So again I forced myself to stay up until 10pm and watched another episode of “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip”, America’s most uptight program. There is just so much tension and angst, mostly trivial, built up to no dramatic high stakes.

It’s not a funny show. It’s not a dramatic one. It is mostly hard to understand. There was some bit last night between Matt Perry and a writer, with the two arguing about something, I think it was about women and August Strindberg—and I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. I love a show that is so smart that the audience is left in the dark.

There are certain tics about this show that are just plain irritating:

• Matthew Perry falling over. He accidentally smashed a plate glass window (incidentally, it was not safety glass) with a baseball bat. He also fell backward on top of a suit of armor. Pathetic.
• The Christian comedienne. She has greasy hair and a hound-dog face. She is not funny or dramatic, and her relationship with Perry has no chemical attraction.
• Amanda Peet. She is just unflappable and perfect and always knows the right thing to say. How come nobody else on the show is this unflawed?
• The pace of the show. It’s not slow. It speeds by, turns corners , goes through hallways, upstairs, downstairs, into cars, up elevators, and into cramped offices and grabs a coffee, cigarette and sandwich while we breathlessly try to catch up.
• There is no sunshine. This show is entirely indoors and at night, and it feels claustrophobic. One of the characteristics of 1940’s film noir, was that there was always a morning after the dark night. This show is all dark and gloomy and lit with phony golden stage light.
• The “Broadcast News” frantic hysteria: GET THIS INTO THE CONTROL ROOM… before all hell breaks loose!!! and we got 90 seconds to fill… lunacy. Even if this is the way it is in TV, what is going to happen to the fate of the world if they cannot fill air time? It just doesn’t matter.

I don’t know why I’m going to compare this show to “Desperate Housewives” but I will. DH is high camp, entirely ridiculous, badly written, amateurishly performed and is wonderful to watch. Marc Cherry, the creator, gives us sex, comedy, suspense, drama, laughter and titillation. S6OTSS has no comedy, is not dramatic and is a crushing bore to sit through.

I don’t know why I’m going to compare this show to HBO’s “Entourage” but I will. E makes me feel like I’m hanging out with real Hollywood insiders whose lives are a roller coaster of elation and triumph, frustration and despair with entirely believable characters. I don’t feel like I’m watching: a-dramatization-of a-behind-the-scenes-look-at-the-top-levels-of-Hollywood-success. S6OTSS always has an artifice and slickness about it that is stagy and off-putting.

Finally, I really, really hate “Saturday Night Live” and anything else that uses that sorry excuse of a late night comedy show as a muse.