The Newsroom: Sorkin's HBO Joint

it's a koan

they're reviewing the novelization

that article was at least good, unlike the NY Review of Books thing about GIrls

the commenter on that article "barry lyons" mounts an incredibly hilarious defense of Studio 60

one, the show was too literate

two, nothing wrong with me

looooool

this is the worst show on television in the most interesting way.

thank god i have breaking bad as a palate cleanser.

after that oft-quoted early review shouted out episode 4 as the worst of the first few, i was prepared for some total garbage and tonight was actually the closest this show has given me to the feeling of the better older Sorkin shows.

this show is hella corny but it almost works as kind of a reverse-satire of the news--like rather caricature the news as hyper venal and stupid do the complete opposite and thus critique the media that way. it's very old fashioned in a "mr. smith goes to washington" kinda way.

That's so gracious

i would say old fashioned in a demented, self-righteous "Bulworth" kinda way only without pras

ok why would everyone come in on a Saturday just because this dude is obsessed with Bigfoot.

also this episode is called "I Will Try To Fix You" and it ends with a Coldplay song that features those very lyrics.

there was a flashback to LAST WEEK'S EPISODE in the middle of a scene to explain what was going on.

i'm gonna watch every episode of this season fyi

^ditto and i don't know why! it's like watching ugly people have sex in a lucite coffin

this show is hella corny but it almost works as kind of a reverse-satire of the news--like rather caricature the news as hyper venal and stupid do the complete opposite and thus critique the media that way. it's very old fashioned in a "mr. smith goes to washington" kinda way.

― ryan, Monday, 16 July 2012 05:03 (18 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah this is OTM. like it's a wildean thing in trying to depict some idealistic super news. it's just kinda problematic that it's so flawed in other areas, & that there are the rendering issues - like the technophobia, &c - about the news show itself.

there was a flashback to LAST WEEK'S EPISODE in the middle of a scene to explain what was going on.

― Legendary General Cypher Raige (Gukbe), Monday, 16 July 2012 05:56 (17 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol.

i thought this was pretty okay, too; it's definitely still shoehorned with bold, slightly ill-advised sorkinisms like the bigfoot thing, but at least something was happening. it'll be interesting to see whether there's more Gabrielle Giffords stuff next week, because it was hard to work out how daring/weird its incorporation was based on just that; like in some senses it was obviously awful, what with the coldplay & its co-option as a drum to bang the staff's righteousness on/backdrop for some smallscale James-McAvoy-guy smouldering &c. but then in other ways it feels like you should be able to play with that history a little. at least if it's for the aim of molding a story about how the news should work.

my main takehome from this ep is man i love alison pill so much, it is just unbearable

Is she the weird looking blonde?

she is maggie, she is real pretty i think. she was on in treatment & in some recent woody allen films &c.

Yeah, def less horrible than the last few. If it stays at this level it's better than lots of network stuff (which is not a high bar) but that doesn't mean that it's uniformly smart or enjoyable by any stretch. There's still an undertone of unbelievable condescension towards all women, made slightly less terrible here because it's directed towards maggie who is supposed to be sort of naive as opposed to mackenzie who is supposed to be together or whatever. Nonetheless, both men in maggie's life are, judging by this episode alone, fucking enormous douches.

there is just no restraint in the portrayal of assholish-boyfriend-being-assholish. like has he done one okay thing yet or has each action - even tentatively okaying the RIP screen in this ep - been just some additional straw in the haybail of she should be with the other guy. i am saying this while being 100% on board the swooning over her & the other guy, it's just so clunky.

I'm trying to remember how he worked it in previous series. Relationship stuff seemed to happen at a pace that didn't draw too much attention to itself in The West Wing, even as threads were just dropped for whatever (RIP Mallory and Sam). Sabrina Lloyd/Josh Malina in Sports Night seemed to happen quickly, but they just wound up together and we followed their various trials and tribulations. That worked pretty well for a 30 minute a week thing. He seems to want to get EVERYTHING into a 10 hour span that he can here though. Which, really, isn't that much longer than a 22 episode season of Sports Night with each ep being 20-odd minutes, but maybe he needs to be able to space it apart.

the other guy was horrible this episode too. really repulsive with the whole "go talk to your boyfriend" speech.

I'm trying to remember how he worked it in previous series. Relationship stuff seemed to happen at a pace that didn't draw too much attention to itself in The West Wing, even as threads were just dropped for whatever (RIP Mallory and Sam). Sabrina Lloyd/Josh Malina in Sports Night seemed to happen quickly, but they just wound up together and we followed their various trials and tribulations. That worked pretty well for a 30 minute a week thing. He seems to want to get EVERYTHING into a 10 hour span that he can here though. Which, really, isn't that much longer than a 22 episode season of Sports Night with each ep being 20-odd minutes, but maybe he needs to be able to space it apart.

