The Newsroom: Sorkin's HBO Joint

i try REALLY hard to turn and talk to the person i'm with through the entirety of those godforsaken things

...lest ye be confronted with the terrifying visage of Larry Hagman during the promo for the 'Dallas' reboot O_o

heh,not only have i already forgotten promqueentheus i also forgot about the
YOU'VE BEEN WATCHING "THE ROUNDUP" WITH PREVIEWS OF THE HOT NEW TNT SCIFI DRAMA FALLING SKIES THE NEW 2013 INFINITI AND THE US ARMY BE ALL THAT YOU CAN BE

― Authorities don't know who shot the 50 Cent the goose. (forksclovetofu), Monday, July 2, 2012 8:09 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark

ha are they really pushing hard to pretend Falling Skies is a new show to try to pull in people who missed how boring it was last year?

ya know, if there was one person i'd think to ask if i wanted to know whether a new TNT drama was all that or not, it would be sd.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1ETr1i_YNo

Mortimer seems like she's overacting every scene.

More Munn please.

Great dialogue

oh yeah olivia munn was good.
i feel like he hasn't earned 'great dialogue' because the rendering of people's speech can be fine but what they're talking about is such bullshit. it - already! - felt like such a weird retread of episode one - are you in or are you out, let's start this thing over. emily mortimer's speeches make me want to do some hysterical freudian reading about the gender dynamics of the woman needing to be saved by the heroic guy. & the dialogue just rotates around vague allegiance to a noble cause. it isn't a show about what people believe but that they (intensely, admirably) believe. nothing's getting unpacked or explored.

2nd episodes tend to get made so long after pilots that i think sometimes there's a tendency to reiterate and overstate the premise and keep 'beginning' the story, even though the audience usually just saw the first episode a week earlier and doesn't need reminding. 2nd ep of Newsroom had much bigger problems than just that, though, obv.

How is my buddy Kumail in that Franklin & Bash thing?

emily mortimer's speeches make me want to do some hysterical freudian reading about the gender dynamics of the woman needing to be saved by the heroic guy.

this is so otm. i was like, what is up with her ridiculous over-the-top praise of this surly dude at every turn. i mean, i know, she has a guilty conscience and is maybe still in love with him, but honestly it was absurd. the dialogue is not great!

the dumb email incompetence plotline telegraphed itself immediately, but i will admit i laughed at emily mortimer destroying dude from homeland's phone. i preferred sports night's take on unexpected comedy when natalie tried to shock dan rydell out of his writer's block. yes i will be that annoying girl who, for every plot point on the newsroom, brings up a superior sports night plot point.

at this point i just assume there is a site somewhere tracking all the sorkinisms and self-plagiarisms on this show (the one that bugged me most in this episode was lohman echoing natalie's "why isn't anyone yelling at me?" freakout but without remotely as justifiable a context for it).

nobody whose name isn't Franklin or Bash gets much to do on F&B. Kumail was good recently on Bunk, which is a really really funny show, though.

SD, I trust you've seen this already?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S78RzZr3IwI

this part of the New Yorker review made me laugh

The second episode is more obviously stuffed with piety and syrup, although there’s one amusing segment, when McAvoy mocks some right-wing idiots. After that, “The Newsroom” gets so bad so quickly that I found my jaw dropping. The third episode is lousy (and devolves into lectures that are chopped into montages). The fourth episode is the worst. There are six to go.

yeah i'm aware of the youtube, i was talking about tracking the use of sorkinisms in the new show

it isn't a show about what people believe but that they (intensely, admirably) believe. nothing's getting unpacked or explored.

it's not about their believing, it's about their having trouble believing. namely in their ideals (or 'verities', like i saw one reviewer call them), and in themselves (e.g. enough to do what they think they should be doing, or say what they think they should be saying).

the emily mortimer character goes around praising will because the idea is that people in this setup depend, for their belief in themselves, on whether some particular other person believes in them. a lot of the action - i don't know if you want to call it unpacking or exploring, but i don't think sorkin is really going to try to show you anything but what he thinks of as timeless truths, not extremely content-specific insights into institutions like the news (tho some of that, so far as he picks out some of its structural features accurately) or into the present historical moment or whatever - a lot of the action comes in the characters trying to avoid or refuse accepting the belief others show in them.

in the case of the leads that has partly to do with their relationship past, recovery from which is probably going to be spun out for a while as various incidents bring them closer to or drive them farther from being able to fully acknowledge the past. (e.g. in the second episode we find she cheated on him, but she says she only found she really loved him when she did; but she intimates that there was something about him that made him not quite loveable that drove her to cheat; that's probably not accurate or fair at this point, but it's a sign of what will get spun out as will eventually opens himself up enough to being pegged by what she has to say that she ventures to say it.)

