The Newsroom: Sorkin's HBO Joint

i have to make myself forget that her character's name is 'Mackenzie MacHale'

i feel like every detail of this will be forgotten in a couple months

i'm going to write a compelling dramatization of how we should've made fun of it 2 years from now, though

Sorkin is literally the worst writer in the world. It's incredible how terrible he is at understanding how human beings and the spoken word work both independently and in interrelated ways.

Also the casting for this was terrible.

I really enjoy just watching daniels just do his thing though. didn't know that about myself!

is this programme basically just meant to make journalists feel great?

I actually really enjoyed the live production of the news show part very similarly to how I enjoyed the west wing. every other aspect of this endeavor was absolutely unbearable.

not the journalists who broke the stories that newsroom takes credit for xp

i checked out the newsroom hashtag last night and there were a lot of people saying variations "of course journalists don't like this show, it reveals how bad they are at their jobs!"

i thought this was pretty okay? i enjoyed it? or i'm trying not to reflexively hate on it just because some of it was obviously pretty standard in pretty standard ways. it would be nice if he could do something to transcend the network cliches but i don't know that they're awful for their inclusion, more just disappointing. like the working with an ex relationship in which each side conceals an enigmatic history & still smoulders thing - it is such a pre-fab timebomb, & it was in studio 60, but it's lazy writing more than it is bad tv, i think. i wish alison pill wasn't such a klutz, because she's great, also her dress was v nice, but i can get with the peter parker whippy new newsroom guy. it would be nice if her bf became slightly more complex rather than just spitting out fodder to justify our affection for his rival. i think this is gonna be particularly problematic if the audience is already privileged with the gift of hindsight & knowledge of historical irony, so we always know who we're rooting for, who'll be vindicated & who'll be a stupid hubristic asshole. & the waterson guy seems like a missed opportunity. there should be some awesome intriguing back room network man. a david carr man. instead it is a guy in a bow tie. do you remember this guy from studio 60? i hated him. like a budget kevin bacon.

http://www.seriesadictos.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/studio-60-weber-300a121206.jpg

Is that Steven Weber?

it's ricky sargulesh

i thought Weber was one of the more redeemable parts of Studio 60, actually

o easily

this thread and emily nussbaum's (otm, at least based on the pilot) review of the newsroom are making me kind of want to watch studio 60, which i couldn't stomach at all when it was airing.

in a perverse way, just to help me catalogue all the ways in which sorkin shows are embarrassing

really?
i'm trying to find a picture of one of the simpsons characters who wears a suit and works for a network and represents corporate interests to include, whom he seemed to be the live action version of. iirc he was just a kinda james murdoch guy with occasional displays of pre-programmed emotion.
xxp

to be clear, "better than Sarah Paulson in Studio 60" was not meant as high praise

omg that actor is so annoying. sarah paulson, i mean.

if i were kristen chenoweth, i'd be like, her? really? thanks, dude.

really nobody could've played the Kristen Chenoweth cipher besides Chenoweth herself, but Paulson was pretty amazingly ill-fitted for it (xpost)

i wonder if i have a lower standard for judging this - like if its flaws are all the things we can file under _ways in which sorkin shows are embarrassing_ i think i'll be okay with it; it won't be the sopranos that manages to be generally complex, but its lazy failures are the kinds of lazy failures that we're super used to - un-fleshed-out female characters, predilection towards syrup & happy endings & rootsy belief, &c&c&c. it was when those things sorta overtook the interplay of characters or blunted the occasional exchanges of people having well-rendered arguments in the west wing or studio 60 that i tuned out slightly.

can i just say the murky moody Greg Mottola direction is a terrible look for this show? it could've at least been a better, more Sorkin-y Sorkin show if it was a little more crisp and clear.

this has been mentioned but i think the problem is that tv has gotten a lot better and there's enough good tv to watch that i don't feel especially compelled to watch the aaron sorkin hour esp if it's kinda lousy?

can i just say the murky moody Greg Mottola direction is a terrible look for this show? it could've at least been a better, more Sorkin-y Sorkin show if it was a little more crisp and clear.

