That’s hilarious.
Yes it was, and I’m not even a Sorkin fan. 
I did think the use of the song ‘Thank you Falletin me be myself’ was a good choice.
Then I wondered why it moved into Mony Mony.
Then I wondered why the hell I had my own music going in the background and hadn’t noticed. :smack:
Yes. One of my favorites.
John Gallagher (plays Jim) reminds me closely of Aidan Gillen (the white mayor on The Wire and Littlefinger on GoT).
What’s the Alec Baldwin movie?
We weren’t in a hurry to watch it because of the reviews, but we liked it quite a lot.
Yeah, there was that one part with Mortimer and Daniels in his office that went on and on, but things ended up moving quite quickly by the end. Nice change of pace. Will watch again.
No Olivia Munn. Judgment withheld there.
Would an exec like Waterston have known about Twitter in 2010?
Love the blog dig. Who was it, Katie Couric, that had a blog that she wasn’t writing herself?
What was with McCain on the screens in the background all the time?
I wonder if they did themselves a disservice by setting this show in the “real” world, and in 2010. Part of the tension the characters felt was not knowing if the BP story was going to pan out – but of course we all knew it would, so we weren’t feeling the same tension. With “The West Wing,” it was a slightly tweaked version of the real world, so we, along with the characters, never knew how the issue of the week would be resolved, until it was.
I’ll reserve judgment – after all it’s only been one episode, and they may not lean on real-life events as major story points that often.
I liked it. The snappy dialogue sounds a bit forced at times, but I was interested all the way through.
That was fucking hilarious! Thanks for sharing.
I just saw it on YouTube. I’m glad to see Sorkin in his wheelhouse. I wondered about McAvoy’s vision of his ex at the beginning, glad they explained that as they did.
Haven’t yet seen tonight’s episode. I’m going to go watch it now. But there’s something that just occurred to me about last week’s episode.
All the previews keep talking about “raising the level of discourse” in news, by putting together a news program that’s entertaining and informative (as if that’s never been done before). Something that no one else is doing. And I’m sure they’ll show it at some point, but last week’s example wasn’t it.
Last week was about a scoop. A good scoop, sure. They can pat themselves on the back for it if they want, but you pull back the curtains and that’s really all that was there.
They didn’t discover a story that no one else was covering. Not really.
I mean, compare it to Watergate. If Woodward and Bernstein weren’t around, there’s a pretty good chance Watergate would never have come to light.
This? It’s oil gushing into the gulf, a raging fire on the oil rig, and 11 people dead. Take away this news network and its “scoop,” give the story 24 hours and every station on Earth would be covering it. Which is fine because the oil isn’t going anywhere. It’s not like reporting on it on a Monday would make a difference in the lives of people instead of waiting for Tuesday.
Bottom line is that they didn’t do anything magical. Not really.
True. I guess the takeaway from last week’s episode was that they have the ability to see beyond the superficial (burning oil rig) and get to the substance (oil leak). So it’s a metaphor, kinda.
Exactly. This was my biggest complaint about the first episode, although it certainly wasn’t the only one. This cuts to the core of the series. If you are making a show about the way the media should be doing its job, you can’t have them succeed through plain old dumb luck. In this episode ACN got a big scoop based not on doing their job the right way, but based on information that would not have really been available to them at that time and which may not have been very well sourced. Because the fictional producer had a fictional roommate who worked at BP and a fictional sister who worked at Halliburton, they knew something they would not have known at that point in the story. If you can only make this critique work because of a series of crazy coincidences, it’s not a valid critique of the way the story was broken. Of the way the story was covered later, perhaps. It makes the deep, deep preachiness of the show even more grating if they say on one hand that the news media should be much better (nobody disagrees) and on the other say that they should also have magically good luck and apparently need someone on staff who is either an expert on oil drilling or becomes so after five minutes on the internet.
I’m also not sure about the way they depicted the response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. It seems to me that people realized that was a big story pretty quickly because it was a huge oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico in addition to the huge rig fire. I remember that being a top news story by the afternoon of April 21, which is before ACN’s show goes on the air. You don’t need a lot of technical expertise to understand why “huge oil spill” is a big story.
The second episode felt like a step in the wrong direction for me. I appreciate that they’re not always going to have everything go right for ACN and that felt realistic. I love whatever they have Sam Waterston do. But there was much more relationship drama in this episode than I needed. (On that note: hey, there’s a huge news story breaking. Mind if we take 10 minutes to argue about our relationship and quote Broadway lyrics at each other?) And it’s somewhat annoying that everybody on the show is devoted beyond all reason to the greatness of Will.
