The Newsroom: Sorkin's HBO Joint

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC8ovJYAU3U

This is terrible

These two posts = ILX

Speech much like Bulworth +

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQKfq6ZsgMk

i'd watch sam waterston kick an orange

WHILE SHOUTING

"How do you fix breaking news?" oof

wow, the 1992 fall season is looking strong.

Does Sorkin have a second type of story he can tell.

walking, talking

or

talking, walking

Men makin' tough decisions in the spotlight.

is there a giant clock on the wall anywhere

i'd like to hit sorkin over the head with a giant clock.

you know i wasn't sure about this but now that i see olivia munn is in it and jeff daniels' appears to maybe be playing that ol sorkin fave the reasonable republican that hates actual republicans but maybe he's prolife or wants lower taxes or something, well, now i'm all in.

this looks unbelievably stupid but i will probably watch all of it

i couldnt do studio 60 but there was something so war-criminally horrible about the skits in the show, this just looks like standard sorkin missing the point in politics

Pilot directed by Daytrippers/Superbad Greg Mottola.

i was down w/ studio 60 right up to the gilbert and sullivan metaskit. never looked back.

depending on when this is on i'll probably watch every bit of it also. also maybe it's just jeff daniels plus newsroom but is anyone getting more of a clooney stupid earnest vibe from this instead of sorkin stupid earnest vibe?

haha the gilbert and sullivan thing was exactly where i bailed too

annoyingly, best episode of Studio 60 was the second-to-last one. Fuckin' waste of time to spend all his time writing all those bullshit sketches and saves the real character story work for when he's burned all his bridges.

ugh can we have the Finkleman show back instead pls

annoyingly, best episode of Studio 60 was the second-to-last one. Fuckin' waste of time to spend all his time writing all those bullshit sketches and saves the real character story work for when he's burned all his bridges.

― Peppermint Patty Hearst (VegemiteGrrl), Tuesday, 3 April 2012 02:32 (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this terrible show having the all-round for-every-body ultimate-happy-ending ate into whatever goodwill it had generated. real bad.

this also looks bad in a kinda prefab way, but I will watch & maybe enjoy it. the kind of tall-professional-woman berates sitting-mastermind-man thing is studio sixty all over again

I will totally watch this, and probably totally resent it. It seems to basically just be Studio 60 minus all the West Wing guys, right? At least he won't have to write SNL-type skits into this one.

instead he'll get to write as many political talking heads as he wishes

Was that Dev Patel floating around in the background of the trailer?

jane fonda sighting too!!

emily mortimer too i think

Sports Night is a classic to me but i kinda feel like he's gotten too much freedom to indulge himself on TV at this point and is better off in the movie world where people can use the strengths of his screenplays and abandon the rest as they like

ugh no way

er not to some dude, to the trailer

haha

Dev Patel and Emily Mortimer are in, yes.

I thought that was David Cromer interviewing Daniels:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/theater/theaterloop/chi-david-cromer-in-a-trailer-for-hbos-newsroom-20120403,0,3745613.column

"progress is slow but I'm in it for the long-haul" plus hand-wave and head-turn is the most Sorkinesque moment possible. It's like the Sorkin Singularity

lool @ this whole thread

haha great thread

I'm both eager and trepidatious

did you see the graduation address he gave? he called all the students dumb. the parents loved it. the parents love that guy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpKC50uFVQ0

This one, going for The Social Network II angle (or the Girls demo):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgFZbrwmndA

http://cdn.screenrant.com/wp-content/uploads/Peter-Finch-in-Network.jpg

This show would seem so much more relevant if I or anyone I knew actually watched TV news, ever.

Also much like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5E9RV9TyEo

"By 1980, every show on television was about a divorced Jew who lives in New York City and goes on a blind date with Tom Selleck."

This show is really getting savaged, huh?

I thought this was a good piece about Sorkin's oeuvre:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_completist/2012/06/the_complete_works_of_aaron_sorkin_from_the_west_wing_to_the_social_network_to_the_newsroom_.single.html

yeah, good article (although i disagree about the value of some shows/movies vs. others)

I think THR liked it, but I just read the first little blurb. I don't think Seitz has reviewed it yet, but he was tweeting that it was corny a few weeks ago but he seemed to be enjoying it.

Pretty sure it's gonna be shit though.

Mostly thinking of Emily Nussbaum's New Yorker review, though I've seen a few other pans as well.

its metacritic rating is mad yellow

such a huge disconnect for me between how much i expect from sorkin (esp w/ evidence like few good men, social network, west wing, sports night) and what he's been delivering on tv these days (studio 60 + now this). i don't think he's being lazy -- maybe he needs a few good editors?

the Slate piece touches on it but i definitely think he needs collaborators -- his recent screenplays that are adapted from real life source material and directed by people he doesn't typically collaborate with >>>>>>>>>> his recent TV stuff where he has full freedom to rehash West Wing and Sports Night to diminishing returns

think it's a potent combination of his own ego (and yes, lack of editors/filters) and the fact that his best TV work was at the cusp of the Sopranos/Wire/Deadwood/MadMen/Breaking Bad era that made us all expect a lot more. West Wing just had to be better than...ER.

