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Published on Tuesday, October 16, 2007 - 2:42am

60!! MEDIUM!! SEAQUEST!! RICHES!! TORCHWOOD!!
Herc’s Super-Exciting
Season-Box DVD Vault!!

I am – Hercules!!

The worst hour of TV Aaron Sorkin ever wrote is still better than 99.9 percent of the hours forged throughout history by all the other TV writers, right? I give five stars to the series finale of “Studio 60 Live On The Sunset Strip,” a finale that ran during the summer and not seen by a lot of people.

The series, created and written by Sorkin (“A Few Good Men,” “The American President,” “Sports Night,” “The West Wing”), depicted the creative forces behind a fictional “SNL”-like TV series. Much of it worked exceedingly well; some of it did not.

I continue to hold in highest regard NBS programming chief Jordan McDeere (Amanda Peet), the network dream boss. Her boss Jack Rudolph (Steven Weber) turned out to be great too. Jack’s boss, Wilson White (Ed Asner), more with the greatness. All proved unexpectedly complex and entertaining. In retrospect, a series titled “McDeere” or “NBS” might have proven a far better fit for audiences, critics, NBC and Sorkin himself.

On to the negatives.

Some argue that the quality of the show’s sketches were not important, that viewers weren’t tuning in for the sketches.

But the sketches were important, and here’s why. Most were completely horrible, and hobbled horribly our suspension of disbelief. Ricky and Ron were supposed to be writing the shitty sketches, not new head writer Matt Albie. If Matt’s stuff came off as poor, it reflected poorly not only on Matt, but also on producer Danny and network chief Jordan, whose faith in Matt could only be read as delusion.

If the show couldn’t afford to hire Jim Downey or Tim Herlihy or Al Franken or Robert Smigel or Adam McKay or Sam Simon to punch up the sketches, they perhaps should have been more careful to leave those sketches off-camera. (It’s possible, one supposes, that Sorkin simply believed his sketches funnier than those mounted by the oft-derided SNL. If so? Monstrous miscalculation.)

The show also had casting issues. Nathan Corddry was funny on “The Daily Show,” but he’s a far cry from the powerhouse likes of a John Belushi or a Bill Murray or a Will Ferrell. Was anyone ever convinced he had somehow emerged as the superstar standout on a hot late-night sketch show?

Original King of Comedy D.L. Hughley? Way funny when he’s doing his own material -- but as an actor Hughley demonstrated deficiencies, and Sorkin’s dialogue never seemed to fit Hughley’s mouth. (Imagine what an actor like Lesure would have brought to Simon Stiles!)

Matthew Perry’s on-screen interviews over the years illustrate that he doesn’t need a script to find the funny, and one senses that “Friends” was so huge, in part, because Perry was a major force in shaping Chandler Bing.

But Sorkin’s work may be too unyielding and accomplished for real funnymen; a funnyman is not necessarily what Sorkin needa to get his work where it’s going. Perry characteristically seemed too confined by Sorkin’s alter ego, and one suspects he’s at least a little glad to be done with the role. (A younger Perry might have been spectacular as Jeter, said to be the show-within-a-show’s star player.)

Perhaps Sorkin’s material needs something of a blank canvas to inhabit; if the canvas comes with its own lines and colors, those elements unduly distract from what Sorkin is trying to do. Rob Lowe – a handsome but (beyond “The West Wing”) generally bland and workmanlike presence – managed to manifest one of the most successful Sorkin protagonists ever in senior White House aide Sam Seaborn.

Ah, but enough with what might have gone haywire. Let’s go out by enumerating a few more of the series’ virtues:

* Andy Mackinaw (Mark McKinney), the tragedy-stained comedy pro who returned to the writer’s room.

* Kim Tao (the spectacular Julia Ling), the sexy and hilariously horny little rich girl on whom the network’s fortunes appeared to teeter. (I think she’s part of the Nerd Herd on “Chuck” now.)

* Zhang Tao (Raymond Ha), Kim’s wily pop.

* Captain Boyle (James Lesure), the military fellow sent to liaison with “Studio 60” cast member Tom Jeter.

* Robert Bebe (John Goodman), the backwoods Nevada judge who turned up to torment the regulars for two episodes before providing them deliverance.

* Suzanne (Merrit Wever), Matt’s landmine-jumping assistant.

* Wendy (real-life ex-Pussycat Doll Cyia Batten), the Bombshell Babe with the boot.

* The show's sprawling multilevel set generally, but especially that giant "Play It Again Sam" Life Magazine cover in Matt's office.

* The Christmas show.

Christmas Day 2007, by the way, will see the release to cinemas of “Charlie Wilson’s War,” about the Texas congressman who aided Afghanistan in its war against the Soviet Union. It teams a Sorkin screenplay with director Mike Nichols, as well as actors Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, Shiri Appleby, Rachel Nichols, John Slattery, Mary Page Keller and real-life ex-Pussycat Doll Cyia Batten. Which just proves again – if you kick a great writer out of TV, you’ll end up paying later.

I adore “Medium,” the ever-absorbing drama about a physicist’s psychic wife. Just out today is the third season of the third series created and overseen by Glenn Gordon Caron, who earlier created and oversaw the excellent and seminal “Moonlighting” and excellent and not-seminal superhero saga “Now and Again” (the one with Dennis Haysbert; not be confused with “Once and Again,” which started the same year and starred Sela Ward).

In its third season “Medium” continued to combine twisty sci-fi plotlines with welcome doses of Caron’s perfecto throwaway wit. If the show lacks “buzz,” I think we can blame the series’ paucity of multi-episode story arcs. Mind you, continuity is not wholly absent. Much more is made now of how psychic gifts run in Alison’s family (notably amongst Alison’s three young daughters), and we’re getting to know better Alison’s crime-fighting Phoenix co-workers. The 19th century serial killer Dr. Charles Walker returns for the third time in the season’s fourth hour (and it turns out he’s been played by Mark Sheppard, who would play Gaius Baltar’s lawyer Romo Lampkin on “Galactica” and Jaime Sommers’ science-nemesis Anthony Anthros on “Bionic Woman”). Texas Rangers captain Kenneth Push (Arliss Howard), introduced in the pilot, came back at midseason. Sonny Troyer, the psychic serial killer introduced in the season-two episode “S.O.S.,” returns in the form of Eric Stoltz. Alison's amiable but ambition-challenged war-vet brother returns late in season three.

Season three begins with gory cartoons and the ghost of Alison’s high-school sweetheart. It’s followed by the “Groundhog Day” episode, Walker’s descendant, the magic camcorder, Kurtwood Smith as FBI Special Agent Cooper, the pervy assemblyman, the lonely cat-dude, the creepy doll-boy, Push’s return, the oil heiress who possesses Alison, the leukemia-stricken future-daughter, the escaped Troyer, teen ‘80s Alison’s creepy neighbor, the demon girl, and the hostage situation with the great Adam Goldberg and the great Larry Miller.

To anticipate the question, there is a fourth season in production, and new episodes of “Medium” are expected to return to NBC in January.

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