Oh, look, it’s an Aaron Sorkin-written scene in which a middle-aged white man acts exasperated and disgusted at how young people - all of whom just happen to be women - demonstrate an ignorance and incompetence that would be extremely implausible in a random person off the street, much less the well-trained, highly-educated employees in a place like the White House. Note the period-specific and already hilariously dated knock at the internet when our hero calls a website by its full URL, the better to express his disgruntlement at some vague sense that all the kids these days are so preoccupied with their newfangled computers and websites that they don’t even know where to find a copy of the US constitution, as well as the fact that nobody responds by firing up Alta Vista and just searching for the damned thing.
The Newsroom is Aaron Sorkin at His Most Comfortable - And Complacent
A couple months back, after the release of the trailer for HBO’s The Newsroom, I said the following about Aaron Sorkin’s latest television project about fictional cable news anchor Will McAvoy:
The character of Will McAvoy needs to be emotionally filthy, covered in the slime that cable news personalities like Olbermann constantly spew. He needs to be an anti-hero with a particularly strong emphasis on the part before the hyphen.
At its core, I wanted this because it would lead Sorkin to explore something besides the well-worn stories he had explored in Sports Night,The West WingandStudio 60. I wanted The Social Network Sorkin who didn’t make excuses for his characters, because lately that’s been by far the most interesting Sorkin. Now that the show’s first episode has aired, I can offer a preliminary (read: too early) verdict: We didn’t get the right Sorkin.
Kevin already presented a detailed look at Internet backlash using The Newsroom as a case study, and I’m honestly surprised at just how many people consider this some new low for Sorkin. I could understand criticism calling it repetitive or redundant. But Sorkin didn’t suddenly forget how to write. There’s nothing laughably bad about this show, the structure and presentation are competently done. In fact, this is almost EXACTLY the same Sorkin we got on every poli sci major’s favorite show ever, The West Wing. And that’s what I find disappointing.
It’s not that The West Wing was a bad show. It was a good show, which regularly showed flashes of being a very good show (just regularly enough that they stayed mere flashes though, which got regularly frustrating). But it came to existence in a completely different era of television. The West Wing premiered before the modern conceit of television as an art form was remolded by The Sopranos, which had debuted just nine months earlier. Since then, we have seen The Shield,The Wire,Deadwood,Lost,Friday Night Lights,Mad Men,Breaking Bad,Justified,Game of Thrones, Homeland and other shows that were not only considerably more ambitious than The West Wing and the other shows of its era, but realized their ambitions far better. They created a whole new level of achievement above The West Wing for shows to aspire to.
Basically, with The West Wing Sorkin could talk a big game but play small and he would still get credit for a grand display because so few people even dared to imagine television being more than a mere evening diversion. He does not have that excuse anymore. The Newsroom was made in a creative environment that encourages creativity and daring and airs on a network that gives its creators ample room to spread their wings. Sorkin doesn’t take advantage of that at all here. Instead, he’s still covering the same topics and approaching the same themes in the same way with the same characters. Which can work if you’re Werner Herzog or Woody Allen, but despite the countless times he has been assigned the label of “genius” Sorkin has never worked at that level. The only time he even came close was when he diverged from his typical schtick in the aforementioned The Social Network.
I would love to see what Sorkin could do by turning McAvoy into a true hack journalist. Or even better, it would be great to see him actually focus on the negative consequences of his main character’s ferocious integrity. And in subsequent episodes or seasons, that might very well happen. But in the first episode, McAvoy is such a gigantic asshole that nearly his entire staff of dozens deserts him, yet they’re still able to break the entire 2010 BP oil spill story without a hitch. On a side note, is every event The Newsroom tackles going to be like this? Because the ACN crew broke 6 weeks worth of BP stories in the span of an afternoon. I’ll accept occasional ridiculousness in a grounded reality, but not constant ridiculousness.
Of course, like The West Wing I would still consider The Newsroom to be a good show. It’s a more than suitable Sunday night time waster, and the characters are all enjoyable, save perhaps Thomas Sadoski’s news team coup leader Don who seemingly exists just to be the guy who says “no” even when you have a clear home run story to pitch (These are pretty much the same characters Sorkin has been using for years after all. Emily Mortimer is effectively playing the same role as Felicity Huffman in Sports Night, Alison Pill pretty much has Janel Maloney’s part on The West Wing, etc.) Jeff Daniels and Mortimer are both great in the lead roles. And if nothing else, the patented Sorkin Dialogue ™ is still incredibly entertaining. It’s at least enough to make me forgive Sorkin’s old man style dismissal of blogs & Twitter or his genuinely stupid view of American history, or even the already tired love triangle between Pill, Sadoski and John Gallagher Jr.’s characters.