i assume that part of it is also that there's some ambivalence about accepting an affirmation of belief in yourself from someone else insofar as these people define themselves by their ideals and their visible, public pursuit of them. you're not supposed to do it just for another person, not just because he or she says you're right, that you're doing right, but because your beliefs are right, or your judgment is right, or because you're on the right side of the issue. this is a setup that tends to repel personal affirmations as mere personal attachments. but it's in tension with the tendency of public pursuit of an ideal to be tempted by, corrupted by, or confused with conformity, pandering, absence of principles or integrity. when the atmosphere is idealistic enough that tends to drive the protagonists back toward looking for affirmations of the only people who could possibly release them from their bind, other people of sound judgment, strong belief, etc.

one option on the table there is that you could simply withdraw if you're satisfied enough that YOU know what's what even if you might not be fully pursuing the realization of your ideals in the world (which is where will is, immediately before the first scene of the pilot). part of the allure of someone else believing in you, believing that you're right, for these sorts of characters would be the prospect of finding someone whose belief in you took the form of love. so the action of the pilot partly turns on will's avoidance of that knowledge, that someone loves him. at the beginning he can't see straight, isn't even sure he's seeing her. after he gets offstage he has to ask, 'what did i say in there?'. her words, on her sign, literally brought out something in him he didn't know he had in him, couldn't recognize.

and he is still avoiding recognizing her at the end of the pilot. he brushes her off (by the terms of their current relationship, which come up again: one hour owned by her, because she says so, and he concedes under the auspices of the job since she's his EP; and a week-to-week contract according to which she's at the mercy of his whims, temper) and assumes this eminently composed attitude (compared to the outburst at the beginning, which was an exception) to tell her a story about a time he displayed composure (when he was really drunk) because of his love for her and/or respect for her parents (cf. the bad-ep pressuring the emily mortimer counterpart alison pill to help him lie to her parents), which story easily disturbs HER composure. when he peeks his head into the control room to thank the (wrong) staff, SAYING that he's no longer going to not tell people what their importance is to him, he's getting it wrong while turning his back on her. then as he's leaving in the elevator he makes as if he's revealing something to her — taking back the lie he fabricated on the night of his outburst about vertigo medicine — by saying that it was that he thought he saw her even though he couldn't have, telling her that he couldn't have recognized her rather than making it a question and letting her tell him that she DID recognize him. (letting himself admit this would also mean admitting that she had gotten him right, known what to say to him, that she had brought out the revealing outburst, etc.)

holy fucking shit

lol

http://www.quarterlyconversation.com/images/paragraph-bw.jpg

ignore this damn philistine j., i'll read your big ass thing

after i eat lunch

the whitespace is so youze can initiate a generations-long tradition of commentary

putting contenderizer out to pasture right there.

i just can't believe anyone has that much to say about anything concerning this show

i swear i read the first para, started to scroll down and thought 'contenderizer' post before seeing the dn xp

oh my! ty for engaging w/me, j., i was actually super proud of the concise, all-encompassing wisdom of the one-liner which you're responding to, i went and pulled it verbatim from the gchat in which it arose to post, here, but i feel pretty inequipped to go in as deep as you -- the characters aren't deep enough yet to go so far into motives or conflicting pressures.

for me the believing/having-trouble-believing thing is just going to be a generic tv cycle, in which the waver in the pursuit of something is a stage in the episode, part of the inevitable drift towards things coming good - the moment of doubt before the valiant reversal or whatever, chandler & monica's break up before their marriage. i don't think that JD's cynicism about the news is fleshed out enough to feel real or support his oscillation between I'M ON BOARD & fuck tv news or w/e. we derive our satisfaction as viewers from the guy coming good & putting on a good show, that being a successful delivery of news programmes that are generally viewed as a positive thing. what i'm trying to say when i say that it's about the act of belief rather than the subject is that the only tension seems to relate to whether or not they are in or out, not the texture or feasibility of the thing itself. i'm p sure some of the west wing actually debated tenets of american exceptionalism - like Josh in the cafeteria with the kids, they don't just hate us for our freedom, c'mon or w/e, which i guess maybe the guy's opening intro did. but for me if it isn't ~about~ the ~role~ of the news, it should be kinda more a procedural, or if it is about the news then it should be more nuts-n-bolts, less lofty bullshit. how do you feel about it so far? you have a much better recall of the nuances & significance of the various turning points of the plot - like shit that whole elevator thing - do you think it's succeeding?

