Oh, that picture? I'm setting aside its hilarious irony for a few moments as we deal with the lead story: goodbye, Ricky & Ron.

I was beginning to enjoy the duo of talent-deficient writers as being some of the few characters on Studio 60 to actually have shades of gray. (I almost just deleted that sentence, but the more I think about that, the more true it seems. Matt and Danny have great chemistry but are still the Liberal Smarty-Pants Boys; Harriet should in theory, but we've seen very little dimension; and Jordan is the flawed up-and-comer who wants to bring back respectibility to TV. I will happily admit, though, that Jack interests me greatly, especially after the Nevada Day episodes.)

Anyway, back what I was talking about. Were Ricky & Ron hacks, or just staff writers who wouldn't have been able to handle being in charge? Did they sell out Matt for not backing up his post-9/11 comments those years ago, or were they trying to protect the show? Was protecting the plagiarising writer a few episodes back honorable or stupid? And most of all, the great point that Ron makes to Matt: there's no argument that Ricky took a lot of (perhaps undeserved) crap after he was passed over for showrunner in the wake of Wes's breakdown. Matt's opinion, and by extension the show's, seemed to be that the duo were hack clowns, but a combination of sharp writing and a great performance from Evan Handler always had me wanting to watch them. (Or maybe I'm just partial to Handler because he guest-starred as Hurley's imaginary friend on Lost.)

As you may be able to tell from those way-too-in-depth bulky paragraphs above, I dug this episode. I got into it. Maybe it's because it was, I don't know, actually about the backstage politics of a late-night comedy show. (And not the epic "Aaron Sorkin argues with himself over the blue/red state divide" topic that the show had become.) Matt had the chance to screw R&R over again and force them to stay thanks to an outstanding option period that was expiring shortly, but he was a gentleman and let them go off to make an undoubtedly crappy "Peripheral Vision Man" pilot for Fox, based on their recurring sketch. (Nice jab at Fox, by the way.)

Now Matt is left with an empty writing room except for two characters I wanted to see more of anyway: the new writer Darius and the inexperienced writer Lucy (played by Lucy Davis, Dawn of the BBC The Office). It bodes well for the future of NBC's show (although not necessarily for NBS's, if you get my drift, but that's a good thing).

In other news, a valuable lesson was on display in the episode, but it wasn't one of the preachy Sorkin variety. No, it was something much more practical: if there's an unlikable female character who's supposed to be likable, it can never hurt to take her clothes off. That's right, we saw a lot of Harriet this time, which was completely superfluous but nonetheless vaguely appropriate due to the subject matter of her side story: she's debating whether or not to appear nearly nude in a Maxim-like skin magazine. (Hence the hilarious irony of actually showing her almost-nude this episode.) Friends and co-stars Tom and Simon are telling her not to do it, and it was an interesting (if endless) argument. (Oh, by the way, this is also a straight-from-real-life scenario, as Sorkin's ex-girlfriend, the openly Christian Kristen Chenoweth, recently posed in Maxim.)

However: exactly how stupid is Sorkin trying to make her??

She fails (or refuses) to realize the following information, all of which are periodically revealed to her by her oh-so-wiser male counterparts: (A) The magazine that asked her to do it would be completely using her to "get naughty pictures of the church girl", as Simon put it. (B) The reason the sketch show has been able to pull off so many anti-conservative, anti-Christian sketches is because it can use Harriet's Christianity as a buffer against backlash. (C) The reason she's considering it in the first place is not to prove she's attractive, like she claims, but to get back at the evangelical group who cancelled her singing tour.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but in this regard, the show is beginning to seem a little sexist. The last bit was pointed out to her by Matt at the show's end, another example of the benevolent liberal male god teaching the impressionable young woman underling a lesson. I would just chalk it up to coincidence, that the male/female dynamic is of less importance than the liberal/conservative dynamic, but in some respects Sorkin has done the same thing to Amanda Peet's Jordan. She's blindly idealistic, to the point that she doesn't even know her job is in jeopardy, and she's too young and inexperienced not to have Danny often give her sagely words of advice on damage-controlling her own bad-press situation. The hyper-smart-male/impressionable-young-female dynamic is what was really upstaging all of Sorkin's other themes this week, and it was a little weird.