Watching Studio60

If you’ve been following along with my Studio 60 Revisited Monday marathon, we’ve now reached what turned out to be our final night with our friends from Studio 60. Not the final episode, of course — it’s going to take five episodes to get through this one particular night of hostage-negotiating and birth-giving and pill-kicking and media-baiting and flash-backing and conscience-finding and romantic reconciliation. But tonight’s pick — “Breaking News,” the show’s eighteenth episode, originally broadcast on May 31, 2007 — is the one that gets all of that action going.

As I wrote back in November of last year, when this episode aired for the first time in the U.K., “‘Breaking News’ was the one on which Jenna Fischer of The Office was the guest host for the show-within-a-show; Matt’s pill-popping out of a children’s vitamin bottle became a subject of discussion; the blonde lawyer was still wandering around flirting with Matt in a way that really should have been the product of a drugged imagination; Danny and Jordan argued over the show’s sliding ratings, and what might need to be done about that; and, oh yeah, Tom’s brother went missing in Afghanistan and Jordan collapsed, setting up the trilogy of ‘K&R’ episodes to come.”

Most importantly, though, after last week’s amusing but disorienting “Disaster Show,” it’s the one where Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford and Amanda Peet came back from wherever it was they were hiding last week. Welcome back! We’ve got a fresh batch of medical and psychological trauma waiting for ya!

Studio 60, NBC, Breaking News, commentary