Just watched the second Newsroom episode, and thought it was better than the first. I really do not understand all the people panning it.
*** Update ***
Watching Friday’s Bill Maher since my power was out the other day, and Gavin Newsome is on. I like the guy, and agree with much of what he says, but at the same time, all I can think is “THIS GUY SHOULD STAR IN THE NEXT AMERICAN PSYCHO.”
Jager
I have have two old broadcast buddies, one is a recently retired News Director and former anchor, the other a News VP of a good sized station group. They both like the show. One of them told me this past week the Deep Water Horizon breaking news story was spot on.
gorram
Is it just me or does Sorkin really like the idea of female employees and their male bosses (who can fire them and all that jazz) being romantically entangled? It’s a major mood killer for me, and Newsroom has it in spades.
Villago Delenda Est
Well, some of the people panning it are Villagers.
Which explains the problem. Too close to home.
Genghis
Didn’t like the first 15 minutes or so. It got better. Not sure I like the idea of a newsroom thinking they are making some sort of supreme sacrifice by trying to tell the truth.
Best…H
Mnemosyne
@gorram:
Well, to be fair, he tried to do it the other way around in “Studio 60” with the female boss (Amanda Peet) and male employee (Bradley Whitford), but that just got really goddamned creepy. Hint to the fellas: if she changes her number because you call too much, don’t keep calling.
I think I can like “Newsroom.” I’m not sure I like the fact that it’s technically a period show (takes place in 2010, not present day) because it makes it way too easy for Sorkin to make his characters infalliable and smug, but at least he played it two different ways in the two different shows.
I can see why the Villagers hate it, though — it’s pretty much a weekly indictment of, well, their entire professional lives.
Old Dan and Little Ann
My wife was fawing all over Gavin Newsome on Maher when we watched it last night. He reminds of a real life Bruce Wayne. American Psycho is also true.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Mnemosyne: I thought the first episode was pretty good, but haven’t watched the second one yet. The Jeff Daniels character is rather Olbermann-esque, isn’t he?
Mnemosyne
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
I liked the second episode a little better — by design, it’s not as polished and the characters aren’t quite as smart and infalliable as they were in the pilot (where we had to understand that they’re good at the jobs they do).
There’s a funny joke about Paul Krugman in the second episode that only political junkies will get.
Hill Dweller
The self-important Village assholes have paper thin skins, especially when it comes to criticism in pop culture.
They know this show has a chance to become popular. Millions of people watching a weekly show that credibly rips their profession is something to fear.
As for Maher, I haven’t watched his show in a while. His inability to competently discuss a topic that wasn’t on the prearranged list became unbearable.
freelancer
I like the show, and it has its cringeworthy moments. Anyone who has’t seen the Sorkinisms video should. I spotted a new one in this ep, and I’m only five minutes into it at the moment. Will memorized the names of all the staffers, and name drops someone no West Wing fan would forget:
I’m just waiting to hear the name Alberto Fedrigotti on the Newsroom.
Dig the show, Aaron, but stop recycling! It’s jarring for your fans and takes them out of the scene.
Spaghetti Lee
@Hill Dweller:
Let’s not get carried away here. The ‘evil businessman’ is one of the most common characters in pop culture but it hasn’t rid us of actual evil businessmen.
Mnemosyne
@gorram:
Also, too, technically the work relationship between anchor and producer isn’t a boss/employee relationship. That’s why they made a big deal in the pilot about how he went to his agent and renegotiated his contract just so he would have the power to fire Mackenzie at the end of each week if he wanted to. That’s also how his boss was able to bring Mackenzie in without his knowledge — as the anchor, he’s not actually her boss, but since he’s the talent he does have some say in who he works with.
Mnemosyne
@freelancer:
G is hoping that “Newsroom” exists in the same universe and at the same network as “Sports Night” and that we’ll get to see Felicity Huffman walk past the camera as an extra at some point.
IOW, some geeks live for that shit. :-)
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Villago Delenda Est:
I haven’t seen it, but from what I take away from the negative reviews I’ve read is that since The West Wing ended its run (I’ll leave Studio 60 out of the conversation because it obviously failed in many other ways) Sorkin’s sort of overwrought, auteur-lectures-through-extended-monologue approach fell out of fashion.
I credit scenes produced in the interim, such as this (which is quite anti-Sorkin), for forcing critics to reconsider their expectations of television. At some point Sorkin is going to have to come to learn to utilize all of the tools of the medium- okay, the camera- rather than resting on dialogue to tell a story.
Bubblegum Tate
Ha, Newsome. He’s somewhere between Patrick Bateman and Bill Clinton.
pbriggsiam
Maybe it’s bad because because the screenwriting is not how people talk (except maybe in the mind of Sorkin) . Almost all the characters come across as arrogant and self-absorbed.
Waiting for the substantive underlying commentary about the media and our country as well as the genuinely moving moments of humanity is not worth it given the above. I don’t identify with bizarre elite world of Sorkin’s characters’ dialogue.
