The Newsroom: Sorkin's HBO Joint

Studio 60's pilot circulated for months and months ahead of airing, on Netflix and other places. and they (ok, we) all had pretty high hopes for it based on that episode.

Lolling at the trailer of Pullman throwing a stapler(?) at the camera. He gets into it like De Niro playing Russian roulette in the Deer Hunter.

Whenever I think I might want to watch this, i'm just going to rewatch Sports Night instead

that is what i do whenever i get a sorkin-y urge tbh. i like social network, though.

me too!

west wing, sportsnight is about it. social network is good but nothing like as rewatchable as WW and SN

Oh, Olivia Munn is in this? Sold.

west wing has some really good stuff, some really cringey stuff, some downright offensive stuff. sports night can be cringey but it just goes down easier than the west wing.

also dan rydell

yeah Sports Night is comfort food to me, i've run through the whole series on DVD maybe half a dozen times now

Olivia Munn makes me even less interested.

iirc josh charles and aaron sorkin had "creative differences" on the set of sports night and in retrospect i want to say that josh charles was one of the best things that ever happened to sorkin.

that's interesting, i haven't really read much of anything about the making of Sports Night since people are so much less likely to write about that than Sorkin's other stuff

yeah WW is not perfect, but I can't help it. the first few seasons are pretty good. Josh Lyman, Sam Seaborn, Will Bailey, Toby.
I want Josh Charles to have a sports show, even now

I follow him on twitter, he talks about the Bmore Raves ALL the time

i know; it's so annoying. josh charles + felicity huffman + josh molina= underrecognized sorkin golden age. plus it was the first time i saw most sorkiny conceits so they seemed fresh.

i don't really know anything about the substance of those creative differences fwiw. in general i sympathize with writers who get notes/revision suggestions from actors, but if that's why sorkin got annoyed with charles, i don't know, maybe he should have listened.

sarah and i have tried to start sports night twice, have yet to actually finish watching the pilot - the whole thing is so artificial and '90s it's unbearable

the pilot is much worse than the rest of the show fwiw

i would just skip it if i were you tbh

i like artificial though

yeah pilot is not good; it takes a couple of episodes for them to lose the laugh track and weird sitcom-y conceits, but if you can ride that out it's worth it.

I love the 90's-office with the glass-bricks everywhere

they don't lose the laugh track at all, even in the second season, i think? there are weird ghostly returns of it. that whole situation is inexplicable.

isn't the second episode the one where dan apologizes to his brother on-air? that's when the show gets good imo. /sap

no I thought it faded out after a few episodes into the first season, maybe more than 2 or 3. I'm pretty sure it's gone by the end of S1

oh god that brother apology is outstanding

i'm kind of amazed this show could wind up as self-parodying as it seems, considering how quickly everyone in the internet smelled self-parody

yeah the laugh track was definitely gone by s2

i'm kind of amazed this show could wind up as self-parodying as it seems, considering how quickly everyone in the internet smelled self-parody

― da croupier, Friday, June 22, 2012 5:14 PM (46 seconds ago) Bookmark

yeah i mean...he may not have agreed with all the criticism of Studio 60 but you'd think he'd at least realize that repeating certain aspects of it were not going to go over well

this seems appropriate

http://www.funnyordie.com/pictures/58a52edd85/the-first-few-pages-of-aaron-sorkin-s-steve-jobs-biopic

http://assets0.ordienetworks.com/images/user_photos/1258805/34ee0b88af4243a463058ea28711be9c_width_640x.jpg

lol oops

or die

sorry, I thought it was funny :(

"dang people didn't like studio 60...well, maybe i just picked the wrong kind of tv to be ridiculously self-righteous about"

"clearly the world is mistaken and needs to be shown more of my genius"

you know what's cooler than a million ipods...?

Olivia Munn makes me even less interested.

Seconded. She is horrible.

Christ, Sorkin is such an unloveable prick:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/television/how-to-get-under-aaron-sorkins-skin-and-also-how-to-high-five-properly/article4363455/

He denies being either an ideologue or a modernist, agreeing only that the show is written in his voice, and that said voice is “authorial” (both my word and his). I’d posit that creating an authorial drama in a time of mumbling, precarious, voice-of-a-generation comedy almost absolutely constitutes an ideology, one both modernist and masculinist. But conveniently, at that moment, the interview’s over.

“Listen here, Internet girl,” he says, getting up. “It wouldn’t kill you to watch a film or pick up a newspaper once in a while.” I’m not sure how he’s forgotten that I am writing for a newspaper; looking over the publicist’s shoulder, I see that every reporter is from a print publication (do not see: Drew Magary). I remind him. I say also, factually, “I have a New York Times subscription and an HBO subscription. Any other advice?”

He looks surprised, then high-fives me. Being not a person who high-fives or generally makes physical contact with interview subjects, I look more surprised.

“I’m sick of girls who don’t know how to high-five,” he says. He makes me try to do it “properly,” six times. He also makes me laugh; I’m nervous, and it’s so absurd. He loves it. He says, “Let me manhandle you.” Then he ambles off, hoping I’ll write something nice, as though he has never known how the news works, how many stories can be true.

chrrrrriiiiiist almighty. ugh

“I’m sick of girls who don’t know how to high-five,”

amazing!

Since when is hi-five-ing some kind of important life skill

When you're a frustrated middle-aged wannabe jock. And boy howdy does he just fucking OOZE that.

haha sorkin's interest in strong female characters/totally over-the-top condescension toward women/awareness of his own tendency toward sexist condescension is one of the most compelling nodes in his constellation of being incredibly frustrating to me.

yeah but how many of his heroines could have "knows how to high five" in their character description

btw how surreal is it that there's nobody named 'Danny' in this show

i couldn't make it through the whole episode

haters gonna hate and there's a lot of bad but there's some good but what really interests me is that it doesn't feel like it should be on HBO at all.

Some good, yes, but it's mostly like a louder, more unpleasant Sports Night.

i really wanted to like it. i loved west wing as much as anyone, but damn this was bad

inexplicably bad acting from waterston

what really interests me is that it doesn't feel like it should be on HBO at all.

that's because it feels like a worse version of shit he did on network tv