I just finished The Option Period. I think it's in this episode where Harriet or Jordan or someone says, "It took you 30 minutes to get to the point." That sums up this episode pretty brilliantly.
What a trainwreck this show is. The one sub-plot about "sponsors on the show or 15 jobs are lost" is something that there's no way the general audience member can identify with. This show has as mainstream an audience as one could find -- a heavily promoted network show from the guy who made West Wing. And pretty much everyone in this audience works a "normal" job in which you have to eat shit and compromise your morals constantly -- and the morals for the general audience member are things like, "I have to cancel our trip to Florida because my jerk boss just gave me a new deadline on my project." The only people who could possibly care one iota about the whole "sponsor the show" drama are creative sorts, and the show is so alienating to that audience -- especially those of us who are comedy nerds, who have been told from the beginning that stuff we generally like sucks and we should like Gilbert & Sullivan and "scathing" political sketches -- that there's no one who cares.
The show REALLY just doesn't understand its audience. And then it ends with a happy compromise about the billboards on the set, which pretty much translates to, "You sold out and are making excuses for it."
The other plot about Ricky and and Ron -- I think a show from their point of view would be great. Here you have two comedy writers who were handed a show in some sort of controversy after Matt and Danny quit for the first time. They have a big team of writers they work well with. Ratings and critical acclaim might not be as strong as at one point but the network obviously still cares about the show. And then the producer has a public meltdown -- not of your doing -- and the new network president, whom you've never met, makes the decision to rehire the people who quit in the first place. And these guys hate you because you disagreed with their support of Bill Maher (!) in the wake of the heated political climate of 9/11, in which your opinion pretty much mirrored that of most Americans at the time. And now you're marginalized without any sketches getting on the air so you decide to leave the show with the writers you know and respect. And your parting gift is the new head writer -- who hates you, even though you tried to bury the hatchet -- telling you that your project has no chance of making it.
THAT's a good idea for a show. It's a total underdog story. The early episodes would pretty much start with everyone struggling to find their footing and then it slowly comes together and you overcome the odds.
The Harriet stuff is also pretty fun to watch -- the whole "Believe us, we don't mind seeing you naked but..." is such cliched writing.
This show is so addictive. I really wish it didn't get canceled. I kind of just want to skip to the asinine sounding Afghanistan TRILOGY but I kind of like the mundane episodes more than the sweeping faux-epics.
