As if to secure its position at the bottom of the broadcast TV networks’ heap. NBC aired the last episode of Aaron Sorkin’s brilliant “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” Thursday.

As ever, it was funny and sad and savagely true, which, as any good screenwriter knows, is bloody hard to do in 120 minuses, and damn near impossible to do the 40 minutes that are left in an hour-long show after the commercials are loaded in.

NBC’s new programming guys better act fast or they’ll lose the two or three good sitcoms they still have, and be left with nothing but endless iterations of “Law and Order,” “Dateline” anda slew of really dumb “reality shows.”

Sorkin’s flourishing, of course. His new movie, “Charlie Wilson’s War,” starring Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman, and directed by Mike Nichols, is in post-production and will be released later this year.

Meanwhile, an extraordinary new film, “The Fever,” has turned up – without any fanfare at all – on HBO. It will be screened on Saturday at 1 p.m. on HBO’s Signature Channel (507 or 508 in Santa Monica), and can be seen “on demand” through July 15.

Based on a play by writer/actor Wallace Shawn, adapted for the screen by Sha wn and Carlo Nero and directed by Nero, it stars his mother, Vanessa Redgrave. It is devastatingly honest and it will either ruin your day, or weekend, or electrify
you.