The Newsroom: Sorkin's HBO Joint

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.

Sorkin fired everyone

http://www.thedaily.com/page/2012/07/19/071912-ent-sorkin-newsroom/

honestly why does anyone else but an ex-girlfriend need to be there anyway

wow dude is dating kristin davis? i saw her on TV this week and she looks insanely good for her age. h8 u sork pimp.

i'm picturing interviews for new writers and a young hotshot walking in and giving a sorkinesque "here's what you're doing wrong" speech and the bossman just smiles and tells him he's on the team.

that whole episode was about dumb girls, come on

fuck aaron sorkin; why can't i stop watching this show

that whole episode was about dumb girls, come on

― horseshoe, Thursday, July 19, 2012 11:17 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

well by own admission i spaced on that when i made my post, so, retracted. show is not v memorable tbh.

fuck aaron sorkin; why can't i stop watching this show

― horseshoe, Friday, July 20, 2012 4:17 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

“The Newsroom” is phenomenally bad good TV.

Was too soon to say it this morning, but now we know what season three will feature...

jesus christ, that was the wrong way to get me to look at the front page of the nyt

this show has now officially transitioned from a somewhat guilty pleasure into an actively offensive piece of shit

the comparison of the wisconsin union battle and the arab spring
the line of fucknuts giving checks to help support the multimillionaire saving a poor brown boy from overseas
the inane valentine's day subplots
this show can fuck off

smackdown of the gossip columnist was just woefully horrible

"i'm a middle aged man who never achieved his potential"
uh

I will watch Olivia Munn in anything but man does she seem out of place here. I guess its just her past work that's creating this impression but I just can't suspend disbelief enough to transform her into a doctor of economics.

'there are eight hundred thousand websites?'

do u think that was sorkin or one of the guys he just fired

i need some better tv shows because currently this is the thing i catch up on in the rare moments my laptop is working and i could probably be doing better, maybe

yes - Your Ten Favorite Shows Currently on Television

this show is fascinatingly bad now, huh. i still kinda like it. this week's was so bad though! there is some kind of decadence to how satisfied sorkin is with his arsenal of tropes, his vocabulary of behaviours to squeeze in between sentences. maybe there are situations in which the pratfalls would usefully punctuate the all-go nature of the station, but now they just happen all the time. the reflexive-sarcasm is the kind of thing microsoft word could have a shortcut to generate after you write a line of dialogue:

olivia munn: did you-
emily mortimer: yes
olivia munn: really
emily mortimer: no [<- punchline]

this happens every episode! & shit like the bit where everyone talks at once, in a control room or in the meeting room like actors in a crowd scene in a school play (i like the actors, they're all really good!, & carry the weight and demeanours of their intended real-life analogues, but their interplay is so often so cartoonish). there is always a throw-away reference to huh we talked about this last night at 3am!!! (when you called because you were worried about this because you are neurotic), just lazy character-burnishing w/o any restraint. it's wandered into the same territory as studio 60 in just assigning moral trumpeting to characters - so the tech guy gets to wheel out 7/7 & get a moment of piano music - & it's never even for anything broader than episode conclusion. we don't talk about guns after gifford, or journalism after the COOL MAN SEE YOU WHEN YOU GET BACK FROM THE MILITARY FORTRESS INFERNO guy goes missing on assignment (okay i guess we do, but only to the extent that journalists are tough, which is kinda fine but feels like an unearned conclusion given that he just walked a few people into doors and wars). so much of it stretches logical belief - the paramount importance of the guy uncovering his face, the bribery of the gossip columnist & daniels' potential adherence to it, the profile of a show's executive producer (really?, maybe i am wrong about this). & they all spend their time in horrible empty purple-lit bars with dramatic asian decor, which is fine, only maybe some of them wouldn't, i don't know. i am kinda curious to know what the dynamic of the writing room is like (you know how everyone in an office adoringly cowers under the gaze of their paternalistic moral heavyweight of a boss), it reminded me of that thing about how mark e. smith has to stop new musicians from trying to play like the fall, as if the guy just has people spoonfeeding him generic snappy dialogue.

big fan, will watch again.

^good post
the problem is that this show is starting to fill me with murderous rage, otherwise i would totally be into it for the lulz

i wish i could steal this : (

?
i can't work out whether you mean download or commandeer the reins of to steer it in a better direction, which is how i feel when watching

well it sounds like there might be some job openings, but i don't think sorks is gonna tolerate any writers' room uprisings.

but i meant the former. my housemates are phobic of illegal downloading and would freak out at me if they happened to get a cease-and-desist-letter.