Kane
At first glance I thought Bill’s guest was Scott from the Kardashians.
freelancer
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
Me from five minutes ago on IM:
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@freelancer:
Let’s not forget- and, I write this while cringing- Gilbert & Sullivan. His characters just happen to know the work of G&S down to the note, and they are willing to perform it for each other. It is coming to The Newsroom, I tell you, but at least they won’t be able to try to pass it off as something a sketch-tv series, even a fictional sketch-tv series, could ever employ in order to get a laugh.
Mike S.
Cole likes Gav… Cole doesn’t know the first fucking thing about politics in CA.
LOL, this blog is continually bloated with additional fail, day by day.
Villago Delenda Est
@pbriggsiam:
“George, you can write this shit, but you can’t say it.” — Harrison Ford, on the dialog in Star Wars
Yutsano
@Mike S.: Noted, your concern has been.
freelancer
@Mike S.:
So are sites visited by UFOers, Bigfoot hunters, Truthers, Birthers, Creationists, Alex Jones fans, Paultards, and Ghost Hunters. You know what I do, since I feel their thinking is full of failure? I stay off their fucking site. Problem Solved. Thanks, we’ll do fine avoiding epistemic closure
on our ownwithout your help.ETA: Edit to highlight my own unintended irony.
Sly
The show isn’t bad. But the occasional break-ins of that insipid goddamned music… that music that tells the audience, in an utterly ham-fisted way, that this is the moment in which the character speaking is delivering a high-minded and passionate defense of an enduring and deeply cherished principle… gets real fucking old real fucking fast.
Sorkin’s stuff has an arrogance to it that I just can’t stand.
Donald G
The comments about Sorkin remind me of a comment Marc Scott Zicree once wrote about one of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone episodes. Paraphrased, Zicree said that there were two types of characters in one particular episode: characters who made speeches, and characters who made speeches while shouting. On another occasion, he commented that all the characters in a story spoke with Rod’s peculiar rhythms so it sounded like Serling was arguing with himself.
It’s a trap that’s easy for writers, especially those with particularly distinctive styles to fall into, and even more so if one has a preachy, didactic bent.
James E. Powell
Just watched the first episode. This show is in not nearly as bad as it’s been described. Outside of Cole and a few other people on this blog, I have read nothing but negatives, mostly quite heated.
It’s Sorkin, so it’s got the usual problems or charms, depending on taste. I have the same issues with Newsroom as with The West Wing: too much sanctimony and too many speeches instead of dialogue.
It was good enough that I will watch it until I find a reason not to watch it.
dance around in your bones
I just watched Newsroom for the first time tonight (for some inexplicable reason Netflix disappeared from the overly complicated TV at the house I am staying at….otherwise I would have continued my MI5 marathon). It was pretty good. It’s just a goddamn TV show. Nobody I know talks like that, but they’re not on TV reading lines written for them. Meh.
Keith
I’m a HUGE fan of HBO, and I’ll tell you why I will not watch Newsroom: the previews made it look like some kind of Bulworth fantasy for cable news, where if only a news anchor would have a breakdown and just start telling it like it is, our world will be rocked, and change would really start happening. The entire preview was summed up for me with that hyperventilating producer saying “He’s trying to do good, and he’s risking a lot to do it!” I seriously thought it was Lauren Ambrose (from Six Feet Under) doing her Claire Fisher character.
I just have no desire to watch a show where the trailer hits you over the head with sanctimony. And seriously, was the original trailer using *another* Black Keys song, or did it just sound like one?
jon
How many characters of color? Just want to know, because it was a (Donald Trump voice) huuuuuuge issue with another recent HBO show. Or does this show get a pass, since it mainly concerns men?
Mnemosyne
@jon:
Off the top of my head, two African-Americans (one man and one woman) with minor roles so far and two Asians (again, one man and one woman) with major roles as well as a few additional ones with minor roles. There are probably at least a few Latino/as in the newsroom, but not everyone has had a line yet. And that’s off the top of my head without really looking for it.
Sorkin’s always been pretty good at being inclusive, but I suspect also that the casting department at HBO had a fire lit under their ass after the “Girls” controversy. The minor/background roles are usually hired by the casting director, not the showrunner, so it’s the casting director who would have been taking most of the internal heat for “Girls.”
Daulnay
Gavin Newsome? He’s the kind of guy that would have an affair with his best friend’s wife. No morals, only ego. (Yes, he really did. How is this guy still in politics?)
The Moar You Know
Those of us who are former San Francisco residents and had to deal with Newsome’s constant, tiresome grandstanding, his failure to do anything good for the city, and abject inability to control his urge to fuck anything with a vagina that got within a hundred feet of him, are not so thrilled about the guy.
He’s gunning for a national job, or course, always was. He would be a first-class disaster for the Democratic party. One of the only people I’ve ever known who could be legitimately labeled a “sex addict”.
YoohooCthulhu
@The Moar You Know:
He’s just sort of an empty vessel. In the right handlers he could be an ok congressperson, but I wouldn’t want to see him in any leadership position.
