TVSquad

God bless The Onion. I haven't read it in a while, but whenever I go back to it, the fine folks there never fail to give me a good belly laugh. In the current issue, "columnist" Artie Mayer laments the forgotten early days of his favorite show in an essay entitled "Studio 60 Was Better When It First Came Out".

If you read through the essay, you can tell what argument they're mocking here: the age-old argument that Saturday Night Live was better when it first came on the air. But I like how it was mocked here; Mayer (a made-up name, by the way) decries how the show has slid downhill from its premiere episode from four weeks ago.

"In Studio 60's heyday, they would do this thing where Judd (Hirsch) would come out before the opening credits and deliver this long, angry monologue about the current state of network television. I used to sit in front of the TV, just waiting for him to unleash his famous catchphrase, 'It's not going to be a very good show tonight.' But they haven't done that for a while," he writes. He also laments how they keep using the same ten characters in every show and how the episodes all have the same structure. Funny stuff.