― some dude, Monday, June 25, 2012 9:24 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

maybe you're right but i experienced mottola's direction as the one refreshing change because everything else about the show down to phrases of dialogue was such a retread.

if it had that thomas schlamme sports night look (which i love) i would just have popped in a sports night dvd because at least robert guillaume can deliver sorkin dialogue.

yeah true. but to me it felt a lot like Moneyball, which similarly tried to be brooding and meditative in a way that brings out the worst in his dialogue.

yeah sure. but i guess it's a there-if-you-need-it thing that delivers media-y distraction for people who are eligible/interested in it, with a good cast more, than it is a bold new take on anything. there is something funny about the west wing existing slightly before an advance and change in quality and style of tv - i watched some a while back & you could sense how it was slightly constrained compared to how it might've been a few years later - it'd occasionally go for a big cinematic gambit, use of some weird mike oldfield style orchestral music or of bold percussive flourishes, but it never seemed to go that much further. maybe sometimes. maybe with the canteen 9/11 episode.

some of the look of this was pretty nice, i thought. daniels & the exec's walk & talk, the exterior thing on 6th ave.

this thread and emily nussbaum's (otm, at least based on the pilot) review of the newsroom are making me kind of want to watch studio 60, which i couldn't stomach at all when it was airing.

had a swell old time watching the pilot, but by ep 3 or so the novelty of an SNL-based drama wore off. May revisit.

granted, i came into it like I did Tommy Wiseau's The Room.

i have fondness for greg mottola because of the daytrippers + adventureland, so i might have just decided to like his direction when i saw his name tbh

the direction reminded me of Adventureland and i kinda hated Adventureland

yes i remember being mad at you about that

Studio 60 would have been fine if a. they had better skits, or just never showed them and b. sorkin could have left his anti-christian right boner off tv.

even if they had better skits I'd then say "well why don't you just do a great sketch comedy show instead of a self-righteous drama about one"

another problem for me is that iannucci's vision of how politics works resonates a lot more w/ how i believe they work than sorkin's. when west wing was out, that kind of critique (where the horseracing stuff can take backseat to the ethics) was still fresh enough (and i was young enough) that i was willing to buy it - that even if WW lacked a certain kind of verisimilitude, i still appreciated the implicit subtext (people are essentially good, politicians are trying to do the right thing in complicated environment, the vision that there is something greater than us that connects us). but in 2012 for a variety of reasons (my age, the changing political landscape, etc) iannucci critique of politics as just selfish, narcissistic, incompetent vapidness feels more real to me, and it's hard to go back to the sorkin narrative. but like, this is kinda what it is for everything -- once the critique exhausts itself, it's hard to care quite as much. not that this forgives the terrible writing and dumb ideas of Newsroom, but that it's already pushing the wrong way against the culture.

Iannucci and Sorkin feels like a false binary to me, and neither places a big priority on realism.

i don't know about realism, but my impression is that both are trying to indicate something that is true about how our politics + political systems work. i think sorkin is more interested in the potential of politics, and iannucci is more interested in its failures.

if i wanted straight realism i'd just watch CSPAN all the time

if I wanted to listen to a newsman yelling all the time, I'd watch the actual news.

the one great thing i like about the west wing is that, although its never said, bartlett was quite obv a shitty president who got nothing done. maybe its because they were always talking about ethics and being good and shit

better than that empty suit Newman or goddamn Lassiter!

tv has gotten a lot better

as long as you don't turn it on.

it turns me on

classic Morbs xpost

For me, this fared worse because we've had the ace look/feel/editing of The Social Network and Moneyball, and this didn't match up.

Sorkin mentioned in an interview how a cable show means not having to write for commercial breaks every 10 minutes, but I think what Fincher and Bennett Miller both figured out is that there needs to be some breathing room between the gushes of language--and so the most memorable parts of both films are the quiet moments in between as much as (or more than) the dialogue.

Funny how David Milch and Aaron Sorkin are maybe the two best and most rhythmically complex writers of dialogue in TV but are now probably incapable of making a fully satisfying show. Maybe movies are the way to go. Or maybe a 30-minute show would push either them into a good haiku zone.

This is streaming free on YouTube and HBO and everywhere, btw.

So, my studio note is: needs some scenes of Jeff Daniels in a cab looking out a window, making a sandwich, whatever. Needs some rests.

I think that's exactly otm. I couldn't put my finger on what was wrong even setting aside the Sorkinisms and I think that's it.

Having those beats would also have served to make the live broadcast section feel even more tense than it did. Newsrooms in my experience are long periods of boredom punctuated by total frenzy. This was a long period of soap-opera-level screamy shouty punctuated by mid-frenzy.

this thread has made me resolve to watch Sports night. i watched a few eps when it was airing but i didnt 'get it' back then, im sure i'll be more receptive now

i started it this year, i didn't get addicted to it but i liked it. i also noticed the weirdness of the laugh track - it felt like the most reluctant laugh track ever.

overall, i found the 90s-tv vibe a bit distracting, tbh. not the show's fault.