Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip survived a mere 20 episodes on NBC before being fed to the cancellation reaper. Now, speaking to AV Club, star Steven Weber offers his take on why the comedy-drama didn’t make the cut for Season 2:
People for some reason, and this happens, had been sharpening their knives for Aaron Sorkin and I don’t know why. It’s like you’re about to give birth and people are standing around and the baby is born and immediately they start saying, “Why is he crying? Why isn’t the baby standing and talking? You’re not a good parent!” And that’s what they did to Studio 60, they immediately leapt on this new creation and immediately compared it to West Wingand any other movie he’d done and attacked the admittedly dramatic dialogue. [..] There was network pressure. We suddenly found ourselves in some unlikely and ridiculous competition with 30 Rock.
Also citing financial issues for the Studio 60‘s struggles, Weber added:
But I think that technically it was a hard show to produce, because a lot of the episodes were long and dense. They were expensive to shoot because the sets were huge. We had an actual practical TV and movie studio, so that if I was doing a scene with you and the cameras turned to you, behind you were 300 feet of actual working set that has to be lit, populated with background, designed. And that costs… millions of dollars. And after a while, that took a toll. And ultimately, people ganged up on the show. And it may have thrown the writers to a certain extent. They were not getting love. It’s hard to create when people are throwing rocks at your window. And that’s kind of what happened. It definitely deserved another season. Easily. People around the world still love that show; it’s really a great show.
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