'Studio 60' watch

Aw, heck, let me throw another log on the fire - namely a Defamer item that cites "current whispers" (whoever they are) as contradicting Ray Richmond's THR blog in which he cites "key industry sources" (whoever they are) as expecting the NBC show to be picked up for the rest of the season. Defamer's "whispers" insist that NBC honchos are desperately trying to get out of creator Aaron Sorkin's contract and shut the show down. It should be noted that Defamer has been on the "Studio 60" deathwatch for weeks.

We suppose we won't know which set of rumor-mongerers are correct until the network is good and ready to place either a pick-up or cancellation announcement in the trades, but we're nonetheless going to gird ourselves for the eventuality that we may never get a chance to say a proper goodbye to Lobster Boy, Fundamentalist Girl, and the rest of the gang.

There is an important business element to all this noise, and it is the financial pressure GE has been placing on its NBC Universal division. NBC, after all, is the one network that's been reduced to running cheapo reality and game show fare in the 8-9 p.m. time slot. Why? Because it doesn't generate enough profit for GE. So how do you fatten up earnings while also green-lighting a $3 million per-episode series that continues to have a limited viewership? Well, you don't. The issue here isn't the show; who know if GE's top brass have even seen a single episode. The issue is the m-o-n-e-y. Why, they might wonder, must the network shell out so much each week, while on ABC there's a show called "Dancing With the Stars" that has been a ratings leader for weeks - and which can be produced at a much lower cost?

And forget about the argument that "Studio 60" attracts a coveted audience that advertisers want to attract. As a WSJ piece pointed out the other day:

Broadcast television is still a game of mass, not class. As executives themselves like to point out, it's the one-big-tent nature of the traditional networks that can make them more appealing in a world where audiences are fragmenting into narrow tribes. Advertisers may covet a certain "quality" audience, but they can find it elsewhere, like the Internet. When they are spending the big bucks, they still need a certain critical mass.

The show's upscale audience certainly doesn't hurt. But overall ad revenue still depends mainly on size of audience. "If you are not going to deliver the ratings, I'm not going to pay you," says Laura Caraccioli-Davis, a senior vice president at Publicis Groupe's Starcom USA. And while NBC knows some people record the show on a DVR to watch later or catch an episode on the Web, its advertisers pay only for live ratings. (Adding viewers who record and play "Studio 60" back within seven days of the original airing bumps the show's weekly ratings by about 18 percent, Nielsen says.)

Sorry all you sensitive, artistic types out there, but this is the way businesspeople think. Nothing personal - it's just the m-o-n-e-y.