Social Network was good because of Fincher working against the screenplay (sort of what that Slate article said, I think).

http://www.gq.com/entertainment/tv/blogs/the-stream/2012/06/how-to-write-a-monologue-like-aaron-sorkin.html

i actually like his speeches and enjoy the way he breaks down what he does there, but god his faux-Network speeches are getting so "you could kick a ball in the street"

MSZ digs its "Capra-corn"

http://www.vulture.com/2012/06/tv-review-the-newsroom-corny-but-inspiring.html

urgh ffs take away this guys copy of network

wouldn't do any good. he's memorized it like Fahrenheit 451.

this show looks like sixteen piles of crap

I really don't like the way it uses actual events/figures because it dates the show right away, and makes it even more of a facepalm than when it's blindingly obvious what the fictional events/figures are like they did in Sports Night and West Wing.

he's veering towards just straight-up Oliver Stone steez, ie being smashed over the head with a mallet while someone shouts DO U SEE every 5 minutes... if he's not there already.

tbh i think he's always been like that, but Josh Lyman had some lolzy lines so it was cool.

yeah maybe it's the players that made his material awesome

Krause and Charles <3

The players didn't make the meterial distinct, though--Sorkin did that.

yeah actors with comedy chops tend to be his salvation, and it seems like Newsroom wasn't cast with that in mind (like Jeff Daniels obviously has those chops but won't necessarily put them to much use)

xpost

so wow, these reviews are so bad i don't even think i'm going to watch it
http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-prospectus/post/_/id/51842/the-newsroom-aaron-sorkins-toxic-mess

think I'm just gonna rewatch the Ken Finkleman series on Youtube instead

They should really put it up free, like they did with the Girls pilot, given these reviews.

Not that it simply isn't lousy, but i think there's an instinct among critics who got caught with their pants down lanticipating Studio 60 not to get embarrassed again.

Studio 60's pilot circulated for months and months ahead of airing, on Netflix and other places. and they (ok, we) all had pretty high hopes for it based on that episode.

Lolling at the trailer of Pullman throwing a stapler(?) at the camera. He gets into it like De Niro playing Russian roulette in the Deer Hunter.

Whenever I think I might want to watch this, i'm just going to rewatch Sports Night instead

that is what i do whenever i get a sorkin-y urge tbh. i like social network, though.

me too!

west wing, sportsnight is about it. social network is good but nothing like as rewatchable as WW and SN

Oh, Olivia Munn is in this? Sold.

west wing has some really good stuff, some really cringey stuff, some downright offensive stuff. sports night can be cringey but it just goes down easier than the west wing.

also dan rydell

yeah Sports Night is comfort food to me, i've run through the whole series on DVD maybe half a dozen times now

Olivia Munn makes me even less interested.

iirc josh charles and aaron sorkin had "creative differences" on the set of sports night and in retrospect i want to say that josh charles was one of the best things that ever happened to sorkin.

that's interesting, i haven't really read much of anything about the making of Sports Night since people are so much less likely to write about that than Sorkin's other stuff

yeah WW is not perfect, but I can't help it. the first few seasons are pretty good. Josh Lyman, Sam Seaborn, Will Bailey, Toby.
I want Josh Charles to have a sports show, even now

I follow him on twitter, he talks about the Bmore Raves ALL the time

i know; it's so annoying. josh charles + felicity huffman + josh molina= underrecognized sorkin golden age. plus it was the first time i saw most sorkiny conceits so they seemed fresh.

i don't really know anything about the substance of those creative differences fwiw. in general i sympathize with writers who get notes/revision suggestions from actors, but if that's why sorkin got annoyed with charles, i don't know, maybe he should have listened.

sarah and i have tried to start sports night twice, have yet to actually finish watching the pilot - the whole thing is so artificial and '90s it's unbearable

the pilot is much worse than the rest of the show fwiw

i would just skip it if i were you tbh

i like artificial though

yeah pilot is not good; it takes a couple of episodes for them to lose the laugh track and weird sitcom-y conceits, but if you can ride that out it's worth it.

