yesyesyes.
Did anyone else notice that Ron Ostrow (who’s appeared in just about everything Aaron Sorkin’s ever done) was sitting behind Don on the plane? I’m just surprised Josh Malina hasn’t shown up yet. 
This one felt more like an original show instead of TWW or Sports Night at CNN. There was definite Sorkin flavor, but less “He did THAT already too!” for me.
And Terry Crewes just makes everything better, as does Allison from Eureka.
They sure are burning through 2010 and 2011 at a good clip. The first 7 episodes have covered over a year. At this pace, season 2 will be in real time and season 3 will be set in the future.
That occurred to me, but like a lot of HBO shows, they’ll have a long hiatus between seasons.
I really enjoyed that episode, particularly the way it captured the excitement of covering a really big story like that one. But it’s kind of like how every episode of ER featured a six-car pileup on the highway or a plane crash. Few nights in the newsroom or in the emergency room are ever that eventful; mostly it’s really dull. And presumably a later episode will confront Late For Dinner’s relevation that ACN is hacking cell phones (as was News of the World).
Time brought this up in their (largely negative) review - in the years before the series starts, we’re told, Will McAvoy’s laid back, non-committal, non-challenging style made him the most popular cable news anchor, analogous to the easy-going Jay Leno. In reality over the last ten years, though, it’s the slow news days between major stories that led cable news to fill time with gibbering pundits competing to be the most extreme, and somebody like McAvoy would have been eaten alive in that environment.
Looking at the episode list:
#1 and #2 take place in the same week - when the BP oil spill started.
#3 is six months later (!) - and discusses the 2010 midterm elections.
#4 is two months after that, New Year 2011 and the Gifford shooting
#5 is a month after that, Valentine’s Day.
#6 is two months after that, in the early days of the Japanese earthquake/tsunami/Fukushima disaster.
#7 is a few weeks later - the death of Osama bin Laden.
What the heck do these people do in the relatively slow periods between these stories? How do they fill airtime without giving excess attention to emotion-charged nonstories? Or does McAvoy’s five-times-weekly hour of News Night supposedly focus solely on important news, with the implication that the rest of the fictional ACN network covers all the useless crap that we (as watchers of The Newsroom) are spared but real-life watchers of CNN and Fox News and MSNBC are not?
Anyway, fine, we don’t need to see Will McAvoy fill an hour discussing flag pins or the use of “niggardly” or other piddling crap that actual news anchors waste time on because they have so much time to fill (unless, of course, he’s covering them just to show us how uncomfortable he is in doing so), but since E.R. was invoked, those characters had personal lives that could be interesting and complex (far more so after George Clooney left, in my opinion). Watching the comparably maladroit romantic contortions of Will/MacKenzie and Jim/Maggie (they’ve all been working together for over a year, now - one would think these matters have a half-life somewhat shorter than that of Uranium)… that’s become our time-filler, and I guess it’s the tragedy of fiction that Will McAvoy can make promises to his viewers that Aaron Sorkin cannot extend to us.
Yet again, twenty somethings relate to each other through reference to musical theatre, as twenty somethings are wont to do.
After thinking more about the latest episode (“5/1”), it occurred to me to wonder why they were having the one-year anniversary party on a Sunday night. Wouldn’t Friday or Saturday night make more sense, so that they could sober up before work the following Monday? But of course, they all needed to be in the same place when they got word of the president’s special announcement. Just once, I’d like to see an episode in which everyone is at home, on their way home, in the supermarket, etc. when big news occurs.
I liked this episode, except that the plane stuff was a little much. Don is an entitled douchebag the entire time, but he is “redeemed” at the end by being sensitive to the pilots and giving them the news about Bin Laden, as though he is somehow responsible for it? I was SO hoping an Air Marshal would pop up and tase Don. OTOH, I did like the passenger “Lester” and his flirting with Sloan.
I’d like to see one where they get something wrong. Not as in “fuck up the pre-interview” as Maggie did, but as in actually call something wrong despite their best efforts. They have developed a keen sense of the exact nature of developing news stories so far, mainly because they are reporting on 1-2 year old stories.
Ooooo! I would have loved that!
Yeah, I like his persuasion strategy - insult the flight attendant more, that’ll convince her!
Saw this past Sunday’s about OBL’s killing.
My wife kept saying “I *hate *the way women are portrayed on this show!”
Can’t argue the point - Maggie’s character and how her interactions with Jim are written are unrealistic, weirdly awkward and ultimately, annoying as all hell. Mac comes across as the opposite of the war-branded, take-no-shit veteran. Sloan seems like the most reasonable female character thus far.
And Will being stoned seemed like an unnecessary throwaway twist to give Daniels something to do that episode. At least he played a cool guitar (he’s a great player and that was really him on that Martin OM-28 - my guess on the model based on what I saw ;))…
Jeez I want this show to be better than it is. I will complete the season, but…
ETA: after a quick Google, it was probably this, with a natural top: http://www.martinguitar.com/catalogs/OMJeffDaniels.pdf
For people who dislike this show: What TV do you watch?
Since Game of Thrones finished, Breaking Bad and The Newsroom are the only two shows I look forward to.
On my DVR, you’ll also find True Blood, Weeds, Louie, Colbert/Stewart/Letterman and some Australian stuff (Gruen, Good Game, Media Watch, Four Corners), but they mostly sit for a while.
Am I missing a heap of good stuff?
But what a name?!? All I can think of when I hear her name is “Black Sabbath.” Does anyone in the world have the last name “Sabbith”?
Except she’s that old stereotype that a woman can either be social or smart-- she’s shown to be basically autistic when it comes to dealing with human interaction and emotion, all while making her some sort of economic genius.
So I’ve got a question – and quite possibly my interpretation is wrong – but it seemed like the big “victory” of the episode is that ACN was able to report the news of Bin Laden’s death about 15 seconds before the president announced it.
But who really does that help? Are the viewers somehow better informed because they learned the news 15 seconds before everyone else did? What was the real accomplishment here?
Journalists are typically portrayed as placing a lot of value to be first to break a story. Sometimes there is value because of the story - e.g., an emergency requiring listener action; sometimes because the journalist gets the buzz of being first and if the story is a long-term one, can be the “voice of the story” which is huge - look at Woodward and Bernstein; or sometimes it is just because they are competitive…
But in this case, no real value, no.
**ThelmaLou **- I hear ya; I guess I assumed the name was a variation on Jessica Savitch, the newswoman who ended up having a coke problem and drowning after a car crash…
Well, in this case it didn’t do much, except that they can say they were the first. In reality, had Will actually not been high and checked his phone, he’d have seen the text from Biden and they would have been able to report it 20 minutes before the announcement, which obviously would have been a much bigger deal.