Sunday’s headline at FoxNews.com consisted of three words and a number: “‘STUDIO 60’ CANCELLATION IMINENT.”

The third word, as you’ll have noticed, was misspelled. If it came to the attention of “Studio 60” writer, Aaron Sorkin — the sort of man, as P.G. Wodehouse might have written, who can spot a typo at 40 paces — you have to assume he got a small, sour chuckle out of it. He’d have got another one from the subhead: “‘Studio 60’ Concellation.” (Not much of a consolation, but still.) And then, just to prove that the two misspellings were the real thing, the wizards on the copy desk repeated the first: “‘Studio 60’ Cancellation Iminent.”

It was a prowd momment for Phox Nuws. Whether it’s a prowd momment for network television is a trickier question.

“Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” (to give its full title), NBC’s show about putting on a “Saturday Night Live”-style TV show, has been preceded in its maiden season on Monday nights by “Heroes,” which starts at 9 p.m. “Heroes” is about a group of people with superhuman powers trying to prevent a nuclear holocaust, and I suspect it’s the kind of program that makes Mr. Sorkin feel quite ill. It’s also the hit of the fall season, attracting 14.3 million viewers on its last outing, many of them young, limber, and eager to buy things. But when “Studio 60” comes on, they flee, leaving NBC with 7.7 million.

If you’ve been watching “Studio 60,” just imagine how Jack Rudolph, the reptilian network chairman played by Steven Weber, would react to those numbers.

As a viewer, one wants to like “Studio 60.” One wants (or wanted) it to succeed, if only because it has such lofty aspirations. But by last week’s sixth and possibly final episode, certain questions became unavoidable. Why do its characters seem like political talking-points wrapped in human flesh? Are they speaking Mr. Sorkin’s dialogue or are they trapped in it? And what’s the show about, anyway?

Take the early episode in which the newly hired head writer, Matt Albie (Matthew Perry), zonked out on Vicodin following minor back surgery, held his first formal meeting with the show’s staff writers. Albie was wearing a suit. The writers were dressed as if they’d just raided the 50 cent bin of a Salvation Army store.”What are you guys wearing?” Albie asked, looking at them in disbelief. Then he said that from now on they’d have to come to work in suits.

It was, you might say, a culturally conservative moment. Albie (Mr. Sorkin’s fictional stand-in) wanted to write a sketch comedy show for sophisticated grownups. Ergo, his underlings ought to dress the part. A bit of a stretch, a bit of a throwback, but that’s what he said. A few scenes later Albie clutched his head in amazement and asked,”Did I really say that?”We were back in default liberal mode. And the minor issue of whether Albie truly wanted everyone to stop dressing like skateboarders or if it was just the Vicodin talking went unresolved. Did he really say that? Yes and no.

That’s “Studio 60” in a nutshell: The show that can’t make up its mind. After a while, the schizoid vacillation becomes infectious. People like me support it because it’s verbal as well as visual, and because it’s about intelligent people who discuss serious topics in an engaging way. At the same time, we can’t help noticing that half of what they say doesn’t make sense.

“Studio 60” also has an unusual problem: The longer you watch it, the less you know. Weirdly, the gradual accretion of characterological detail makes the principal players less convincing with each passing episode. Amanda Peet, who plays the gorgeous president of a major television network, was last seen stumbling around a party like a teenager who’d never been on a date. Albie — the head writer and comic genius — visits a comedy club and in a fit of counterintuitive affirmative-action guilt, hires a melancholy black comedian whose jokes sound as if they were written by the conservative columnist Shelby Steele. I happen to like Mr. Steele’s columns, but I can’t quite see him bringing the house down in Vegas.

Yet Albie, looking sagely on as the black comedian bombs — “You’re boring us!” someone shouts — mutters,”he just needs discipline.”It’s utterly ludicrous — he hasn’t hired a comedian, he’s hired a high school teacher. Mr. Perry, who’s been superb throughout the series, looks deeply queasy in the scene, and no wonder. Who wants to play the Designated White Guy in an absurd affirmative action fantasy? At moments like this, you have to wonder whether the high-IQ show of the season isn’t one of the dumbest things you’ve ever witnessed.

In that sense, “Studio 60” is the John Kerry of TV shows: It looks intelligent, it sounds intelligent, but your gut keeps telling you it’s a pompous windbag. It also has a political tin ear of monumental proportions. In the latest episode, a writer on the show is about to receive a visit from his parents. He speaks of them with such lassitude that someone inquires whether they’re actually alive. The answer: “Well they live in Columbus, Ohio, so barely.”

More than 1.5 million people live in the greater Columbus metropolitan area. That’s a lot of potential viewers for a struggling TV show to alienate with one sullen sentence. But this, remember, is the show that can’t make up its mind.

In due course the parents show up and, actually, the kid is right: They are barely sentient. His father is a walking corpse whose cultural knowledge is approximately equal to a pigeon’s. He hasn’t even heard of Abbott and Costello. Yet at the end of the visit, the son, who’s spent the entire time acting like a snooty docent, says: “I love you dad, and whether you like it or not, you taught me everything I know.”

But the father doesn’t know anything. We were just shown that.

“Studio 60” is both so smart and so stupid, it’s starting to resemble one of those bizarre medical mysteries on “House,” like the one about the boy who keeps seeing aliens because he’s biologically two people, one of whom is completely nuts. Hope that NBC keeps it on the air. One way and the other, it has the potential to entertain us for a long, long time.

bbernhard@nysun.com