The best show on TV this past season wasn’t Grey’s Anatomy. It wasn’t C.S.I. It wasn’t Heroes, although that show was awesome. No, the best show of the 2006/07 TV campaign was Studio 60, and it won’t be coming back for another season.

NBC just finished airing the remaining episodes of the series, after pulling it mid-season in favor of the Paul Haggis Irish mob drama The Black Donnellys, which sucked.

Why did NBC pull the plug on Studio 60? After all, everything about the show was good. The writing was solid and clever; everything you’d expect from a craftsman such as Aaron Sorkin. The acting was top-notch, especially for TV. You can thank the group of all-stars, veterans, and perfectly-cast unknowns that made up the cast for that. Matthew Perry was never this funny, or awesome, on Friends, even though he was the best of the bunch there, and Nate Corddry has enough comic potential to fill any of the ridiculous costumes he wore. The directing, the lighting, heck, even the title screen, it all fit. It all worked. Perfectly.

But more important than that, Studio 60 had something to say. From the first episode, Studio 60’s point was clear: television is about more than art and culture. It’s about more than making people laugh or cry, about more than telling a story. Television is about power, influence, control, and most of all, money. It is a business through and through, a delivery service for commercials, and any chance of broadcasting anything with some artistic merit is merely a side-benefit, one that isn’t very high on most networks’ list of priorities.

This commitment to commerce and indifference to art has become even more transparent in recent years. No, it’s not a dirty little secret that corporations are out to make money, in fact, it’s what they’re designed to do, but that doesn’t also mean the pursuit of the almighty dollar is a noble one. Sacrificing culture for cash is not something that should be commended.

And that’s where Studio 60 said more than it meant to. Its short run made its points about the TV industry self-referential. Case and point: Studio 60 was pulled for The Black Donnellys. When that low-rent mob-movie rip-off couldn’t stand on the shoulders of Paul Haggis’ name, it was pulled as well. What replaced it? The Real Wedding Crashers, a reality TV show.

The proliferation of reality TV is no secret, but it is the best example of a disturbing trend in modern entertainment. Reality TV is leading the way in a stream of entertainment so mindless and fake, so flashy and simplified, that it has no real cultural or artistic value. It’s all about money. The shows can be produced for pennies, because the people on the shows only want their 15 minutes, which means most of the ad revenue generated will be profit. And speaking of ads, the amount of product placement and name-brand sponsorship during the show alone is a gold-mine for any network.

In a TV landscape dominated by cheap, sleazy, reality cash-cows that lower the standards and attention spans of average viewers and Nielsen households, clever and thoughtful dramas like Studio 60 can’t compete. Neither can clever comedies like Arrested Development, which was lucky to get 2.5 seasons on Fox, despite its genius. The fact is, there’s no appreciation for clever anymore. Clever doesn’t sell. People don’t want nuance, or subtlety, or subtext. These days, most entertainment carries about as much subtlety as being hit in the head with a brick.

Critics of Studio 60 can, and will point to the ratings as proof of the show’s impotence. They’ll say people gave it a fair chance, and just weren’t interested in watching. That may be true, but it doesn’t answer why. The show’s quality was top-notch, so it couldn’t have been that. Perhaps, instead, between our obsession with celebrity, the sensationalism of our news media, and the constant glorification of everything mundane thing we do, we didn’t want the rug pulled out from under us. Most of us don’t want to hear it’s all a joke when the ride’s so much easy, spoon-fed fun, and the TV networks (and the corporations that control them) are happy to accommodate this, as long as we keep watching and give them more money.

In a way, I’m glad Studio 60 got cancelled. I do lament the fact that there won’t be new episodes for me to enjoy, but it’s kind of comforting knowing that it never became a pop success. In a world where reality TV shows are dominating the airwaves and topping ratings numbers, perhaps high ratings aren’t a great thing. All that ratings are proving these days is that people prefer low-brow, low-grade entertainment that never asks them to think, so not catching on actually serves to validate what Studio 60 really was. It was smart. It was clever. It did make you smile and frown, because it made you think, which is precisely why it was beyond what TV is.

Studio 60 wasn’t the first show to flounder in an industry more concerned with celebrity relationships, celebrating mediocrity, and product placement than solid storytelling, good acting, and comedy that’s actually funny, and it won’t be the last. It’s a shame that shows like Studio 60, shows built well from the ground up that are actually trying to say or do something interesting, can’t find a place on network TV, but it’s not really a surprise. Television exists for one purpose and one purpose only: to deliver commercials right into the homes of everyone with a TV screen to sit in front of. Art can’t win this fight; commerce has too much money behind it to lose. It’s sad, but it’s the truth: which is something you won’t see on the airways.