Salon's great Heather Havrilesky weighs in on Studio 60, and she had a pretty similar sense to me of the downside, though she was bigger on its upside. A chunk:

All of which brings us to Aaron Sorkin's "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" (10 p.m. Mondays on NBC), a show that, on the one hand, tackles the pathology of the professional circle jerk and its resulting mediocrity head-on, yet on the other hand, indulges the incredible self-importance of the TV writer to an extent heretofore unseen on the small screen.

Again, for the same reasons that it's easier to stomach the self-important banter of idealistic politicians and cops and doctors and other high-minded civil servants, it's also easier to stomach TV shows that focus on these kinds of people. On "Grey's Anatomy" or "ER" or "The Wire" or "The West Wing," we tolerate the melodrama that characters drum up about their jobs, we tolerate their all-knowing tones and their self-righteousness and their indignant attitudes because they do have pretty high-pressure jobs that serve the common good, at least in theory, and it makes sense that they're dogmatic and idealistic and stubborn about what they do and what they should be doing.

But self-important banter among magazine editors, just for example? Not so easy to swallow.

Then she spends a few paragraphs on some of its good points, where I think she's overly generous. Then more on the trouble:

The trouble is that, when Danny and Matt stop to gaze around the set of their new show, and the camera circles them dramatically like it's the last scene of Werner Herzog's classic film "Aguirre: The Wrath of God," at least one or two cells in our bodies can't help but rebel against the pomp and circumstance of the moment. It feels wrong, somehow, to romanticize TV writers this much, however talented and witty they might be. Meet a few TV writers and you'll see what I mean. It's not that they're bad people -- many of them are charming and smart and extremely friendly -- but they're richer than God, yet they always seem to be jealous of someone who's even richer and more successful than they are. Plus, even the ones who write for really crappy shows, shows that they should pay a tax for inflicting on the human populace, talk about their bad shows like they're saving the free world. ...

Plus, ask anyone who lives in Los Angeles or works in the industry: Hollywood culture is pretty distasteful, no matter how you slice it. Even though that's one of the points of Sorkin's show, dramatizing what dicks network executives can be or giving TV producers lines like Judd Hirsch's in the pilot -- "That remote in your hand is a crack pipe!" -- doesn't really change the fact that these are Hollywood wiseasses, not heroes.

Yeah, she really nailed it. The "Aguirre: The Wrath of God" reference was perfect. The whole show felt kinda that way to me. I think that ultimately, I resented Sorkin's presence, because half my brain was thinking, You've got a pretty good show here: interesting situation, good characters, etc.--so why the fuck do you have to piss all over it with self-importance, like it's Aguirre: The Wrath of God?

I remembered thinking that West Wing at first turned me off with it's self importance, but at least the characters were facing earth-shattering decisions. Here, not so much.