Hob
@The Moar You Know: A thousand times yes… although, unfortunately, there are also lots of San Francisco residents who thought and still think he’s cool. And it’s not as if he only became a grandiose corporatist nitwit after his first election. There’s a pretty big streak of pro-money, progressive-about-everything-except-scary-poor-people sentiment in SF, and he was the perfect guy for that.
In his defense, he was pretty charming when he put on a T-shirt and a baseball hat and showed up to rally the corporate-volunteer troops at his big charity events. That is, if you ignored how he was doing his best to axe all the public services that those charity events were inadequately trying to substitute for.
(ETA: Also, he has either a mutant power making him the most photogenic person in history, or world-class makeup artists, because I saw him up close at a non-public event [he was making empty promises to the nurses’ union that I was in] and he looked about 20 years older than he did on the news.)
Terry Chay
Ahh, Our ex-Mayor McDreamy! Women go gaga over him even more IRL. So glad he’s failed up to the state level. No way anything was going to get done in SF with him on the ticket every year.
If it wasn’t for his inability to keep it in his pants, I’d say think he’d be a good thing for the country. SF political standards are not exactly in line with reality. Most people would like his politics… Just like Clinton.
ChrisB
@freelancer: Same thing when the producer says that she hasn’t any friends. Amanda Peet’s character on Studio 60 said the same thing.
But I like Newsroom and don’t mind admitting that I like shows where I am rooting for some of the characters (though that hasn’t worked out so well in Game of Thrones).
Hob
I do have to give Newsom props for some things: his full-hearted defense of gay marriage, his stand against immigration raids, his backing of Tom Ammiano’s health care plan, and the Homeless Outreach Team which has done some good work.
But he’s a horrible administrator who should never be in any executive position (except maybe something very limited like Lieutenant Governor), he’s way way too enamored with the private sector, and he’s not trustworthy. I’m sure much of his flakiness, as well as the horndog behavior, was due to his drinking problem– and I have huge respect for people who have struggled with addiction, but when you’ve fucked up publicly that badly due to booze and have finally been forced to admit it, saying “I have a problem, but I’m the Mayor so I’m not going to do rehab or meetings like the little people, I’m just going to have my friend give me some private counseling” is not really a good sign.
CAnightmarin
I initially took a liking to Newsom but he’s been embarrassing at the state level (I never lived in SF so I didn’t really pay attention to his mayoring). He got elected Lt. Gov, a position with pretty much zero power and authority, and once he found out that was actually the case he threw a giant tantrum saying the rest of the Dems in state gov were conspiring against him. I think and I hope we’ve seen the last of him.
MCA1
I thought the second episode was much less satisfying and of significantly lower quality than the pilot (which I thought was pretty great).
The scene between the associate producer and Maggie was cringeworthy and had all the Sorkin defects in it – too pat, way too sanctimonious, too monologuey for a dialogue. (Most of) The best West Wing scenes were not those in which Jed Bartlett diatribed, but where the shots came sidelong and askance. Also, terrible direction of the actor playing a drunken Maggie. Someone who’s slurring their speech that badly and can’t remember what was just said to them can’t stand up straight and make a speech ten seconds later. The plot point about her hiding under a bed in college while her boyfriend hooked up with an ex was ridiculous and pointless. Oh, and the e-mail technical problems leading to forwarding a personal note to thousands of people? C’mon, really? It’s 2012 (or 2010, I guess, on the show).
The character of Mackenzie, or Emily Mortimer’s portrayal, or both, leaves something to be desired right now, and she’s Sorkin’s primary moral vessel here. So that’s a bit of a problem. I think Daniels, on the other hand, is spot-on. As always.
Agreed with others that the music, intro theme and otherwise, is bad. Thom Yorke does not approve of last night’s inclusion.
Here’s hoping for improvement. The best Sorkin television leaves me saying “That’s exactly what I’d want to be able to say” at least once or twice in an episode. Didn’t get that last night, but there’s so much fertile ground there re: our failed media, I can’t give up just yet.
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
I’d like to know who is directing the sound choices, editing of the mix (swell Radiohead “high and dry”… NOW! Full blast!), and who decided the intro song was a good idea. This person, I feel, is the reason the show isn’t better.
Mnemosyne
@Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac:
Given that TV is primarily a writer’s medium, I think you can probably point the finger directly at Sorkin for those kinds of choices.
Lancelot Link
Gavin Newsome’s a real jerkass to waitresses, too.
That’s how I judge a person’s character.
burritoboy
I don’t think we need to label Newsom a sex addict – he’s admitted it to the public (multiple times). Hint to the rest of California: there’s a reason (or rather, a multitude of reasons) we wanted to promote him the hell out of here, and now he can go be the rest of the state’s problem as opposed to San Francisco’s. I can’t stand Ed Lee either, but at least he’s not a freakin’ male model pretending to be our mayor.
Hob, it wasn’t like it was any secret that he’s basically Gordon Getty’s avatar from way way back.