Other cable news shows pander to someone, whether it’s the right or the left. The ‘new format’ pretends to pander to the electorate who aren’t businesses or congresspersons.
Plus they are also very critical of commentary as news and they want to do ‘The News’.
I like the show very much. I’d like to see more life than news, but I think the point is that life happens when you’re working. I can accept that, especially on a tv show.
There were four or five good quips in that episode and there were about two minutes of interesting conversation between Leona and Charlie (one of the good quips was something like “TV networks have a unique ability to inform the national discourse!”/“I know. That’s why I bought one.”), but other than that I think I hated every single second of that hour of TV. How does someone get the kind of credit Sorkin does for being a brilliant writer - and The Social Network really was outstanding - and then trot out almost every single cliche you can use in a single episode of TV show except “we’re trapped in an elevator and she’s having contractions!” The entire conceit of calling Charlie into the CEO’s office and not explain why he was there for an hour while she silently sits there being threatening? What the hell was that? What company is run that way? How did Mac get to be a great producer when she is so hopelessly unprofessional she needs to yell at Will about his dating habits every day? How does Maggie suffer from panic attacks and have no idea how to cope with them unless some Nice Guy is there to talk her through the attack? How is Jim’s behavior with Maggie supposed to come off as sweet or anything other than cliche (as romantic drama) and completely moronic (as the behavior of an adult human being)? Why could they not come up with a plan to fix the news other than Have Will Be Awesome, and by “Be Awesome” we mean act like a moderate version of Keith Olbermann? I love Sam Waterston, but why is it supposed to be endearing that Charlie is a drunk who is constantly threatening to punch his coworkers?
And why the hell is this show so unbearably patronizing toward women and so unaccepting of their professionalism? Journalism schools turn out more female graduates than male, for fuck’s sake! So far the brilliant work here is all being done by Will and Charlie, and Mac’s contribution is to dotingly have Will be great. The only other competent act of journalism from a woman so far was Sloan’s deficit ceiling question, and nobody answered it. Other than that, Maggie gets mad at Will for dating beautiful women and Maggie is stuck in an annoying relationship drama while advising Will about his. Is it going to go on like this?
That was well said, Marley. I did like the CEO’s delivery with the golf joke as well.
After an evening’s reflection, I am going to give this show one more episode. If it doesn’t compel me by then, it’s off the DVR.
I keep wanting to punch Don.
“I could of done the kind of show Mac is doing…whaaaa!” But you quit to do another show. Suck it up.
Poetic license? Makes for better TV, I guess.
It’s not that they were doing commentary, it’s that they kept doing stories that showed the Tea Party candidates were morons - they used the easiest and most prominent real-world target in Sharron Angle, who really is an ignorant dingbat - and that the Tea Party was being funded by the Koch brothers, which undercut the belief that it’s an Authentic Grassroots Movement[sup]TM[/sup] and so on. Now those candidates have power and Leona does not want to piss them off because they could take it out on her corporate empire. It occurs to me that it is a little weird that The Newsroom is about doing a better news show, but since it’s set in the real world past, nothing they do is going to make a significant difference in the broader world. They did a lot of stories informing the public about the Tea Party, but the Republicans still swept to a big win in November 2010.
In the reviews to this point, everybody has said the upcoming episode is just a maudlin trainwreck, and if it’s worse than last night’s episode I may strangle my DVR. However it sounds like it is actually about a real, very difficult journalistic issue. I guess I’ll spoiler it even though it’s about something that really happened in the recent past and we all know what happened-
They’ll be covering the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and all those people in Tucson. Specifically it sounds like they’ll have to decide whether or not they are going to report that Giffords had died, as several news outlets incorrectly did that day.
I’m only 20 minutes into the third show and I want to punch Mac OUT. Just…tie her down and give her anti-estrogen meds until she stops acting like an overly hormonal, tween-aged TWIT.
I want to like her, and I do, until she starts acting like this. Then I just want to stop watching and post about how awful this is. The writers should be shot.
On the plus side, I really like Jeff Daniels in this. I get him mixed up with several other actors, but in this…yeah. I really like him. I’ll remember him for this 
I would prefer the News Night broadcast to the behind-the-scenes stuff. Looks like a news show I would get in to.
Yes. Sorkin shows are always like that with women. The West Wing would crack me up because the women would march around shouting what school they went to and what their GPA was, but men never, ever had to announce their credentials. Sorkin simply cannot write women. The best he can do it write them as if they were men, you know, competent at their jobs and stuff, like CJ Craig on The West Wing. Otherwise they’re blithering, baffling idiots who exist to be impressed with and flustered by men.
Also, can you believe that Maggie’s friend was on the phone the whole time listening to the long conversation between Maggie and Jim? Because women have nothing better to do than strain to hear a conversation between their roommate and her co-worker. Women!
