The Newsroom: Sorkin's HBO Joint

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

getting out of this show graciously may be hard for hbo, as the horses being beaten are already dead.

should i watch this guys?

i must admit i'm intrigued by emily nussbaum saying each of the first four episodes is worse than the one before it

Waterston was way off, yeah. xposts

Clunky, Sorkinesque stuff with rousing speeches and an utterly lack of cynicism. It's axe-grinding, but not wholly unpleasant as of yet (I expect that will change *very* quickly). I'm interested to see how he's structured the season. I also totally and utterly believe in a lot of the ideas but it's cheap to re-do the BP Oil Spill with 20/20 etc.

we reached for the stars, and we acted like men

That was pretty Sam Seaborn.

felt like a parody to me. that schmaltzy music playing over it didn't help

Yeah but West Wing was never much better. Maybe it's *we* who have changed.... ~~deep~~

I never watched the West Wing when it was on, but after some Studio 60, The Social Network and this, I don't know how I could take it seriously now

I don't know what your problem with The Social Network was, at the very least in regards to the tone/corniness that pervades his other work.

well you've already said "haters gonna hate" in regards to this, so i'm not surprised

well i didn't mean that in regards to my opinion on The Newsroom (it isn't good, fwiw), but TSN is a lot different because of FIncher (this has been discussed i know) so I was just curious.

fincher definitely lit it better but the script was still pretty facts-through-the-sorkintron-3000

ah right, so it's the facts that bother you and not the tone/delivery/preaching/grandstanding?

xp, but it won't matter much

In re: Sorkin. I watched Moneyball in a theater. I watched The Social Network on dvd at home with my wife. Never watched The West Wing. Maybe two episodes of Sports Network or what ever it was called. That's it.

He appears to know how to write a screenplay so it has the requisite number of acts and can write dialogue that has a bit of snap. I was amused. I would watch something else he wrote. Probably.

His Achillean Heel is a simplistic sentimentality in his method of summarizing characters and their inner selves. This shortcoming will not hurt him with the general public. As a rule, sentimetality plays very well with the masses. He's no crappier than, say, Neil Simon in his later years, when the jokes got more formulaic.

"Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail" still a perfect episode of network television imo.

Gukbe otm

the social network was pretty entertaining, but the ways that sorkin changes the facts and the words he puts in their mouths fit pretty comfortably with his whole hackneyed chayefsky aesthetic, so it adds to my point that it'd be hard to watch the west wing already being familiar with his later work, even if fincher and cast sugared the pill.

I think TSN was a lot more ambiguous than that, because of Fincher and the performances, but yeah I wonder if watching The West Wing now for the first time would find it grating.