A reader had a different reaction:

Wow, Jonah, I had a totally different reaction to Studio 60. (It may have helped that I never once watched The West Wing.) In particular, I was pleased with the portrayal of the Christian character as a self-possessed, intelligent, and likeable woman. Her response to the lame baiting from one of her colleagues on the show was perfect, and the Matthew Perry character came off as a narrow-minded bigot by comparison with her. I’m always alert to the ritual denigration of Christians on prime-time TV, but I just wasn’t seeing it here.

Me: I didn’t quite say there was ritual denigration. There was ritual Christian-baiting. As for the female character’s faith, I am sure that she’s being built up in no small part because that will give Matthew Perry’s relentless conversational victories more heft in the future. This was the technique, recall, on West Wing. The little blonde lawyer was given just enough credibility, that liberal victories in debate were all the more authoritative. The conservative talking point was thrown out there by one politician or another in a plausible-sounding way, only to be “debunked” by C.J. or the President or some other numinously sagacious liberal. The conservative view, in the end, was never allowed to go unrefuted. There’s nothing “wrong” with this in any strict sense, but it does illustrate how Sorkin has always been more interested in polemic than art.