8 TV Characters Who Would Have Been Fired In Real Life

1. The Entire Sketch Show Cast (Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip)

Reason For Termination: The. Worst. Ratings. Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip is the oft-forgotten, post-West Wing Aaron Sorkin show about sketch comedy writing that had the grand misfortunate of debuting at the same time as Tina Fey's groundbreaking 30 Rock. So there was already a built-in excuse for viewers to debate which was funnier.

And it's a debate that never, ever ended in Sorkin's favor. To say the actual show-within-the-show was unfunny doesn't quite tell the whole story, because oftentimes it felt like the sketches weren't even trying to be funny. It was just more of the same sermonizing that any other Aaron Sorkin show has, except this time there was no justifiable outlet for it, and so he shoehorned it into a weekly live comedy show in place of jokes. A typical Studio 60 skit made even the clumsiest of Saturday Night Live sketches look like their finest iteration of Celebrity Jeopardy, by comparison.

In fact, in one game show style sketch Studio 60 showed as a rough draft, called Science Schmience, was so overly wordy and preachy that, honest to God, halfway through it you would have thought the "writer" of the sketch would have been fired on the spot. Except this "writer" was actually brought in to help right the ship of Studio 60 and return it to the glory that it apparently had at some point in time. It was...awful, to say the least. No one on that cast would have survived their first season on SNL.