The idea here is that they’re going to offer some specific critiques of how big stories should have been covered. If they’re making things up it doesn’t have the same impact. I don’t know if it’s going to work and it is certainly Monday morning quarterbacking, but it’s an important element in what they are trying to say.
Yeah, there is a certain amount of disingenuous self-praising there. “Why don’t we do a news show that is informative and not moronic?” “Oh my God, you’re a genius!” 
So. The mousy girl, who two weeks ago was an intern and last week an administrative assistant, says TO HER BOSS, “oh my god, how come you can’t just magically trust me when I say I can do an awesome job at this phone interview? I’m completely experienced here and it’s downright rude of you to assume otherwise!”
I think any professional journalist would be offended if her boss demanded they do a practice interview before he allowed her to talk to a spokesman on the phone. He was wasting her fucking time and saying he didn’t think she knew how to do a basic part of her job. Of course, in the heat of the moment she also did something absurdly unprofessional, but in the interest of personal drama I guess that’s going to happen again.
But that’s the point. She wasn’t a professional journalist. Last week she was an administrative assistant and now she’s an assistant producer. But the title change doesn’t magically anoint her with journalistic knowledge and her boss knows that!
But instead of saying “hey secretary! I don’t trust you to get my coffee, let alone screen a guest,” he says “let’s walk through this together so we’re both on the same page.”
And this girl, who apparently is so scared of confrontation she’d lie quiet under a bed while her boyfriend fucks someone else, confronts her superior as being way out of line in making this request. He doesn’t know what she’s done as an intern. He doesn’t know if she’s done anything as an intern. So he questions her and it turns out he’s completely, 100% right to have done so because she ends up fucking it up.
Hell, for all we the audience know, she totally lied about why she fucked up because she didn’t want to admit that she lied about knowing how to pre-screen a guest.
I find the show entertaining, but I am a little put off by the way Sorkin rehashes his old stuff. News Night? Sports Night? Raising the level of discourse is straight out of West Wing. The girl being actually offended that no one gave her a ration of shit for a major fuck up is straight out of Sports Night. I am sure I would find some stuff from Studio 60, but I didn’t find that show as memorable. (although I do remember complaining that Studio 60 was rehashing Sports Night and West Wing dialogue.)
I admit I’ve never worked in TV news and they have not gone into depth about Margaret’s background, but my understanding of the situation was this: she works in television, she has been with McAvoy’s ACN show for a year, she presumably has a journalism degree, and her cable network has offered her a job as an associate producer on the 10 pm news show. So it would appear she has at least some vague idea how her job and television news work. She was not asked to talk to Gov. Brewer, she was asked to help prep Brewer’s spokesman. She has presumably done this a ton of times and spoken to scads of spokesmen in her brief career, but her boss (who is on his third day on the job) says she doesn’t know how to talk to someone on the phone and needs to practice with him. This would be more than a little insulting. If he doesn’t trust her to do the job, he should ask someone else to do it instead of conducting a pointless make-believe session, or else he should just let her do her own job. I remember discussing this once in some other thread (I forget what show or movie was being discussion), but journalists don’t role-play interviews like this. It’s useless.
All Sorkin productions are like that. I think it really comes down to the word “gravitas.” The President of the United States of America? Hell yeah I want Jed Bartlett! Raise the mother fucking discourse in this place and I’ll say “it’s about time.” He completely hit it out of the park.
The problem is, it didn’t translate to Studio 60. There’s no gravitas there. I don’t want a comedy program that raises the public discourse. I want a comedy program that I can laugh to. Or with. Or even at. And Studio 60 provided none of that. It was just preachy and annoying and I didn’t care.
I think Sorkin managed to straddle the line with The Newsroom. It can raise public discourse. It can have gravitas. But it can also crash and burn. It’s teetering right now, and teetering towards the latter rather than the former. But I’m willing to continue giving it a shot.
I like the show and will keep watching, but am a little disappointed that the second episode, at least, seems more like a comedy of errors all around than…I don’t know. I was expecting, or hoping for, something a little more serious. Also can’t believe Mac put personal interest in front of an immediate, emergency deadline. What wasted time there was there, ugh. It was kinda painful to watch. And more than a little unbelievable.