Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is really three shows. Seriously. The first - and best - is a tongue-in-cheek drama following the backstage politics of a late-night sketch comedy series. There's the loyal team of Matt Albie and Danny Tripp running the thing, there's the cast members and the sweet little P.A., there's the pressures for ratings, quality, etc.

The second show, which is promising but is increasingly becoming disconnected from the first, is the story of a young woman (Amanda Peet's Jordan McDeere) who finds herself in charge of a major television network. In a constant struggle for quality over ratings-driven debauchery, she hears show pitches, fights with the chairman, and copes with a scandal in her now-very-public personal life.

The third show is a terrible love story with an unlikable female lead that serves as a microphone through which Aaron Sorkin can bash the Religious Right under the guise of giving it a fair shot.

The first two shows are everything I like about Aaron Sorkin. The third is the one thing I hate: the constant desire to force-feed us his very specific opinions about everything under the guise of Teaching Us All A Very Interesting Message. (Don't worry, I will contain this rant to one paragraph.) At first, I was interested, maybe even pleased that he gave voice to the masses of rational-minded Christians through the character of Harriet Hayes. Now it's clear that the only reason he had for doing so is to bash evangelicals as if they need more bashing. Aside from the constant pejorative remarks about the bible-thumping Pat-Robertson-watching red-stater cliche that we're led to believe number in the millions, the character of Harriet is portrayed as a stuck-up talent with a superiority complex the size of Mount Rushmore. The kicker is, Sorkin doesn't even realize he's doing this, because he still insists on making her "star-crossed" love with Matt the central romantic angle of the show.

But I digress...

In terms of the actual episode, since that's technically what I sat down to write about, we deal a lot more with the mysterious reporter (Christine Lahti) who was introduced last episode. Now she's got total access backstage, and throughout the episode she goes about slowly psychologically breaking everybody into talking about what they're not supposed to. Unfortunately, all of the taboo topics she's getting into invariably deal with the Matt/Harriet romance, but still, it's entertaining (if a mite predictable...and these people are in show business, shouldn't they know better than to talk to her?)

It was also nice to see the guest host (Gilmore Girls's Lauren Graham) and musical guest (Sting) actually appear on the show, especially since they could be considered bonafide celebrities (yeah, I'm referring to Rob Reiner's appearance in the third episode. You're just not famous anymore, dude.) There was also a great line from Matt to Lauren Graham in the teaser for next week: "Here's my number. Could you also give it to the woman who plays your daughter?"

And, finally, the whole running-the-network Amanda Peet subplot. I actually liked it a lot. Jordan does, it seems, have a sound long-term plan in eventually raising the quality of the NBS network as a whole, but it's ludicrous to assume that someone in real life would make that gamble when you're constantly on the edge of being fired anyway. Turning down a cheap reality show you know would bring the network easy ratings in favor of a drama about United Nations politics? It's pure idealistic fantasy - pure Aaron Sorkin.