"Studio 60" debuts tonight!

Yes, believe it or not, something's going to pull my attention away from professional football/wrestling on a Monday night...

In case you've been under a rock, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, the new show from The West Wing and SportsNight creators Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme, debuts tonight on NBC at 10pm/9pm central.

If you find yourself fed up with the state of television today...if you're endlessly frustrated with the mindless pablum they shovel at us in the name of keeping profit margins high...if you love tightly scripted, well-acted, meaningful comedy and drama...watch this show.

If nothing else, watch the first 10 minutes and The Speech that precedes the opening credits. If you don't agree with what's said, fine, turn it off and never approach S60 again. I'll understand.

But if you hear something that sparks a little bit of outrage, a chord of truth within your soul...by all means, watch on. You'll like what you see.

Then wake the kids and call the neighbors, because in my never-very-humble view, we need more shows like this on television.

OK, I'm off my soapbox...enjoy the show.

On a lighter note...

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip debuts next week. I still can't friggin' wait...



Did I mention I was a fan of great writing?

"Who has left this hole in the ground?"

On 9/11/01, I was on a trip that started the day before in New York City and would end 10 days later in Houston. On that trip, together with nearly 100 total strangers, we would see the best of America, a unanimity of purpose amidst grief, and a sense of coming together the likes of which this generation had not seen.

I feared it wouldn't last. I was right, but I couldn't have guessed how far removed from that feeling we'd actually be five years later.

KO articulates that which I still struggles to express.

"Have you no sense of decency, sir?"

KO got a powerful reaction to his Special Comment on Rumsfeld last week. He took another swing higher up the administration food chain (to completely mix metaphors) Tuesday night.

We're less inclined to look at multiple sides of issues, or in this case motivations, these days. We just are; there's not a lot we can do about it. The media business-savvy side of me knows that, in part, Keith's doing this for ratings. If he's not, he's in the wrong business.

But I also sense a man with a typewriter, a microphone, a camera, a platform and a point of view desperately trying to bring some reason into the social arena. If he has to call out the sacred cows of the political world, so be it...and more power to him.

It has long been the duty of journalists in this country to ask the tough questions and say the unpopular things. It's an idea codified into the user's manual for this country, there at the very top of the list of things the founders saw they needed to add to the original document. Keith, alongside so many others currently maligned by the extreme fringes of all sides of the ideology spectrum, carry on that tradition to the best of their ability and despite the roadblocks put in front of them by a disinterested public and, more frequently, their own bosses.

I agree with the unspoken sentiment Olbermann issues here: Why is this happening?

Good Monsters, indeed...

For those of you (the few, the proud, the probably related to me) interested, the new Jars of Clay record Good Monsters is out today. Everybody's throwing a lot of hyperbole out about it, so I won't add to that lengthy list...except to say that it's great to finally hear them rock out unabashedly.

Congrats, guys...but man, you need to fire the pinhead who wrote your bio. What an overblown sack of verbiage that guy is...