at this point i just assume there is a site somewhere tracking all the sorkinisms and self-plagiarisms on this show

fwiw i was kinda disappointed by the ny mag thing about dialogue recycling - so much of it was broadbrush enough that it's kinda understandable that it'd be a topic the guy had revisited a couple of times in similar contexts.

i thought it was gonna be - Aaron, Tuesday, 3 July 2012 18:57 (59 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink, tbh

i just think the guy recycling THAT much is ridiculous. like, either he has too much contempt for the audience to think they'd notice or that it matters to them, or he's cynically plugging the same elements into a formula over and over because it "works" (even when it doesn't), or he lacks the self-awareness or memory to realize how much he repeats himself. and any of the above is pretty lousy.

xpost

i kinda saw it more as just a - maybe woody isn't the perfect fit, but - woody allen kinda thing, covering the same territory again. i guess if we're talking dialogue, like actual lines, here, then that's slightly more awkward, but to me it felt more just like he was running around the same themes. it's less problematic to me than his enduring failings, ie staid or bloated character types &c, anyway.

but it's not even one thing or another that's recurring -- bits of dialogue, character types, plots, relationships, physical gags, settings, even episode titles, EVERYTHING he does just gets regurgitated out of the same blender over and over, to an unusual and remarkable degree.

i think there's something to be said for artists letting their unconscious mind shine through and allowing the unintentional repetition of themes to speak for itself as kind of a subliminal statement on what's important to them. but at a certain point guys like him need a collaborator who's seen his other stuff and is welling to say "wait let's not do that again, people have seen it before."

sorkin needing a collaborator is otm in general - his instincts veer him towards such whirlwinds of syrup. that this episode was called & frequently referred to 2.0, & sorta plastered some contemporary facade over its general ninetiesism, seemed so backwards. everyone otm about the unfired chekhovian pistol of the "new e-mail system" too it could be dynamic but it isn't.

schlump, i don't know if it's succeeding. that depends an awful lot on what sorkin does with a season's worth of episodes. i kind of find myself hoping he uses the shorter season to force himself to write an arc that integrates this kind of relationship-logic with the initiating event.

but i was very disappointed by the reviews i've read. studio 60 did seem kind of ill-advised to me at the time, but i would've thought that with all the recap nerds out there now parsing glances and dress colors and stuff for mad men and speculating about gus's motivations on breaking bad there would have been some better watching/interpreting out there on the internet for a sorkin joint. i've always found the self-congratulatory viewers he attracts distasteful, but particularly because they cloud the question of what's any good about sorkin. like, the question of whether he really has any ideas, or really is writing intelligent tv or whatever. he's written some good-sounding monologues, but i think too many people get distracted by the blustery features of his dialogue and then think that what they're supposed to be doing is deciding whether they're hearing good arguments, or whether people really talk that way, or whether it isn't just speechifying on the writer's part, or whether he is or isn't right to be sticking it to x idiots. i think it's pretty clear that as a writer he invests a big part of his thought in the dramatic structure. when he loses his shit and when he's working at a really high level that can be obscured (because the structure falls apart or because there's so much going on thanks to it that you don't notice it all working), but it seems like the contrasts between the characters across the episodes, what they say and do, admit and don't admit, etc., are very clearly drawn in these first two 'newsroom' episodes. clear lines.

what i wonder about, though, is how formalist he is going to be about it. it strikes me that he seems to have purified some of the elements from past shows. like, it's a workplace drama. and a backstage workplace drama. and the main relationship is one that bridges the onscreen/control room divide. and the job is one that is defined by its being public, in the public's interest, for the good of the public. and letting your personal life manifest itself in your job is considered to be bad in all kinds of ways (as well as just unprofessional re workplace drama when it's ratcheted up to sorkinian hyper-competency levels). but to excel at it you have to have the kind of strong personality that is liable to overflow and show up in your work, i.e., in public. the set is kind of like the sportsnight set, but more starkly split between public/private visible/hidden: will has an office, the office, and though mackenzie has one you don't see it until the second episode, there's a conference room for group-dynamic scenes and for looking into from outside when there are arguments and trainwrecks, there's a massively public open office (where the lower-level characters have to play out their conversations and become exposed, and where the upper-level characters are constantly going to be storming in and out of to try to conceal themselves and their conversations), there's the news desk (facing dangerously out into the public - like in mackenzie's threat to assert her control over will when he's there) / control room combo…compare that to the warrens and the compartmentalization of the west wing, where a lot of the particularities of the relationships between characters were developed with the use of their offices and their access to others (josh and donna, toby signaling by throwing the ball at the window, leo, not to mention margaret and charlie and mrs. landingham, as intermediaries to the president).