i liked 'do you know what you're ow know what you're ow what you're doing'

watching a sorkin show means accepting that the people in it will act in certain constrained modes of behavior and (especially) verbal habit; i think it's only a problem when it rubs up against the other problem viz. the implicit claims that we are in a fictional universe that doesn't drastically differ from the real one

sometimes, watching this, i wish that he had, instead, written something where the stakes were not high, or not purportedly high - the stakes here aren't high in the way the show likes to insist they are; this is a remarriage comedy in less superficial ways than it is a backroom drama - but other times, watching this, i am glad to watch it fail in interesting, troubling ways

olivia munn is interesting in this in that she's trying to avoid falling into the same set of inflections as everyone else; the charlie guy also, a little; both are attempts to find slightly different ground for performing the guy's dialogue

-

if you can list ten favorite shows currently on television i am not going to trust yr views on anything, least of all television

Louie, breaking bad, mad men, game of thrones, boardwalk empire, justified, community, 30 rock, parks and rec, curb idk pretty easy to come up with ten programs better than the lowest of low-rent sorkin circle jerk

only people who don't watch television have credibility with thomp. or maybe has painful memories of Chauncey Gardiner.

game of thrones and mad men and parks and rec. okay got you

both are attempts to find slightly different ground for performing the guy's dialogue

this is true!

watching a sorkin show means accepting that the people in it will act in certain constrained modes of behavior and (especially) verbal habit

this is generous, i think. i don't think those habits have to be actually limited to the point of repetition. other stuff of his has been way punchier than this, hasn't seemed as formulaic. re: behaviours more broadly, i think there is a good case for this show being melodrama, operating in its own universe, maybe occupying some weird Wildean position as idealistic-satire, but it isn't the kinda 'stock character traits' thing that's bothering me: it's that this veneer isn't really used to any weightier end - we talked a while back about whether this should ~mean something~, & perhaps it doesn't have to, but for it to be fairly traditional in format without doing anything more interesting or interrogative on another level just makes it seem kinda perfunctory. like the how will this telegraphed love triangle resolve angle isn't interesting & the what is the role of the news thing isn't thoughtful.

btw has anyone actually stopped watching this yet, i wondered if horseshoe was still on board

other stuff of his has been way punchier than this, hasn't seemed as formulaic.

i think i like this about it, maybe, or want to be able to rearrange it as a positive: other stuff hasn't been as thoroughgoing exhibition of sorkin doing what he does well for an hour at a time (well, with ten minutes of failed pathos interrupting)

i mean, probably, because aaron sorkin holds me in some kind of thrall, but omg schlump you know what is starting up again soon? BOSS!

xp

i still really like jeff daniels. every episode i say aloud to my sister, "jeff daniels is just better than this show" and she's very patient with me about it. (she doesn't watch the show)

on my facebook the newsroom enthusiasts, or at least the people who were willing to spare ten seconds to post some link to some review or trailer or something, were very predictably 1) concerned facebook liberals (a distinct crowd from leftist-or-further-left types with countercultural sympathies) and 2) walking-stereotype college-aged intellectual aspirants who are into, like, woody allen and tom waits for the first time in their lives and have yet to learn proper attitudes of shame / disdain about 'being cultured'.

i kind of feel like both those audience demos are likely to rest firm on an attitude like 'at least it's better than everything else', but it must be a pretty specialized demo that could be satisfied with that while at the same time not having any knowledge or interest in the slightly more 'substantive' or 'important' tv that has been getting chinstrokers going post-sopranos, and at the same time not of any of the plenty of good but obviously not super substantive shows that would make them cautious about being so self-congratulatory about being into the newsroom.

have you glanced at the comments in Pareene's article? Most reactions: "But there's so much shit on TV! I'm glad someone's being whiny and didactic for liberal causes! WAH WAH WAH."

on phone, xposts, etc

people seem to remember sorkin as having strengths he never did: like, people remember martin sheen yelling at god as being good drama and not high kitsch. i don't know i might have complained about that upthread

it's maybe worth thinking about how everyone on this thread is people the show defines as not being part of its audience, except when er it does (munn as meta casting)

'telegraphed love triangle' - hm - how many minutes into his girl friday do you go on thinking that rosalind russell is going to move to oklahoma city?

boss is probably better than this, actually. so are the two shows i started watching last night, come to that

tempting to think of those as low-information tv consumers

(probably busy off supporting liberal causes, only so much time to unwind in front of the toob and be edified)

what are the two shows you started watching last night, thomp?

yes! so pysched for boss! i am repressing that the trailer made it looks slightly trashier this season but yeah i keep remembering how good it was. this always seems remarkable because there doesn't seem to be a small-scale well-dressed articulately-blogging cult following around it or anything.

& yeah JD is so good; i even sorta cave to his likeable-asshole thing - not when they end an ep with him secretly writing flamboyantly benevolent cheques, but just to his actions seeming to exist as varied manifestations of his character - that his grudges are a part of his beliefs, his impatience a sign of his concern, &c. the acting is mainly really good in this (i am discounting people like the guy who was shouting at mcavoy to pronounce gabrielle giffords dead, not because he was bad necessarily but because some of the parts are just cartoon villains). olivia munn good so far. emily mortimer still kinda head-tiltingly beseechy, maybe that is not her fault idk.
xxxps &c