I never watched West Wing and am not super familiar with the rest or Sorkin’s work other than a few episodes of Sports Night which I did enjoy.
The style of dialogue that I loved in the first episode is already starting to wear thin for me on the second one. It’s repetitive and he makes the same jokes over and over. Also, no character seems to have their own voice. Anyone could say any line with only some minor changes and it would be the same.
Saw the second episode. I’m not interested in romantic history of the two main characters, and I’m actively disinterested in seeing it take up roughly a quarter of the episode’s run time.
I’m also getting a little put off by Englishwoman and Waterston (I’ll learn their character names by and by) instantly - and in Waterston’s case, with threats of violence that I’d probably laugh at if directed at me (“Bring it on, Early-Bird-Special”) - jumping to Mainguy’s defense whenever someone points out that he’s kind of a jerk. He is kind of a jerk - mollycoddling him and jumping down the throat of anyone who criticizes him is not helping him.
I suspect manipulative writing, in the sense that suggestions that Mainguy is flawed gets shot down, coupled with repeated praise for Mainguy, is suppose to impress on the viewer that Mainguy is uber-talented, even when he’s quite obviously being a jerk. If he has any flaws, it’s that he’s too good at his job.
Not quite the case - the conceit of Newsroom is that a golden age of accurate news once existed - in the time of Cronkite and Murrow - but gosh-darnit, MacAvoy will lead American News, and America, back to the promised land.
Agreed. I liked the first episode, but this one was awful. It may be that a show about a news room, rather than something more serious like, say, POTUS, has no core context to keep us interested (Lou Grant aside).
I think that NPR article was the one I’d read earlier, and if so, there was another section that resonated for me.
Something about it being a show for people who love America but hate Americans. And a lot about how the premise of the show is that people are STUPID, STUPID, STUPID.
Which is supposed to make you feel good, I guess, about being the part that can appreciate a show that thinks everyone else is stupid, but…it kinda pissed in my cheerios a little.
I’m kinda curious how she manages to accidentally put an asterisk into the “To” field of an e-mail she types on a phone. My working hypothesis is that she suffers from convenient bouts of implausible stupidity. In a future episode, she will trip and fall, knocking over a interview subject in the most embarrassing way, because her illness will briefly cause her to lose the ability to tie her own shoes.
She’s ditzy but committed! Just the thing to help Will become the man he secretly wants to be.
I need Maggie to calm down if I’m to continue watching this.
Mackenzie: “Wait, you mean everyone thinks the guy that acts like an asshole is an asshole?”
Everyone else: (stares silently at her, thinking she’s not too bright)
Okay, episode 1: I thought it did a pretty decent job as a pilot, in that it introduced all the characters and the relationships thereof in an economical and entertaining way. I absolutely loved the first scene with Will speaking his mind at the panel discussion. Then the oil spill plot started, and, well… I seem to recall a lot of those details becoming public in the days following the rig explosion, but this dude has the entire story locked down in five minutes because he just happens to have high-level personal contacts at both BP and Halliburton, who both thought the very first thing they needed to do in this situation was to call the News Guy. The whole thing was eye-rollingly implausible, but you know what? I went with it because I’d gotten pulled in by that point and it made for a pretty fun ride of a TV show.
Then, episode 2: From the first mention of Chekov’s e-mail system, everybody watching the show (and many who weren’t watching, just by osmosis) absolutely* knew *that somebody was going to send a sensitive e-mail to the entire staff by the end of the show. When it happened, it had zero impact because the audience was two steps ahead already. Plus, it was a stupid e-mail that nobody would have actually written and sent in the first place.
Also, in the “more ridiculously implausible coincidences” department, the spokesman for the Governor of Arizona that Maggie has to interview, 2500 miles away, just happens to be her old college boyfriend who cheated on her! How about that! And you know the rest.
So then, instead of simply reporting the story and saying something like “Governor Brewer’s office declined to comment at this time,” they decided they had to dig up somebody to be a talking head, just because (which seems like the exact opposite of Mac’s stated mission earlier in the show), and found not one, but three incredibly worthless guests. And the brilliant professional anchor who did such a masterful job of doing an entire newscast unscripted and on the fly just three days earlier can’t handle a short interview with a few yokels.
Plus, I’ve yet to give a rat’s ass about any of these characters.
Sorkin has done much better than this in the past, so I know he’s got it in him, and I’ll stick with the show for a little while in the hope that it will improve. But so far I’m not terribly impressed.
Sorkin’s stock in trade, as discussed, is gravitas. So the problems with seeking gravitas in the media include: a) while there are always landmark events that mark journalistic effectiveness, the media has always been gray-area messy, in terms of objectivity, quality, intent, etc.; and b) in today’s media, we know so much more about the process and the players that no one thinks that integrity in America is a black-and-white problem to solve.
There’s an article in the NYTimes Book Review on a new bio of Walter Cronkite. It basically skewers the collective understanding that Cronkite had demonstrably greater integrity or impact on the events of the day, e.g. Influencing LBJ about pulling out of Vietnam or running for a second term.