― Legendary General Cypher Raige (Gukbe), Monday, July 16, 2012 8:44 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

i think this is where the episodes jumping weeks/months apart from one big story to the next has been an especially bad idea. one of my favorite things about Sports Night was how it really felt like you were literally getting the day-to-day of the workplace, watching one situation unfold for a couple days in one ep and then picking up later that day or that week in the next ep (which made the jump ahead from season 1 to season 2 feel refreshing and narratively significant). on Newsroom you're just hopping around and "oh here's a montage so you get an idea of where these people are with each other but we're not going to earn it at all, we're just gonna jump into the big confrontation."

oh, and the fucking date crawling across the screen just as they break the Giffords story, don't get me started

^^^oh god i'm sick of that date popping up, so it's like REVEAL THIS IS AN EVENT

another downside of trying to tie everything into real events.

also i'd like to reiterate that this show is terrible-looking, hate the bleary washed-out look of it all

what really bugs me about this show is its hypocritical sanctimoniousness. tabloids are horrible! we shouldn't be distracted by such tawdriness! oh and btw here's a bunch of adults acting like morons about their stupid bullshit "relationships." and a seven-minute version of "fix you"

you sound like you're trying to civilize the world

playing "fix you" over an emotional moment is so tired and hacky, aaron sorkin you're doing things they did on The O.C. in 2005.

playing "fix you" over an emotional moment is so tired and hacky, aaron sorkin you're doing things they did on The O.C. in 2005.

― deist mountain dew (reddening), Tuesday, 17 July 2012 08:09 (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the music is so bad! like its conspicuous - sad 1997-era radiohead reveals

I'm trying to remember how he worked it in previous series. Relationship stuff seemed to happen at a pace that didn't draw too much attention to itself in The West Wing, even as threads were just dropped for whatever (RIP Mallory and Sam). Sabrina Lloyd/Josh Malina in Sports Night seemed to happen quickly, but they just wound up together and we followed their various trials and tribulations. That worked pretty well for a 30 minute a week thing. He seems to want to get EVERYTHING into a 10 hour span that he can here though. Which, really, isn't that much longer than a 22 episode season of Sports Night with each ep being 20-odd minutes, but maybe he needs to be able to space it apart.

― Legendary General Cypher Raige (Gukbe), Tuesday, 17 July 2012 01:44 (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think the most ominous precedent for this relationship heavy handedness is studio 60, in which something simmered on and off for exactly as long as it needed to until the last ep. otm about the preferable thing of just fading in and out of those storylines, cf mary louise parker's character in west wing.

unless this has a story in which someone misplaces their underwear it's going to remain above sorkin's batting average for romantic whatever

oh c'mon dana didn't LOSE her underwear she took it off

there's nothing much about this show that makes sense

yay p4reene

http://www.salon.com/2012/07/19/aaron_sorkin_versus_frivolity/

The fuck were all those camera ZOOMS in this ep?

The ZOOMS made me think that Altman doing this material could've been a good combo.

Pareene otmfm

Pareene otm but I have two quibbles (why oh why am I defending this nonsense?)

The significance to the company heads of the Tea Party bashing wasn't that it was bad for ratings, it was that they became congressmen and some were going to be on the communications subcommittee and the boss needed their support. Which is a much better critique than "ratings drop stop being mean".

Also weren't major network news divisions massive loss-leaders for a long time, as in that was their point? Also, British networks sink money into their news programmes and they don't make any profit at all and they're still good. I'd say Channel 4 News is still the best nightly news broadcast around actually, so Sorkin is right there.

I don't watch this show and I'm saying this as an outsider but...

"The significance to the company heads of the Tea Party bashing wasn't that it was bad for ratings, it was that they became congressmen and some were going to be on the communications subcommittee and the boss needed their support. Which is a much better critique than "ratings drop stop being mean"."

is some trade federation BS why would I want to watch this show

You wouldn't, hopefully!

Though I do think that "the problem with news is the interconnectedness of huge media corporations and elected officials and the gladhanding and backscratching that goes on to keep this shit running" is much more dramatically interesting than "The News is terrible because Murrow is dead and there aren't HEROES any more who will fight for the truth and it is called....GALILEO!"

Figaro.

A dumb girl (dumb girls are this show’s primary villains) asks what makes America the greatest country in the world

this feels like a very 'hey internet girl' meme-fueled observation, virtually all of the antagonistic/unsympathetic characters on the show are male except jane fond, who is def not portrayed as a 'dumb girl'

also lol at giving this ugly-ass show points for how it looks. most of the rest is fair game, though.

although i just remembered the lady from TMI (haaaa) and she was a 'dumb girl' i guess

lol at giving this ugly-ass show points for how it looks

Yeah, was gonna say, this smacked of "I need to say something nice about this show or else it will look like I'm just ranting, so I'll praise the thing that has the least to do with Sorkin."

The thing that has least to do with him is usually the best thing about his projects.

morbs what do you think of his old-timey banter? like do you consider it an accurate or inaccurate throwback to a style you do or don't particularly enjoy? i just imagine you and sorkin having a lot of the same favorite movies

he is no Ben Hecht.

although i just remembered the lady from TMI (haaaa) and she was a 'dumb girl' i guess

there was her and the other woman he went on a date with in the same episode who liked reality TV, and threw a drink in McAvoy's face after he called her a bitch

the third woman he dated was not portrayed as dumb per se, just dumb for having a gun I guess

The thing that has least to do with him is usually the best thing about his projects.

Well, yeah. That's what I imagined the article's author was thinking too.