The Newsroom: Sorkin's HBO Joint

sigh

there actually have already been a few of those

Maybe the next episode will have Olivia Munn appearing in a scene where no-one mentions her ass or tits.

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Monday, 20 August 2012 20:24 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah that was really not complimentary
but to recap
-olivia munn's top, the navy one w/lighter sleeves
-terrible piano motif
-renewed ninetiesism
-love triangle has become compelling to me
-mac i think is just the worst? like i can't believe she must emote, so, each episode, so frantically or so enthusiastic about everything. i like emily mortimer. but this is so bad.
-man i love alison pill
-man
-weird takes on GOP caricatures; either wow will is PRO-LIFE or else the dastardly coward in a suit who vetoed the debate

anyway as usual i watched this mainly thinking 'this is just not so great' - like all of the 'funny jim' stuff & mac & people quoting poetry & the whole office of a newsroom daily frequently stopping in an awed childlike silence to get invested in some moment engineered by their work parents, like a trip to the grand canyon they are forced to enjoy - & then realised afterward that i mainly enjoyed it, like maybe not 'mainly' but certainly for its peaks.

For the first time I felt that when the episode was over I wanted to watch the next one.

the whole office of a newsroom daily frequently stopping in an awed childlike silence to get invested in some moment engineered by their work parents, like a trip to the grand canyon they are forced to enjoy

lol

yeah i mean the jim-at-the-door thing & was a neat conflict, & unspooled nicely. poor maggie.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m92lsf4nQD1qi98gto1_500.gif

the direction of this was p bad, i thought. i can't remember specifically how. but the whole thing could be so much livelier, more interestingly made. say with fewer piano motifs. i like will smoking, though. that always seems pretty meaningful.

alison pill killed it i thought

about 50% of the LARB bit on the show i thought was good:
http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=745&fulltext=1&media=

feel no sympathy at all for maggie, gotta say

Yeah, i feel zilch. She's into Jim but she won't do anything about it, and she's constantly meddling in his love life. She'll set him up on a date w her decent-seeming roommate and then act like he's doing the worst thing ever. I could take it more when she was being a super-producer and helping out with stories and connections and all that, but it seems like it's fallen by the wayside. And it's kind of a big stretch to not see that Don has figured things out.

As for Olivia, it's cool and all and yes beautiful people can be smart and intelligent but it feels more and more like her expertise is just a qualifier for whatever sexist comments her co-workers want to make that week. I don't understand the internet troll thing. Is he doing a story on something specific? Is it just about internet trolls in general? Dude has a pretty easy job, from what it sounds like.

Mac, ugh, it's kind of the same as Maggie. She clearly is in love with Will but doesn't want to show it or make any effort towards reconciling their relationship. All we are left with are crazy eyes whenever he has flowers in his office. I'd say the two of them have no chemistry but she clearly is psycho about him so it sort of makes sense.

Not sure why i keep watching this. It's super dumbed-down stuff full of easy liberal thumbs-up moments maybe that's it. Even though the whole mock debate thing was completely dumb and made no sense at all it was fun to see them make fun of how stupid the debates are. But really, if they were going through all the trouble of compromising their principles so that they could land the debate why on Earth would they set up something that was basically a Daily Show skit and then come out and yell "eff you" to the guys in charge. Like alot of things on this show it made no sense.

They did comment on how naive it was, at least.

And Don realises that he's losing Maggie. Don kind of the best character I think.

Don is the closest thing the show has to an audience surrogate who sees how obnoxious and passive-aggressive everyone else is and wants to slap some sense into them

Sorkin fell into the HBO antihero tradition of making the asshole villain sympathetic completely by accident

Don was okay this episode but there's no going back from "they killed Bin Laden for you". Ugh!

Maggie/Jim pressurizing Lisa to do the show was just horrible. Run Lisa! Run far away!

the actress who played lisa was pretty good in that scene. i was a little sad they felt the need to have both the 'eighty million' slip and the abortion bit in the interview.

vulture recap this week notes: "*Have you noticed how zoom crazy the cameramen are on this show? Just rewatch the scene where Mac and Will are talking about the mysterious white flowers in Will's office. There is a zoom with every cut, either short or long." -- as with so much in this show i guess this is another thing which p much falls into 'well, i see what you're trying to do' ...

the actress who played lisa was pretty good in that scene. i was a little sad they felt the need to have both the 'eighty million' slip and the abortion bit in the interview.

yeah she's good, & has become more interesting i think; she was maybe a stereotypical smart-but-'ditsy' sorkin character for the first ep? i wonder what happened w/her & jim. i am counting on the sweet panging frustration of them being together, it feels like a necessary end-of-season carry-over that even schmalzy sorkin couldn't pass up.

i actually thought she was p erudite in the tv interview, i didn't know why they were all so hysterical about 'saving her'

when i was watching i kept thinking about the part in last week's vulture recap, where the writer pointed out that there wasn't a blackout in nyc on the day of the blackout in the show. just thinking of the writer looking it up & feeling really satisfied & then writing his snarky post about how a thing portrayed in a fictional place never happened.

dangerous to be pro-choice in NYC that hotbed of extreme pro-lifers

well tbf i think they were concerned about the national viewing audience's reaction, not the other people working in the studio

The important thing is they freaked out and treated everything as if it was THE END OF THE WORLD. I just feel sorry for Lisa. Go find a new place to live and stop involving yourself with these drama-crazy news people.