There was a point where Jim and Punjab totally broke the 4th wall and looked right at me. Freaked me the fuck out! And where was Jim to get the Gypsy reference?
I like the Olbermannish speeches, I admit, though the show’s smugness of hindsight annoys me (we know now that the Times Square bomber was a one-off nutcase - this was rather less clear at the time).
As for the interpersonal “drama”… fuck it, couldn’t care less, it’s getting in the way.
This episode sealed it. I will watch this. The criticisms don’t resonate with me. This show is a cut above 90% of everything else airing currently.
Over/under on the episode # in which Mac misplaces her panties? (Fans of the West Wing and/or Sports Night know what I’m talking about.)
The framing device with the company chairwoman and president kinda reminds me of Studio 60’s recurring characters of network president and chairman (Amanda Peet and Steven Weber, respectively), who seemed to take an awful lot of interest in the antics of the central characters, even though they represented at most 1% of a network president’s responsibilities and 0.1% of a chairman’s.
It’s somewhat interesting that they got Jane Fonda in that role (until the closing credits, I was thinking “huh, this woman sure reminds me of Jane Fonda - I guess they’re imitating her on purpose as a reference to Ted Turner…”) but I gotta figure if a corporate chairwoman found that one part of 3% of her domain was getting annoying, she would crush it with a wave of her well-manicured hand and not waste time getting shouted down by fogies who tell her son to “get the fuck out.” She doesn’t have to make threats (“He’s gonna tone it down, or I’m gonna fire him.”) - she can flatly say “Do as I tell you or get out.”
The dramatic musical sting when she first says “I’ll fire him, Charlie” made me chuckle, as though this concept was so utterly shocking and unexpected to Waterston’s character (“What?!”) that it takes him aback. Well, duh, fella - you must have known this was a possibility, if you weren’t an idiot.
Well, so far Olivia Munn’s character seems to have her shit together.
No doubt she’ll be shot by a deranged Tea Party nut in the first-season cliffhanger.
It wasn’t perfect, but I actually enjoyed this episode quite a lot more than the previous one. I liked the way the story was told – oddly, the framing device and the time-shifting made for a more cohesive narrative than last week’s more linear story line, IMO.
I liked Will a lot here. Confident and cocky works better on him than angry and fumbling. And I’m getting on board with the whole “fantasy newscast” sort of aspect. It’s fun to watch, even though it’s very far removed from what any real news show would ever do.
Hey, Sports Night fans, did you recognize Ted McGinley as Gordon? Oh, wait, that wasn’t Ted McGinley, was it? But apparently Mac is dating the same bland pretty-boy stereotype that Dana was. How long before he starts resenting her work hours and her obsession with Will? Or maybe he’ll sleep with Olivia Munn.
Finally, I can see no reason for Jim wanting to go out with Maggie other than because the script says so. The girl is a train wreck, and there really isn’t a spark there. Natalie and Jeremy had a spark. I don’t feel it here.
Still, a much better episode. They’re 2-for-3 by my scorecard, so I’m hopeful it will continue to improve.
I’ve only watched through the second episode so far— and I’m somewhat relieved to see I won’t be threadshitting when I say I’ve found the show disappointing and not particularly captivating so far.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of Sorkin’s TV work, although I did see The Social Network, which wasn’t bad. A lot of the dialogue in this, particularly the second episode, sounded very “scripty” to me. **hajario **said it nicely upthread, that (paraphrasing) there’s a distracting sameness to the lines, which makes it sound unfortunately like what it is: a bunch of actors all speaking in the same voice, which in something as talky as this, begins to grate after a while.
I like the energy when Will is on air, but the rest of it has been falling flat. Also, not sure if this has been mentioned, but the language seems oddly sanitized for a pay cable show— I’m hearing “freaking” and that people think Will is an “ass.” I never hear “ass” (as an obvious euphemism for “asshole”) except on network TV, applied to say, Gregory House, when clearly he screams to be referred to as an asshole. Was this originally filmed as a network TV series, or are they just keeping it clean-ish so it won’t require any modification when it airs in re-runs?
This was always an HBO production, and I hadn’t thought about it, but yes, there is surprisingly little profanity considering the pressure these people are under. Sam Waterston’s character did tell Jane Fonda’s weenie son to fuck off at the end of the last episode. Maybe that’s just the style they want. They probably won’t do as much compulsory Sopranos-style nudity either.
Or Game of Thrones-style sexposition.
So, was anybody covering the 2010 midterm elections thinking about the historically pro forma debt-ceiling vote just a few months off? Seems pretty prescient of a pair of reporters to raise the issue and grasp its potential significance on the night of the election. What’s next, at a staff meeting in late April 2011, Will says “Let’s leave a block of time open on May 2 - my reporter’s instincts are telling me something important is going to happen.”