesswoman. If Suzanne and Danny hadn’t seen her, it would’ve been a pretty good bet she was another drug-induced phantom.

But she’s not, and Jordan’s given her permission to check out the writers room as part of her research, and so Matt brings her down. He and the writers all confirm that the sue-er was fired because she was a bad writer — even though none of them was there, either — and engage Lucy in some mock sexual harrassment. Matt leaves them to come up with new sketches, and goes back upstairs.

Danny’s there to berate him about the lack of sketches, and urge him to reconsider something called “Jason the Mason,” but Matt’s counting on a miracle. And counting the minutes ’til Harriet gets back from Luke’s set. He’s bugged that she’s late, even though there’s nothing for her to rehearse — because, of course, she’s with Luke. Danny reminds him that when they came back to the show, Matt promised working with Harriet wouldn’t be a problem. Ha! As if.

Apparently, Harriet’s got a bit of a problem working with Luke, because he’s taking some poetic license with her character, Anita Pallenberg, and depicting her as guilty of manslaughter when in real life she was cleared of those charges. Harriet argues, Luke overrules, they set up the shot again, but in the meantime, Danny calls. He wants her to please make nice to Matt so that they can, like, have a show this week, and although Harriet disavows that responsibility, she understands the weight of it.

Jordan’s carrying some extra weight, too, over and above the baby bump. It’s a virtual baby, one with a diaper sensor and a feeding sensor and a habit of crying if you stick it in your handbag. When Danny ridicules the idea, Jordan bets him a hundred bucks he can’t keep the baby alive through the night. He takes that action, but you just know he’s going down.

Back on the set of Luke’s Rolling Stones movie, Harriet’s Anita again hands over a gun with a bullet in it, telling her victim it’s not loaded and challenging him to play Russian Roulette, leading to him blowing out his brains, or at least getting lots of fake blood on her. Harriet keeps screwing up, and they keep trying again, and then she’s arguing about the scene again with Luke. He finally figures out it’s about something else, and of course that something else is Matt. She says they had a terrible fight, and she said terrible things to him, and Luke figures out it was “that night you came over to my house.” And makes her do the hated scene again.

Matt’s freaking out over single-cell parameciums or some such, and apparently it’s not 4 a.m. yet because no miracles are happening. Mary comes back from the writers room and does that Martha O’Dell thing of knowing more than she reasonably might about relationships between Matt and Ricky and Ron, and Matt and Harriet. In fact, as Matt and Mary sit drinking vodka and talking about how breaking NBS’s rule about fraternizing has caused Matt to be completely unable to work without Harriet, it might be a good idea for Matt to bring Suzanne in to confirm that Mary’s there, ’cause she’s talking like a figment now.

That other pair of rule-breakers, Jordan and Danny, are having a peaceful moment in Danny’s office — Jordan sleeping on the couch, Danny working — when the fake baby starts to cry. He takes the baby downstairs and asks Tom and Simon to watch it, which turns out to be a big mistake, because first they throw it on the floor, and then they use it to try out the new fake guillotine Cal’s got from props. The fake guillotine neatly beheads the fake baby, and when Danny sees what’s happened, he demands that Cal get props to fix it. The baby, not the guillotine, although obviously that needs some work, too.

After another batch o’ takes, Luke asks Harriet what happened, and she gives him way more information about Matt than he wanted. Few more takes, and Harriet apologizes, but Luke’s had it. He thinks she’s telling him all this so he’ll break up with her, which he obligingly does. He calls Matt names, and she says she can’t let him do that, because Matt would never let anybody do that to her.

And as if to prove it, Matt’s reading the deposition now in the sexual harrassment case, and seeing that one of the issues is a conversation in the writer’s room in which all the guys talked about “the different ways they might have intercourse with Harriet Hayes.” That gets him about as riled as you’d expect, and he insists that would never happen in a writers room he ran. Still, it seems like he’ll still be a witness for the defense, though why he wouldn’t want to throw Ricky and Ron under a bus, I have no idea.

Simon almost throws himself under the bus by admitting he slept with the litigious writer, but it turns out the woman he’s remembering is someone else. Mary takes off, but not before giving Matt her card and suggesting he ask her out. It’s clear he’s got to shake Harriet off first, though, even if Danny thinks he’s nuts for turning Mary down. They have a discussion of his writing problems, and Matt admits he never realized how much he counted on Harriet coming up to his office, which she doesn’t anymore.

Cal brings the baby back to Danny, and it looks all better. Danny wakes Jordan up and brags a little about his superior daddy skills … until the baby’s head boings off and its eyes pop out and the full extent of the prop department’s joke on him is apparent. Lucky thing Jordan’s crazy about him.

And, as we knew all along, Harriet really is crazy about Matt, too. ‘Cause just as he’s standing out on his balcony looking like he might throw himself over the edge, she turns up, looking a little spooked by her experience with Luke but willing, once again, to help Matt get unstuck. Must be 4 a.m.

Studio 60, NBC, 4 A.M. Miracle, recap