Just got to this episode. Truly jaw-dropping. Gonna try and figure out some way to to work "We reported the news" into daily conversation
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m8bmhk2uge1qe3p9bo3_250.gif

lol i cannot imagine in what spirit that gif was made

Ok, all bad things about this show noted, I will basically always laugh at physical comedy involving difficult pants.

save-a-sork

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/24/arts/television/the-newsroom-finale-and-both-sides-of-aaron-sorkin.html?hpw

but Alison Pill and Olivia Munn, as a junior producer and a financial reporter, aren’t summoning the style Mr. Sorkin’s writing calls for, and their scenes can feel flat.

One of the reasons Munn is so great is that she doesn't fall into Sorkin-delivery traps.

yeah that line really stuck out; i'd argue w/it on the basis of other performances/presences being worse (& munn's & pill's being great), but even apart from that it assumes that the programme is being held back by delivery - that it's a clumsy perfect-sorkin-programme - rather than its limits. in straightforward quickfire sorkin mode it isn't necessarily all that, although there have been bits in that vein that've been rad

Bab O'Reilly montage

i may have actually said "come the fuck on" when those arpeggios started in

i don't know, i don't care, i like jello

i feel like sorkin is progressing geometrically to discovering a sort of absolute zero of extra-diagetic music, the Least Subtle Musical Cue. on the other hand, the baba o'riley bit was sort of saved by editing and mixing, for me, when jeff daniels starts clumping around the hospital room and it totally overwhelms the drums coming in and everything sounds jarringly arrhythmic. anyway that is probably the basis of my entire reading of this episode, which was everything i hoped it could be.

i had a little buzz of 'this ain't so bad, hit on enough things Sorkin does well but hasn't literally written before' acceptance mid-season that came crashing down in the last couple episodes. genuinely feel bad for Mortimer and Pill for the bullshit they have to do sometimes.

aaron sorkin has seen the opening credits to sex and the city

aaron sorkin has had the recycle bin explained to him

90% of Mortimer's scenes now consist of her shrieking at Daniels

the fact that she now exists as a completely non-credible person but rather some kind of fantastic disruptive force outside of the boundaries of this as a realist drama, this is actually one of the show's strengths

i am pretty sure she corpses at waterston's line about 'pussy-ass coward-ass pussified pussies', which i wonder if that is him forgetting a line or if sorkin actually wrote the line 'they're just a bunch of pussy-ass coward-ass pussified pussies'

he's written lines like that before, where someone tries to unload something verbose but for once the words don't come. like the one Mortimer had also in the finale.

i thought Mortimer started out with a fairly realistic and well played character before becoming a frazzled Cathy comic strip. Felicity Huffman's character experienced a similar, if milder degradation over the course of Sports Night's run, too.

ack

sloan should've taken the £4m. She and Olivia Munn are above both the show and 'the show'.

Many characters, during the course of the show, run into really promising opportunities to escape the Newsroom and for some reason they never do.

we are coming to be aware that really the lightweight breaking-news dramedy is but an excuse for the sartrean theatre of suffering the protagonists go through, rather than vice versa or the reverse

from everything i have read it seems that 'the west wing' is far superior to 'The Newsroom' and yet i have quite happily watched every episode of this whereas i made it through maybe 3 or 4 episodes of WW.

yeah i think all the criticisms being made of this which are actually accurate apply way more so to the west wing?

i have probably said that already. anyway just, probably because it's easier to maintain standards writing ten hours of television without needing to conform to advert breaks than it is writing twenty-two forty-minute chunks with advert breaks, sorkin's actual strengths ('writing really tight drama' rather than 'being smart' or 'being someone whose politics i agree with 100%') are really well exhibited here (with the exception of, er, the couple of really bad episodes)

i suspect the first season of sports night probably has his best batting average, though, i dunno.

i'm in that zone just beneath "hate-watch" where i love to read frustrated recaps

The whole thing about Jim doing the Sex and the City tour, which was brought up as a good date to impress Lisa, by himself after work, and randomly running into Maggie, was just....ehhhh.....

Olivia should've taken the $4 million job. Also, she's in love with Don? I don't recall this ever being brought up before now.

Jeff Daniels should've quit a job that is literally killing him, where he works every day with his ex screaming at him and gets death threats. The stress of it all pretty clearly responsible for his ending up in the hospital.

Sorority woman should've taken a look at the two lunatics interviewing her and ran away.

But she can handle it because she's why makes America the best country in the world

Ugh, this finale.

I was thinking how much more interesting it would be to have a show about the rise and fall of a Glenn Beck type rather than a Keith Olbermann. He would have frenemies like a Rush Limbaugh type (cameo by Kelsey Grammer), a Karl Rove type (cameo by Philip Seymour Hoffman).

I mean, I would rather be a fly on the wall at Fox News when Shep Smith dares to make a wisecrack than high-fives backstage at The Daily Show.

The whole thing about Jim doing the Sex and the City tour, which was brought up as a good date to impress Lisa, by himself after work, and randomly running into Maggie, was just....ehhhh.....

aaron sorkin has seen the opening credits to sex and the city

It's just really sloppy writing. Once the 3 hour SATC tour is brought up, Jim goes "I don't know if i want to have her like me THAT much". Yet he's going to take time out of his super busy schedule of saving the world through news to go on this tour and not take Lisa? If your gf was into a TV show and there was a tour you heard about that they would enjoy and your sole reason for doing so is for their benefit, wouldn't you want to take them along on the tour too? You know, as a date? To impress someone you are dating?