I love the 90's-office with the glass-bricks everywhere

they don't lose the laugh track at all, even in the second season, i think? there are weird ghostly returns of it. that whole situation is inexplicable.

isn't the second episode the one where dan apologizes to his brother on-air? that's when the show gets good imo. /sap

no I thought it faded out after a few episodes into the first season, maybe more than 2 or 3. I'm pretty sure it's gone by the end of S1

oh god that brother apology is outstanding

i'm kind of amazed this show could wind up as self-parodying as it seems, considering how quickly everyone in the internet smelled self-parody

yeah the laugh track was definitely gone by s2

i'm kind of amazed this show could wind up as self-parodying as it seems, considering how quickly everyone in the internet smelled self-parody

― da croupier, Friday, June 22, 2012 5:14 PM (46 seconds ago) Bookmark

yeah i mean...he may not have agreed with all the criticism of Studio 60 but you'd think he'd at least realize that repeating certain aspects of it were not going to go over well

this seems appropriate

http://www.funnyordie.com/pictures/58a52edd85/the-first-few-pages-of-aaron-sorkin-s-steve-jobs-biopic

http://assets0.ordienetworks.com/images/user_photos/1258805/34ee0b88af4243a463058ea28711be9c_width_640x.jpg

lol oops

or die

sorry, I thought it was funny :(

"dang people didn't like studio 60...well, maybe i just picked the wrong kind of tv to be ridiculously self-righteous about"

"clearly the world is mistaken and needs to be shown more of my genius"

you know what's cooler than a million ipods...?

Olivia Munn makes me even less interested.

Seconded. She is horrible.

Christ, Sorkin is such an unloveable prick:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/television/how-to-get-under-aaron-sorkins-skin-and-also-how-to-high-five-properly/article4363455/

He denies being either an ideologue or a modernist, agreeing only that the show is written in his voice, and that said voice is “authorial” (both my word and his). I’d posit that creating an authorial drama in a time of mumbling, precarious, voice-of-a-generation comedy almost absolutely constitutes an ideology, one both modernist and masculinist. But conveniently, at that moment, the interview’s over.

“Listen here, Internet girl,” he says, getting up. “It wouldn’t kill you to watch a film or pick up a newspaper once in a while.” I’m not sure how he’s forgotten that I am writing for a newspaper; looking over the publicist’s shoulder, I see that every reporter is from a print publication (do not see: Drew Magary). I remind him. I say also, factually, “I have a New York Times subscription and an HBO subscription. Any other advice?”

He looks surprised, then high-fives me. Being not a person who high-fives or generally makes physical contact with interview subjects, I look more surprised.

“I’m sick of girls who don’t know how to high-five,” he says. He makes me try to do it “properly,” six times. He also makes me laugh; I’m nervous, and it’s so absurd. He loves it. He says, “Let me manhandle you.” Then he ambles off, hoping I’ll write something nice, as though he has never known how the news works, how many stories can be true.

chrrrrriiiiiist almighty. ugh

“I’m sick of girls who don’t know how to high-five,”

amazing!

Since when is hi-five-ing some kind of important life skill

When you're a frustrated middle-aged wannabe jock. And boy howdy does he just fucking OOZE that.

haha sorkin's interest in strong female characters/totally over-the-top condescension toward women/awareness of his own tendency toward sexist condescension is one of the most compelling nodes in his constellation of being incredibly frustrating to me.

yeah but how many of his heroines could have "knows how to high five" in their character description

btw how surreal is it that there's nobody named 'Danny' in this show

i couldn't make it through the whole episode

haters gonna hate and there's a lot of bad but there's some good but what really interests me is that it doesn't feel like it should be on HBO at all.

Some good, yes, but it's mostly like a louder, more unpleasant Sports Night.

i really wanted to like it. i loved west wing as much as anyone, but damn this was bad

inexplicably bad acting from waterston

what really interests me is that it doesn't feel like it should be on HBO at all.

that's because it feels like a worse version of shit he did on network tv

getting out of this show graciously may be hard for hbo, as the horses being beaten are already dead.

should i watch this guys?

i must admit i'm intrigued by emily nussbaum saying each of the first four episodes is worse than the one before it

Waterston was way off, yeah. xposts

Clunky, Sorkinesque stuff with rousing speeches and an utterly lack of cynicism. It's axe-grinding, but not wholly unpleasant as of yet (I expect that will change *very* quickly). I'm interested to see how he's structured the season. I also totally and utterly believe in a lot of the ideas but it's cheap to re-do the BP Oil Spill with 20/20 etc.

we reached for the stars, and we acted like men

That was pretty Sam Seaborn.

felt like a parody to me. that schmaltzy music playing over it didn't help

Yeah but West Wing was never much better. Maybe it's *we* who have changed.... ~~deep~~

I never watched the West Wing when it was on, but after some Studio 60, The Social Network and this, I don't know how I could take it seriously now

I don't know what your problem with The Social Network was, at the very least in regards to the tone/corniness that pervades his other work.

well you've already said "haters gonna hate" in regards to this, so i'm not surprised

well i didn't mean that in regards to my opinion on The Newsroom (it isn't good, fwiw), but TSN is a lot different because of FIncher (this has been discussed i know) so I was just curious.

fincher definitely lit it better but the script was still pretty facts-through-the-sorkintron-3000

ah right, so it's the facts that bother you and not the tone/delivery/preaching/grandstanding?

xp, but it won't matter much

In re: Sorkin. I watched Moneyball in a theater. I watched The Social Network on dvd at home with my wife. Never watched The West Wing. Maybe two episodes of Sports Network or what ever it was called. That's it.