the main relations to the outer world seem more simplified/purified here too. being in the white house made the relation to the outer world complicated on the west wing. on sportsnight, there was the relation to the network, and the question of ratings and such, intra-network competition ('10:00' versus whatsername the overnight anchor on sportsnight), but they kind of had to puff themselves up, or slip off-topic, a bit to get plots that hit a sorkinesque level of idealism since they were basically just doing sports news. on the newsroom the idea of the public point of the work seems less contestable, which is kind of why i was attracted to that 'believing in' talk. on the west wing to try to realize their ideal they had to fight among themselves, fight with their own party, the opposing party, deal with the citizenry, deal with the events of reality, all of which could involve competing claims from the other parties about what exactly they were all up to. here it seems like people know what is called for in doing the news, it's just that well-known forces (inner and outer) conspire against doing it.

that tends to make me think that there isn't that much to say about meeting this ideal, in terms of 'what the news is'. and a procedural made out of that would be pretty boring on sorkiny terms; he can't do the week-to-week novel story that a police procedural or a medical show can do (just because he can't make himself / pull it off, i think - he needs a story idea that his structure lets him intensify or clarify, more than one that he can try to detail finely or poignantly; and there's something about the repetition involved in the crime procedural or the medical investigation that seems repugnant to him). which is another reason i found it interesting that he drew the dramatic lines, as they connected with the relationship-and-ideals lines, so clearly. it seemed like a good reason to trust him when he says that he just does relationship stories about people who do the news.

the question will be how or whether he lets the history between the characters that happens in the episodes accumulate and come together in ways that throw any of the relationships into question. i think almost every reviewer has rightly seen that it would be cheap to do this with romantic relationships, and they see the potential for doing it (especially with maggie and her bad-boyfriend/good-senior-producer triangle, but i wonder about who they're going to throw olivia munn's character up against, will seems way too easy). sorkin certainly hasn't been able to resist that in the past, but it's hard to recover from. big historical relationship-changers on the west wing were bartlett's lying to his staff about ms (contrasted with the public), and his concealing his assassination of dude from his family. i don't know about smaller ones. sorkin tends to effect relationship/history-changing things like that by having the characters fuck up somehow and become ashamed / temporarily lose the faith of their peers or betters. i suppose 'making compromises to get the story / quash the story' is the main well on 'the newsroom'.

another way that sorkin could fill out the very formal framework is with some reality. that seems pretty dangerous. he has a really conflicted relationship with it, i think. (that's partly why all the facts, as if to prove that he is writing a show that is about reality, i.e. that the ideals the characters pursue are realizable). bartlett getting shot, pretty good reality (one of the better dividends: its effects on charlie and on his relationship to zoey). 9/11, good stimulus in certain ways. the 'rescue my kidnapped brother from terrorists or whoever' arc in the second half of 'studio 60' seems like the biggest, most improbable failure to add 'reality' to a show ever. from the start he has a constrained relation to 'reality' with the 2010 'newsroom' stories, which kind of makes me expect him to reach for showbiz/corporate intrusions into the proper-newsworld. (i hear there's going to be a tabloid/scandal story?)

but i was very disappointed by the reviews i've read. studio 60 did seem kind of ill-advised to me at the time, but i would've thought that with all the recap nerds out there now parsing glances and dress colors and stuff for mad men and speculating about gus's motivations on breaking bad there would have been some better watching/interpreting out there on the internet for a sorkin joint. i've always found the self-congratulatory viewers he attracts distasteful, but particularly because they cloud the question of what's any good about sorkin. like, the question of whether he really has any ideas, or really is writing intelligent tv or whatever. he's written some good-sounding monologues, but i think too many people get distracted by the blustery features of his dialogue and then think that what they're supposed to be doing is deciding whether they're hearing good arguments, or whether people really talk that way, or whether it isn't just speechifying on the writer's part, or whether he is or isn't right to be sticking it to x idiots. i think it's pretty clear that as a writer he invests a big part of his thought in the dramatic structure. when he loses his shit and when he's working at a really high level that can be obscured (because the structure falls apart or because there's so much going on thanks to it that you don't notice it all working), but it seems like the contrasts between the characters across the episodes, what they say and do, admit and don't admit, etc., are very clearly drawn in these first two 'newsroom' episodes. clear lines.

this is very otm

will let you know if the second paragraph is otm in october

Watching this even if it nose dives.

killer post j.

killer post j.