But my issues with The Newsroom still come down to the question I asked at the end of my previous post, which at the time was just a lazy way to conclude my mini-essay but was, and is, still a worthwhile question. Will the freedom granted by HBO (and, for that matter, the post-Sopranos television landscape) lead Sorkin to embrace his characters’ darkness or will it just mean they can say “fuck” from time to time? So far after one episode, the answer has pretty resoundingly been the latter. But he has a full season to craft a do-over.
“The Newsroom, after four exhausting, smug episodes, gives us none of [The West Wing’s clever dialogue]: just Aaron Sorkin writing one argument after another for himself to win.” - James Poniewozik, Time
“Sorkin’s writing lapses into self-parody, leaving savvier viewers to marvel at how quickly the show goes awry.” -Hank Stuever, The Washington Post
Of course, there are positive reviewsof The Newsroom to be found as well. But in all likelihood, early coverage of the show will be simplified into a collection of pithy quotables strung together to form a larger takedown – something along the lines of “10 Reviews that Prove The Newsroom Sucks” or “Read this Epic Takedown of Aaron Sorkin’s New Show Right Now”. These are the kind of headlines Buzzfeed, Gawker, Uproxx, and HuffPo know the average internet skimmer is going to click on, so why not resort to tabloid-style pageview grabs? Or, if the culture reporter of these fine content mills is feeling especially lazy, “The 15 Funniest Reactions to The Newsroom on Twitter”, wherein a smattering of 140 character nanoreviews by comedians of varying repute are scraped from a service built on shorthanded snark.
When did the dominant form of crowdsourced criticism move from unhinged, genuflecting, excited-beyond-belief hype to detached, ironic, dismissive-wanking-motion-at-your-culture-of-choice backlash?
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Richard Rushfield explores this very subject in his essay “The Backlash Era: Smelling Sorkin Blood”, and cites early 2012 as the turning point when prevailing internet attitudes shifted from Hype to Backlash. Besides pinpointing a specific date, he raises a lot of good points as to why this shift in attitudes has occurred. His breakdown, chronologically, is essentially this:
2005: YouTube barely exists. Facebook is used exclusively by college kids. Twitter is a twinkle in Biz Stone’s eyes. Through whatever internet back channels people used to communicate back then, people begin to buzz about a film whose working title is simply Snakes on a Plane. Fans go wild for the film, envisioning a reptilian gorefest with Samuel Jackson shouting his now-famous (and fan-made) mothafucking catchphrase. Studio execs order the crew to shoot additional scenes in an attempt to meet fan expectations. It’s referred to as “the most internet-buzzed film of all time,” and despite tanking at the box office, the internet hype machine is born.
2006-2010: Subsequent internet fan campaigns – Betty White hosting SNL, fans of Chuck saving the show by eating Subway sandwiches – pop up almost weekly. Outside of entertainment, President Barack Obama is hailed as the first commander-in-chief of the internet age. Political talking head turned internet mogul Arianna Huffington says “Were it not for the internet, Barack Obama would not have been the nominee." This is the golden age of internet hype, when individuals feel that their e-interactions are helping change the world, or getting Kim Possible a third season, at the very least.
2011-present: The Backlash begins to inevitably rise. Too many campaigns exist. It now becomes standard for everything – from a big-budget Hollywood film to a 10-person plumbing company in Dubuque, Iowa – to have a social media presence. Major companies spam consumers with barely-veiled "fan hashtags”, attempting to force users to share things like “Great night with a couple of Buds! #herewego” or “Can’t wait to watch #Tosh on #ComedyCentral tonight!” Fandom fatigue sets in, and for those who live on the web, fatigue quickly turns to anger. People’s previously held belief that their role in fan campaigns somehow made a difference has lead to an inflated sense of self; this is parlayed into utilization of social networks to build their own personal brand – where likes and retweets can inflate or deflate an ego, where buzz and attention are the only acceptable currencies. Facebook goes public – attempting to convert these Buzz Bucks into Real Bucks – and fails miserably, as hedge fund managers are privy to the fast-rising Backlash Model. The Backlash Era is now in full effect.
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So what does all of this mean for the average consumer? Or, for that matter, the average media critic? Will we ever be able to be genuinely excited about a TV show again, or has internet killed the television star? Has appointment viewing been permanently replaced by a detached indifference from the general populace, who will only commit to a show once it’s had a couple good seasons and is available on Netflix? For now, the answer to that question is unclear. But as long as viewers and critics alike are aware that the current negative feedback loop exists, and do their best to rise above it – consumers by conditioning themselves not to be deterred by a few negative reviews, critics by resisting the urge to issue scathing takedowns or write a show off completely based on a few early episodes – we can make it through this together.
