Quote of the day: It's not too late for you to catch a repeat on Bravo. You can also see the premiere of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip online

"Oh, stop this. [Walking on the set, interrupting the sketch, some nonsense with George Bush and somebody else.] Stop this. [To one of the actors:] Let's stop it, Tom. [To the audience:] Listen, folks, we're going to stop this. [The actor asks, "Did we lose the feed?" To the actors:] No, we're live. I'd like both of you to clear the stage. I don't want anyone to think you were part of this. [Continuing audience laughter.] Go on, go on.

"[To the camera:] Uh . . . this is not going to be a very good show tonight, and I think you should change the channel. Change the channel, go ahead, right now. Better yet, turn off the TV, okay? [The audience keeps laughing.] Hell no, I know it seems like this is supposed to be funny. But tomorrow, tomorrow you're going to find out that it wasn't, and by that time I'll be fired. Now this, this is not sup- . . . this is not a sketch.

"This show used to be cutting-edge political and social satire. But it's gotten lobotomized, by a candy-ass broadcast network hell-bent on doing nothing that might challenge their audience. We were about to do a sketch that you've seen already about 500 times. Yeah, no one's going to confuse George Bush with George Plimpton. Now, we get it.

"We're all being lobotomized by this country's most influential industry, that's just thrown in the towel on any effort to do anything that doesn't include the courting of 12-year-old boys. Not even the smart 12-year-olds--the stupid ones, the idiots. Of which there are plenty, thanks in no small measure to this network. So why don't you just change the channel? Turn off your TV? Do it right now. Go ahead.

[Inside the control room, the squabbling drowns Wes out.] . . . trouble between art and commerce. Now, I'm telling you, art is getting its ass kicked, and it's making us mean, and it's making us bitchy, it's making us cheap punks. That's not who we are. People are having contests to see how much they can be like Donald Trump?

[The control-room battle escalates.] . . . We're eating worms for money. "Who wants to screw my sister?" Guys are getting killed in a war that's got theme music and a logo. That remote in your hand is a crack pipe. Oh yeah, every once in a while we pretend to be appalled . . .

[Control-room battle reaches fever pitch.] . . . and it's not even good pornography. They're just this side of snuff films, and friends, that's what's next, 'cause that's all that's left. And the two things that make them scared gutless are the FCC and every psycho religious cult that gets positively horny at the very mention of a boycott. These are the people they're afraid of. This prissy, feckless, off-the-charts greed-filled whorehouse of a network, I do believe, is thoroughly unpatriotic, mother . . . " [And now, finally, the plug is pulled on Wes. The director switches to the show's videotape opening.]

--about-to-be-former executive producer Wes Mendell (Judd Hirsch), stopping the opening sketch of the NBS network's long-running Friday-night comedy show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, in a 53-second meltdown while in the control room network Standards and Practices goon Jerry Jones (Michael Stuhlberg) tries to force director Cal Shanley (Timothy Busfield) to pull the plug on Wes

Okay, straight off, no BS: You have every reason to be pissed at QOTD. In the Wes Mendell spirit of straight talk, you should demand your money back.

Obviously we couldn't have brought you this quote before the pilot episode of NBC's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (not to be confused with the show-within-a-show of the same name that airs on NBS) aired on Monday night. But if we'd gotten it to you Tuesday or even yesterday, you could have caught the repeat last night on Bravo. [However, in late-breaking news, we can report that Bravo has another repeat scheduled for Sunday night.]

As soon as my friend Peter found out Tuesday morning that, instead of watching, I had recorded the premiere, he began hounding me to watch it already. So don't blame him.

What can I say, except that I guess I wasn't expecting lightning to strike three times?

I haven't done the math, but if I had to name the top ten series in TV history, there's an excellent chance that two of them would be the creations of Aaron Sorkin: Sports Night (sadly little-known) and The West Wing. Maybe someday we should talk more about them. For now, let's just say that Sorkin is back, with his collaborator on both previous shows, producer-director Thomas Schlamme.

Sorkin once said that he didn't know anything about writing for television when he started Sports Night--he just wrote, and Schlamme, the show's director, turned it into television. (That's Schlamme and Sorkin in the photo above in July 2001, accepting a TV Critics Association award for West Wing.)

The pilot episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, just as my friend Peter kept telling me, is not only brilliant but so incendiary that it's hard to imagine how it got past all those shiny suits at NBC and parent company GE. Broadcast-industry suits are, shall we say, not dealt with kindly here.

The point is not that Wes is a saint. He's gone along with the lobotomizing of his show for years, just hanging on to his job. In a heated argument as the show is about to go on the air live, Jerry the Standards and Practices guy forces him to cancel an edgy sketch referred to as "crazy Christians," even though it "killed" in the dress rehearsal. Jerry informs Wes that he won't be able to call either the NBS chairman (played by Steven Weber) or the newly installed president (played by Amanda Peet), who are at a dinner party celebrating her arrival--though in fact she isn't officially on the job till Monday.

"What happens if I say no?" Wes says. "What if I go on the air with the sketch?"

The S&P guy answers scornfully: "I'm not going to answer that. Because if you still had the muscle to do it, you wouldn't have asked."

Sorkin has always relished complexity--not to confuse or impress viewers, but to give us a taste of the real complexity of real life. He has shown by now that he's in a class by himself as a writer, and both Sports Night and West Wing were simply extraordinary for the way they used actors, familiar and unfamiliar, in both expected and unexpected ways.

My friend Peter pointed out, for example, that Steven Weber has never been used this way, as the network heavy--and so far he's just brilliant. But then so is everybody else. There's something delicious, for another example, about casting Ed Asner, who has a history of being found "difficult" by corporate brass, as the boss of bosses, the guy whose company owns NBS. It's been ages since Judd Hirsch got to sink his teeth into material as dazzling as what Sorkin has written for the short-lived role of Wes.

It's a heady combination: All these wondeful actors being handed Sorkin scripts, with director Schlamme there to make it great television. The obvious question is, will anyone watch it? And one equally obvious answer is: not if they don't know about it. I'm just suggesting that you do whatever you have to do to catch the pilot, either online or Sunday night on Bravo. And tell everyone you know.