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Jun. 21st, 2012 02:13 pmI watched the first episode of Aaron Sorkin's "The Newsroom" last night. SO MANY FEELINGS. I was telling my little brother about it afterward and struggling to keep from gibbering.
Jeff Daniel's Will is a jackass. I don't like him. He's sort of a cross between Josh Lyman and Jed Bartlett, and it's not a flattering combination. Sorkin keeps having the characters I like tell me that I'm supposed to think Will is right and a genius, and it's frustrating because if we were just supposed to think that Will was a compelling jackass, I would like the show a lot more. If he were more like Josh, really. I could buy an Aaron Sorkin show where everything swirled around a jackass who was good at his job and bad at everything else. But this appears to be an Aaron Sorkin show where everything swirls around a jackass who's good at his job and that means that all the bad at everything else stuff he's actually good at too, you're just too dumb to get it. I dunno. Maybe Sorkin will figure out how to balance this better in future episodes.
West Wing opened with Josh having delivered a 'truth to power' speech that was jackassy and stupid, off-camera. The episode is about Josh sitting in the penalty box 'even though he was right' and apologizing and moving on to the next thing. In The Newsroom we have to sit through all of Will's sanctimonious rant about America, as we did on the inferior Studio 60, and so we start off the show having seen how much of a loutish ass Will is. But unlike Wes Mandell, Will is supposed to be the hero of the show, so we're supposed to like him. This leads to moments like Sam Watterston's hilarious drunken network president telling Will "I liked your speech".
And let's be clear. For all of Sorkin's brilliant rhetorical flourishes and Jeff Daniels's rapidfire, passionate delivery, it is a shitty speech. He starts out fine, criticizing the inane assumption of the collegiate student that America is the greatest country on the world (with oodles of Sorkinian misogyny. Of course it is a female student who asked the dumb question and of course for the rest of the episode they just call her 'the sorority girl'). But instead of just taking a page from Leo McGarry and rejecting the premise of the question, Will just goes on and on about how America USED TO BE the greatest country in the world, spinning a deluded fantasy about how the previous generation hadn't been as stupid as the current generation.
It's the underpinning assumption of the Newsroom pilot: America used to have time for the news and now it doesn't. We used to have Edward Murrow and now we don't even get Dan Rather. America used to be smart and now it isn't. In other words, back in the days of COINTELPRO and ill-fated Asian land wars, everything was better, because we didn't have Cable News and the Internet to rot our brains. Fox News has killed America.
This, all of this, is shit.
And the frustrating part is that if you set all of that shit aside and just let this be a show about striving to make good news, without the trying to fix America bullshit, the Newsroom pilot is awesome.
I love Mackenzie and Jim so much already, with their superpowers of Sherlockian deduction channeled monomaniacally toward producing the news, so intensely focused that they accidentally cast off brilliant deductions in all directions like Mackenzie unconsciously reading Maggie in three seconds. And I loved the whole live news section of the episode so much I was bouncing up and down. The best competence porn I've seen in ages, seriously. Will doing the whole broadcast with [VAMP] on the teleprompter. Maggie assembling a briefing on the MMS without using Wikipedia! Mackenzie threatening Will with the vertigo joke promo! I watched that section of the episode with so much squee and so many feelings. I want that part of the show to just be all of the show, forever and ever.
I don't know. I already like parts of this show better than Studio 60, but I dread other parts of the show. I guess we'll see what comes in future episodes. Like Jed and his struggles with the two Bartletts, it remains to be seen which Sorkin will write this show. But it's good to have new Sorkin dialogue, anyway.
Jeff Daniel's Will is a jackass. I don't like him. He's sort of a cross between Josh Lyman and Jed Bartlett, and it's not a flattering combination. Sorkin keeps having the characters I like tell me that I'm supposed to think Will is right and a genius, and it's frustrating because if we were just supposed to think that Will was a compelling jackass, I would like the show a lot more. If he were more like Josh, really. I could buy an Aaron Sorkin show where everything swirled around a jackass who was good at his job and bad at everything else. But this appears to be an Aaron Sorkin show where everything swirls around a jackass who's good at his job and that means that all the bad at everything else stuff he's actually good at too, you're just too dumb to get it. I dunno. Maybe Sorkin will figure out how to balance this better in future episodes.
West Wing opened with Josh having delivered a 'truth to power' speech that was jackassy and stupid, off-camera. The episode is about Josh sitting in the penalty box 'even though he was right' and apologizing and moving on to the next thing. In The Newsroom we have to sit through all of Will's sanctimonious rant about America, as we did on the inferior Studio 60, and so we start off the show having seen how much of a loutish ass Will is. But unlike Wes Mandell, Will is supposed to be the hero of the show, so we're supposed to like him. This leads to moments like Sam Watterston's hilarious drunken network president telling Will "I liked your speech".
And let's be clear. For all of Sorkin's brilliant rhetorical flourishes and Jeff Daniels's rapidfire, passionate delivery, it is a shitty speech. He starts out fine, criticizing the inane assumption of the collegiate student that America is the greatest country on the world (with oodles of Sorkinian misogyny. Of course it is a female student who asked the dumb question and of course for the rest of the episode they just call her 'the sorority girl'). But instead of just taking a page from Leo McGarry and rejecting the premise of the question, Will just goes on and on about how America USED TO BE the greatest country in the world, spinning a deluded fantasy about how the previous generation hadn't been as stupid as the current generation.
It's the underpinning assumption of the Newsroom pilot: America used to have time for the news and now it doesn't. We used to have Edward Murrow and now we don't even get Dan Rather. America used to be smart and now it isn't. In other words, back in the days of COINTELPRO and ill-fated Asian land wars, everything was better, because we didn't have Cable News and the Internet to rot our brains. Fox News has killed America.
This, all of this, is shit.
And the frustrating part is that if you set all of that shit aside and just let this be a show about striving to make good news, without the trying to fix America bullshit, the Newsroom pilot is awesome.
I love Mackenzie and Jim so much already, with their superpowers of Sherlockian deduction channeled monomaniacally toward producing the news, so intensely focused that they accidentally cast off brilliant deductions in all directions like Mackenzie unconsciously reading Maggie in three seconds. And I loved the whole live news section of the episode so much I was bouncing up and down. The best competence porn I've seen in ages, seriously. Will doing the whole broadcast with [VAMP] on the teleprompter. Maggie assembling a briefing on the MMS without using Wikipedia! Mackenzie threatening Will with the vertigo joke promo! I watched that section of the episode with so much squee and so many feelings. I want that part of the show to just be all of the show, forever and ever.
I don't know. I already like parts of this show better than Studio 60, but I dread other parts of the show. I guess we'll see what comes in future episodes. Like Jed and his struggles with the two Bartletts, it remains to be seen which Sorkin will write this show. But it's good to have new Sorkin dialogue, anyway.