I enjoy Sorkin’s craft w/r/t dialogue - the pacing, multiple layers, convening meaning in monosyllabic clusters - but he is trying to put the media on a pedastle it never consistently occupied, IMHO.
Second this. Plus it didn’t make any sense that they’d bother to announce this crap, instead of sending it by email. But I’m wondering if we’re supposed to understand that Mac deliberately made the mistake of sending that email to everyone. I mean, she said that she wanted everyone to know that Will didn’t cheat on her, so she “accidentally” sends a message to everyone revealing that fact?
To be fair. I don’t think the West Wing was ever about longing to get back to the days when the American Presidency was like the Bartlett Administration. Instead it was Sorkin’s version of what the Presidency would be like if he ran the joint.
Same with The Newsroom.
I like it. I work with the media a lot, and while I don’t think they are quite as good as the show wants them to be, I am enjoying it (even though I am usually the talking head).
The show could stand to be funnier, but there’s been a weird “technology- crazy, huh?” strain to the first two episodes. The anchor thinks it’s kooky that he has a blog (also - “Punjab?”), and Mac (age 40) is mystified by emails? It’s hard to mix an allegedly serious look at the media with flat-out farce, and that’s what happened in the second episode.
Yes.
They had to dig up a talking head because it’s TV news. A no-comment from Brewer wasn’t enough. They needed someone who supported the law to appear on the show and talk about it. They already had someone coming on to criticize the law, so if they couldn’t get someone to speak up for the law they would have had to cancel him and then fill several extra minutes with almost no notice and their coverage of the biggest story of the day would have been lacking. (They also proposed canceling the whole segment.) They need guests. Mac wants them to have guests who have something intelligent and useful to say about the issue. Of course, after Brewer canceled they got three guests who were so spectacularly stupid that even I thought it was a little much and I think the Arizona law is terrible. I guess it is more bearable if you interpret the stupid guests as a critique of TV news show guests rather than a critique of people who supported that law, but still.
He did a good job with those guests, actually. It was just bad TV because they were all braindead and none of them could explain or defend their points of view. Will carried them, practically crammed some informed comments into their mouths, and his questions were good. But the guests sucked. One of them was a racist, one was an airhead, and the third didn’t understand what a metaphor is. Since they showed Will doing a perfect job with no preparation and unrealistic access to information in the pilot I thought it was fair of them to show what happens on ACN when not everything goes right. Unfortunately they submerged that in a bunch of relationship drama and other stuff.
The New Yorker did that, too. It was very interesting reading.
I agree. Will did the same thing with America and with the press in his tirade in the pilot.
Is this supposed to be a nightly network news show, or an evening news magazine? Because I got the impression that it’s an hour-long show, and none of the network shows are that long. And will they address the idea that no one actually watches the network news shows?
It’s not network, it’s cable.
No, in this alternate reality, young people will both avidly consume TV news and also sit around their dorm rooms having informed discussions about it because young people hate the internet.
This actually goes to my point, even if I didn’t make it too eloquently. After all the yapping about raising the level of discourse, or presenting the argument in the best possible way, or whatever other rhetoric they used, they ending up doing it this way, because… this is the way it’s done. It’s circular logic. They talked a great game about doing things differently, and then made no apparent effort to *do *anything differently. But I don’t think that’s what Sorkin was trying to get across.
They did make the effort. They failed because Margaret belittled the sexual performance Gov. Brewer’s spokesman. Initially they were going to have an informed critic speak against the law and Brewer speak in favor of the law she’d signed. Then they lost Brewer right before the show went on the air and they had to replace her with three extraordinarily lame guests, and Mac yelled at them because they were doing exactly what she said she didn’t want them to do. Canceling or dramatically shortening the segment would have been bad journalism because it was a major story, and as Mac said, it would have been unfair to have someone criticize the law while no one supported it. So they had no choice but to go ahead with the terrible guests and the segment was a predictable disaster.
The drama in the series (the part that doesn’t come from the office relationships, which I am already bored with) is the conflict between their lofty aspirations and the demands of daily TV news as a medium. Yes, they want to raise the discourse and better inform the country, but they also need to keep people watching their show because they will get fired if their ratings stink, and in any case if nobody watches the show it doesn’t matter how informative it is because no one will be informed.
Or at least I think that’s the idea. Like I said, in episode two they got screwed by a rather ludicrous set of circumstances and unprofessional behavior. Of course in episode one they succeeded through a rather ludicrous set of cirumstances and unprofessional behavior. The problem is that like you say, so far they’ve done little to support Sorkin’s thesis. I disagree with you on the reason for that. Like the NPR review said, Sorkin wants to make an argument about the news but doesn’t seem to care very much (or know much about) journalism.
I would say the characters need to do two things to make his point: they need to raise the discourse and blah blah blah, and they need to succeed (or fail) for real-world reasons. If they get amazing scoops through dumb luck instead of good reporting, it doesn’t prove Sorkin’s point and they might as well just have the characters develop superpowers or get newspapers from the future like on Early Edition. The ‘real world’ part also means they can’t just reinvent TV news and pretend viewers love it. They need to do a better version of a real news show, which means they need to obey some of the demands of the medium.