As for The Newsroom, I’m still going to watch the show this Sunday, and probably several subsequent episodes as well. Maybe it really is as bad as some critics allege, or maybe it simply needs time to grow, and can’t be written off because of a few uneven early episodes – I’m looking at you, SeinfeldandParks and Recreation. It would be relatively easy for me to read into the criticisms leveled at The Newsroom and write it off as a knockoff blend of Sports Night andThe West Wing from an aging scriptwriting Shakespeare whose highfalutin, 80 WPM dialogue feels stale. That sounds like a plausible reason not to like the show, right? But the thing is, I’ve liked everything Sorkin has written, MoneyballandThe Social Network included, and citing his dialogue as preachy and condescending is a little bit like the criticism Girlsfaced from the Backlash Machine earlier this year decrying it’s upper-middle class view of twentysomething urbanites. Sure there may be a relative lack of diversity, and yes, many of the show’s stars come from privileged backgrounds, but neither of those criticisms disguised the fact that Girlsis an amazing show. Critics citing the first point apparently haven’t watched Friends in awhile, and critics citing the second apparently think Hollywood is a meritocracy in which no famous people’s offspring deserve to get work.
In summary: Watch what you want to watch, and try not to allow external influences deconstruct everything you love until you cease to be entertained by entertainment. But try not to live-tweet your favorite show either, because I will unfollow you immediately.
Screenplay written by Aaron Sorkin, starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill…this movie actually looks really good.
It’s about Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane’s attempt to put together a baseball team on a budget by using automated analysis to draft his players.
I love that Aaron Sorkin is so confident a writer that he just gets rid of (or loses) main characters and side characters with multi-episode arcs and never addresses what happened to them
Like, obviously none of us like Mandy, but she was just GONE in season 2 - not even a check in after the attack on the president and his staff
Top 5 Shows I Wish More People Watched | 03. | Sports Night
It was an Aaron Sorkin show that lasted two seasons before being prematurely cancelled [and the first “grown-up” show I watched as an 11-year-old when my parents let me stay up past my bedtime]. It’s smart and funny and you do not have to like sports to like the show. And I promise the laugh track goes away after a few episodes. This is my favorite comedy ever and I don’t see that ever changing.
Agreed; excellent show. I still think “Eli’s coming” when things are going bad. I loved this show, I’m mad it’s not streaming anywhere. But you can buy it on Apple TV, Prime or Kudo, if you’re inclined to give it a shot. And you should be. I just don’t want to rebuy it bc I know I have the dvds somewhere. Here’s some examples of the Sorkin-quoting gold.
Isaac: Exaudio, comperio, conloquor. That’s a Latin phrase that translates “To listen, to learn, to speak.” Those words are carved into the stone arches that form the entrance to the undergraduate library at Tennessee Western University. This afternoon, an extraordinary young man named Roland Shepard made what had to have been an excruciating decision. He said he wasn’t playing football under a Confederate flag. Six of his teammates then chose not to let Shepard stand alone. And I choose to join them at this moment. In the history of the South, there’s much to celebrate. And that flag is a desecration of all of it. It’s a banner of hatred and separation. It’s a banner of ignorance and violence and a war that pitted brother against brother, and to ask young black men and women, young Jewish men and women, Asians, Native Americans, to ask Americans to walk beneath its shadow is a humiliation of irreducible proportions. And we all know it. Tennessee Western has produced some outstanding alumni in the past hundred years. People of wisdom and vision. Strength and compassion. One of them is Luther Sachs. Luther Sachs owns Continental Corp. Which owns the Continental Sports Channel, which you’re watching right now. Luther Sachs is a generous alumni contributor to Tennessee Western, with a considerable influence over its chancellor, Davis Blake, and its board of trustees. Luther, you’ve got a phone call to make. You’ve go to call Chancellor Blake, and tell him to take down that flag, or he can stop looking for your checks in the mail. You’ve got to put these young men back in a classroom. And I mean pronto. These boys are gonna make you proud one day, Luther. I challenge you to do the right thing. Not an unreasonable request to make of a man whose alma mater declares, “Exaudio, comperio, conloquor.” “To listen, to learn, to speak.” In the meantime, God go with you, Roland Shepard, and you six Southern gentlemen of Tennessee. God’s not done with any of you, yet.
Remembering this is 1999, when ‘heritage not hate’ was the party line, so to speak.
Isaac: It’s taken me a lot of years, but I’ve come around to this: If you’re dumb, surround yourself with smart people. And if you’re smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you.
Natalie: Two guys have ascended five miles into the sky. They walked up a wall of ice, and are preparing to knock on the door of Heaven itself. There’s really no end to what we can do. You know what the trick is? Dan: What? Natalie: Get in the game.
Jeremy: How can it be raining at Indian Wells Isaac: Maybe it’s the rainy season? Jeremy: [patiently] Indian Wells is desert, Isaac. If deserts had a rainy season they’d be called something else Isaac: Fair point.
