Watching Studio60

I watched the episode “The Harriet Dinner Part 1″ again last night, and though it’s never going to be one of my favorite outings, it was less painful than I anticipated.

I was booing when Tom lied to Lucy, especially since it was otherwise such an adorable scene. The Rolling Stones movie Harriet’s shooting with Luke looks pretty insufferable to me, as does the reality show that weasel Hallie is pitching so self-satisfiedly (though I’m glad to see Jordan has her snark back). Drunk Kim was cute, but I felt so sorry for Tom it was hard to enjoy it. And that Luke-inspired argument between Harriet and Matt was kinda brutal, especially since Matt was more or less blindsided. Not that he didn’t deserve it, necessarily, but this evening’s string-her-along behavior wasn’t significantly worse than the many examples of string-her-along behavior we’ve seen before, and I think he was rightly surprised that this made her go ballistic.

Still, I’ll put up with all of that for those scenes with Danny and Jordan up on the roof. I love those scenes. Danny apologized and said he’d stop bothering Jordan, and Jordan’s “Well … ” let slip that she’d maybe really rather he didn’t. She finally told him why she was rejecting his advances — believing he was only interested in her out of sympathy over her condition — and he told her she was wrong. They had a necessary discussion of their relationship at the same time Danny was seeking out silly ways to get them out of there, and beating up on an electrical cord he thought was a snake. They’re mostly back to bantering, after Jordan’s very serious conversation in the previous episode. I’m a sucker for banter, and I have a feeling Jordan is, too.

The other main plot in this two-parter is like an extended joke involving dangerous animals. And it does seem fairly unlikely that, in a situation like this, they would use poisonous snakes, and lose one, and send a ferret after it, and a coyote. But I’ll suspend disbelief because Timothy Busfield’s involved. Cal’s getting to be quite the comic relief, between this and the coconuts on the Christmas show.

All they needed to do to make that plot perfect would be to send Luke and Hallie under the stage with all the other predators.

Come back later this week for a recap, memorable lines, and five questions about “The Harriet Dinner Part 1.”

Studio 60, NBC, The Harriet Dinner Part 1, review