With "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," maybe two strikes are enough.

This much-heralded NBC hour from Aaron Sorkin has been rejected twice by viewers, who were even less enthralled with its winter reincarnation as a romantic comedy than they were with its fall stint as a backstage drama. And now it's been rejected by its network, which pulled the show after Monday night's episode to make way for "The Black Donnellys."

Yes, NBC says "Studio 60" will return this spring (though the network also said the show would run through February, and that's not happening), but the odds of it returning for a second season are long, at best. And if these latest episodes are any indication of what the future holds, perhaps it's best if the future ends now.

Death would not come without mourning, but the grief would be more for the promise represented by Sorkin and a stellar cast led by Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford than for anything they produced. The hope was that the show would expand beyond its good but too inside-the-business start to encompass TV's effect on all of us, both those who make it and those who watch it. Instead, it collapsed upon itself, devoting hour after hour to its head writer's struggles — interrupted only by an FCC-inspired crisis far too patently absurd to support a continuing story.

As you should expect from the stellar talents involved, "Studio 60" has given us flashes of brilliance, but ultimately, it never gave us enough reason to care. The people working on the show-within-a-show had nothing at risk because the fictional studio was a smash from the start. And we as viewers had nothing at stake in that show's survival because most of what we saw was terrible. You get the feeling this is what "The Dick Van Dyke Show" would have looked like had it been made with too much self-aggrandizing angst and by too few funny people.

Yet for all their problems, those early episodes did at least seem to have a point, as opposed to the weightless, painfully silly romantic comedy the show has become. The only rooting interest we can possibly have in these two misaligned couples, Matt and Harriet (Perry and Sarah Paulson) and Danny and Jordan (Whitford and Amanda Peet), is to root against them.

Indeed, it's hard to say which woman you cringe for more: Jordan, who is being chased by a man who shares her own near-psychotic attachment to being overly cute; or Harriet, who is being chased by a self-absorbed, egotistic addict who routinely mocks her most closely held beliefs.

The change in tone came about, of course, because viewers weren't interested enough in the story Sorkin originally wanted to tell, but can he really be interested in telling this one? If so, it's hard to fathom. It's coming across as little more than a desperate, flailing attempt to find something, anything, to keep the lights on.

And if that's the case, well, maybe it's better to just turn them off now.