As everyone else on the interwebs has spent their week reviewing Aaron Sorkin's new HBO series The Newsroom I was itching to add my two cents worth to the pile of newsprint that's been written/posted online but alas, I lack access to HBO. Until I was gratified to find that they had generously posted the entire first episode to YouTube.
Part of me feels like we've seen this before from Sorkin. Seems like whenever Sorkin jumps into the wide world of television, he's good at creating television shows about workplaces and the people that inhabit those places. From Sports Night to The West Wing to the lamentable Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, it's all about the workplace and the people that inhabit them.
The Newsroom tackles cable news. Unfortunately, Sorkin's trademark dollops of idealism and preachiness seem to fall flat here. There's a starry eyed quality to these characters that makes me wonder what universe they're living in. Of course, it's classic Sorkin- television shows about the way sports journalism/politics/entertainment and now cable news ought to be in his eyes. It's indulgent and it feels like an elitist Liberal argument that yes they really believe in truth, justice and the American way and hey, they love America too.
The Newsroom launches with affable newsman Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) attending a college symposium of some kind- McAvoy's popularity centers around the fact that he makes an effort to avoid taking controversial position that 'bother anyone.' He is 'the Jay Leno of News Anchors' so when he's asked what makes America so great by a college student and launches into a 'Network' style rant about how it's not, his rant goes viral. Of course, he follows up the rant by pointing out that America did great things because 'we were informed by great men, men who were revered.'
That's when I rolled my eyes.
It gets worse from there. McAvoy is sent on a three week vacation, comes back and finds that his bow-tie wearing, boozy boss (Sam Waterston) has hired his ex-girlfriend Mackenzie Hale (Emily Mortimor) to be his new executive producer. She turns out to have an even more Quixotic view about the way things ought to be than he does- wanting to 'tell truth to stupid' and 'do news the way it should be done.' There's a cast of subsidiary characters that float in and around these two shining beacons of starry-eyed idealism but none of them were all that interesting.
Things go further downhill when it's revealed that this show is set 2 years ago- starting in April 2010 with the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon. So not only is this show's premise that 'America would be better if we were all just edumacated in the right way' but we get to watch as Sorkin demonstrates the way the events of the past two years should have been reported on, according to him.
Oh brother.
Listen, I thought the first fifteen minutes were interesting. There's something about Paddy Chayefsky style rants that makes for compelling television. Everything else got boring in a hurry but around the 50 minute mark, when the news breaks in on the ceaseless debate about what's wrong with America and how our heroes can reclaim the 4th Estate as 'an honorable profession' things pick up nicely as titular newsroom explodes into a breathless, frenetic pace of activity as they attempt to track down the breaking news about the Deepwater Horizon spill. It's entertaining- but not entertaining enough to forgive the fact it's drenched in nauseating amounts of 60s idealism. Sorkin's done this before- but been better about it.
Overall: There's some dim hope for this show. But I'm not rushing to subscribe to HBO just so I can see it on a regular basis.
(Interesting aside: at the beginning, McAvoy lays into his super-liberal counterpart at the symposium by calling Liberals losers. This show demonstrates an interesting truth about liberals though- they're not necessarily losers. They're just hopelessly bogged down in the past.)
(Another interesting aside: Sports Night was better.)
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