― Black_vegeta (Hungry4Ass), Tuesday, 3 July 2012 21:22 (46 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^
i'm really awed by how orderly your view of this is. i'm less optimistic about a neat union of relationship history/narrative progression than you, i think, maybe having been so thoroughly burned in Studio 60, which - spoiler, fwiw - offered a couple of engrossing complications but unashamedly just satisfied everyone possible at the end; the various realities of what it's like when people are together and then apart and then thrown together weren't explored beyond the bad moods the-chandler-guy & the lead-actress-woman would be in. i might be bringing something personal to the table, here, but long-running submerged never-spoken or lingering romances can feel unconvincing to me, & so i think i'm thinking of will & mackenzie as a slow-release eventual-reunion timebomb more than i am an interesting influence upon their future interactions.

but that was a really great post, particularly wrt the privacy and effect of spaces & hierarchies. will watch extra-hard next week. iirc there are gonna be some monologues to discuss.

i still haven't seen an episode of this, but j.'s post is the first thing that makes me want to...

cautiously optimistic about the introduction of Terry Crews apparently coming in a few episodes

wow, j. thanks for those posts!

i can't help feeling like the newsroom hasn't earned that level of attention yet, and i think the nussbaum review is good! but you've given me a lot to think about.

but they kind of had to puff themselves up, or slip off-topic, a bit to get plots that hit a sorkinesque level of idealism since they were basically just doing sports news.

i'm beginning to wonder if this isn't why sports night turns out to be the most palatable sorkin project to me at the end of the day. because if you're going to do an hour-long show about immigration or deal with the trauma of September 11th or whatever lofty thing an individual episode of the west wing tried to do (alongside sorkin's dramatic structural concerns, which, you are right, are always present and are probably the thing he is best at), you have to not cop out on the level of thought. does sorkin have any ideas?

on sports night i feel like the really amazingly structured episodes, like the one where gordon wears casey's shirt with the implications thereof, bear witness to a social world, a network of relationships that is complex and compelling and gets at that thing in your first post--people needing to be believed in/shying away from people who believe in them, etc. etc.

also i loved how the characters on sports night were really intense about their job and bristled at others' observations that "they were basically just doing sports news."

yeah, i think that's good for audience identification. it's nice to be able to feel that you can see your own passion or intensity for work in that of the characters. but if you see it in west wing staffers then there's something that could be chastening about thinking of yourself on their model, you're not serving the president or your country or whatever, you're not the best of the best.

about attention—to ol forksclovetofu too—i don't think it's a matter of earning a level of attention, so much. it took me a while to type out my posts and i'd certainly like to be able to really sort out what i think in the context of nice readings of the episodes, so there's more attention to give, but i don't really think i paid an excessive amount of attention. this was just stuff i saw, and that i expect a lot of people could see. what i found frustrating about a lot of reviews was that they acted like there was nothing good being done with the writing/show overall, without talking about any of this sort of stuff, which seemed to me exactly what was happening, what WAS being done.

since it's pretty accomplished, at least for me, that sustains quite a bit of interest. i don't know about the other kind. like, i found the first couple episodes emotionally affecting, but don't know what to expect about where it might go. i'm remembering the first season of 'angel', where they go along kind of doing stuff, but it's not until the episode where doyle dies that you're like, ok, i'm all in now. i can't remember what the comparable episode on 'west wing' was. but i find it rewarding to try to think ahead of these things and see if i can follow what the writers are setting themselves up for. whereas watching like, 'castle' or something, or even usa shows that i think are pretty smartly written like 'suits' or 'white collar', i don't so much expect as much of a payoff from close attention to the basic structural setup.

i'm honestly not sure what people are asking for when they want ideas from a show.

maybe "ideas" wasn't the right word. also maybe i'm not reading the show properly. i don't know, i had a whole bunch of stuff i was going to say here about immigration and anti-immigrant sentiment, but i think it probably amounts to my not reading the show properly and the show not really being for me. i will still read your posts about it.

yeah, i think that's good for audience identification. it's nice to be able to feel that you can see your own passion or intensity for work in that of the characters.

zing!

i have no passion or intensity for work tbh; i think it's aspirational in my case

i'm honestly not sure what people are asking for when they want ideas from a show.

― j., Wednesday, July 4, 2012 3:09 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

i think for THIS show the complaint is that Sorkin engages in a lot of serious real world questions about politics and media in a way that is surface-level 'smart' but actually just verbose and not actually informed or insightful.

yesterday i talked to my dad, who is possibly a bigger Sports Night fan than me, and he's enjoying Newsroom so far, particularly the big speech in the pilot. which is basically the kind of speech he gives in his living room to family members on a weekly basis.

OMG the po faced solemnity of this fucking show it is SO SILLY