Earlier this month, Tina Fey and the cast of 30 Rock reunited for a live show in front of a packed, raucous audience at Radio City Music Hall to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the beloved show about life backstage at a fictionalized version of Saturday Night Live. It was a star-studded affair, with cameos from 30 Rock guests like Jon Hamm and Will Forte, plus other famous friends like Tom Hanks and Lin-Manuel Miranda (who performed the Tracy Jordan holiday novelty song "Werewolf Bar Mitzvah").
There would be no comparable celebration for the other show set backstage at a fictionalized SNL that debuted on NBC in the fall of 2006: Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Before the two shows debuted, Studio 60 was the one everyone was excited to see, while 30 Rock was considered an afterthought — NBC doing a favor for Lorne Michaels, essentially. This was Sorkin's first new series since he was forced out of The West Wing following the White House drama's fourth season.
“I remember the announcement,” says improv comedian and Dead Eyes podcast host Connor Ratliff. “The way he had left West Wing, it was such a big deal that he was coming back to TV.”
Instead, Studio 60 turned out to be the first big bomb of Sorkin’s career. Much of the initial excitement was gone by the end of the second episode, if not sooner. And by the time the 22nd and final episode was burned off in late June of 2007, the series had become easy shorthand for multiple creative problems, from hubris to the difficulty of making convincing fake comedy.
30 Rock ran for seven seasons, won multiple Emmys, and even got Sorkin to make a self-deprecating cameo midway through its run. Studio 60 is mostly remembered as a punchline, if at all by the general audience. But it remains an intense object of fascination within the real world of comedy, where writers and performers can still quote lines from it to one another like a shibboleth. As a new Blu-ray box set is hitting stores, I talked to some of those writers about what they feel went wrong with Sorkin’s vision, and why they still care two decades later.
As Last Week Tonight with John Oliver executive producer Tim Carvell puts it, “It's the weirdest thing, where it's got all of the form and all of the ingredients of a good show, and all of the content of a bad one.”