He appears to know how to write a screenplay so it has the requisite number of acts and can write dialogue that has a bit of snap. I was amused. I would watch something else he wrote. Probably.

His Achillean Heel is a simplistic sentimentality in his method of summarizing characters and their inner selves. This shortcoming will not hurt him with the general public. As a rule, sentimetality plays very well with the masses. He's no crappier than, say, Neil Simon in his later years, when the jokes got more formulaic.

"Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail" still a perfect episode of network television imo.

Gukbe otm

the social network was pretty entertaining, but the ways that sorkin changes the facts and the words he puts in their mouths fit pretty comfortably with his whole hackneyed chayefsky aesthetic, so it adds to my point that it'd be hard to watch the west wing already being familiar with his later work, even if fincher and cast sugared the pill.

I think TSN was a lot more ambiguous than that, because of Fincher and the performances, but yeah I wonder if watching The West Wing now for the first time would find it grating.

I mean if this isn't sorkin tone/grandstanding/delivery/preaching...

Erica Albright: It didn't stop you from writing it. As if every thought that tumbles through your head was so clever it would be a crime for it not to be shared. The Internet's not written in pencil, Mark, it's written in ink. And you published that Erica Albright was a bitch, right before you made some ignorant crack about my family's name, my bra size, and then rated women based on their hotness.
Reggie: Erica, is there a problem?
Erica Albright: [Turning to talk to Reggie] No, there's no problem.
Erica Albright: [Turning back to face Mark] You write your snide bullshit from a dark room because that's what the angry do nowadays. I was nice to you, don't torture me for it.

it isn't really

there's no requirement that I enjoy sitting here listening to people lie, gukbe. You have part of my attention - you have the minimum amount. The rest of my attention is back at the offices of Facebook, where my colleagues and I are doing things that no one in this room, including and especially your clients, are intellectually or creatively capable of doing.

like, a character being upset that the protagonist behaved like a shit and then was very verbose in her rebuke doesn't really fit the bill compared to a Sam Seaborn speech or Bartlett talking to the ghost of Mrs. Landingham or Chandler talking about True Satire or whatever

again, that's just verbose. that's not preaching/grandstanding.

but i see what you mean. like you've heard one Mamet script you've heard them all etc.... I respect that.

i will admit my sense of what his aesthetic amounts to is based on the post-curdle end of his career, that and some of those early '90s "you can't handle the truth"/"i am god" hits

though if you don't think "You write your snide bullshit from a dark room because that's what the angry do nowadays" isn't grandstanding, you may be aaron sorkin.

this kinda gave me a rush during the broadcast part of the episode but it was largely really annoying

also i'm not really sure how they're going to be able to pull off this alternate history where a nightly news broadcast breaks news... the entire thing just seems so fossilized. but i guess that shouldn't really be a surprise.

every single character detail/relationship tension/loss of faith/renewal of faith plot point etc etc of this episode was lifted directly from sports night or the west wing.

Jeff Daniels and Emily Mortimer's bickering is gonna get old real fast.

inexplicably bad acting from waterston

― buh, Sunday, June 24, 2012 11:42 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah! i think he doesn't have the knack of sorkin dialogue yet. he's no isaac jaffee.

also i'm not really sure how they're going to be able to pull off this alternate history where a nightly news broadcast breaks news... the entire thing just seems so fossilized. but i guess that shouldn't really be a surprise.

― J0rdan S., Monday, June 25, 2012 12:32 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, so much detail about a real, old news story...i mean, both sports night and the west wing flirted with ripped from the headlines type stuff but never so directly, and on the west wing eventually sorkin developed an alternate, parallel reality to accommodate this kind of thing, replete with fictional middle eastern countries.

that schmaltzy music playing over it didn't help

― buh, Sunday, June 24, 2012 11:56 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes this was terrible

i must admit i'm intrigued by emily nussbaum saying each of the first four episodes is worse than the one before it

― da croupier, Sunday, June 24, 2012 11:49 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i need to read this review, but i think this is going to keep me watching, perversely

i didn't find it wholly unpleasant tbh, but it is sort of embarrassing how derivative of his own work it is. seems like a waste of a good director and a great actor in jeff daniels. jeff daniels was really good, i thought.

i don't know exactly how to put this, but you'd think sorkin's m.o./perspective on what's wrong with the world would have developed somewhat beyond what's essentially the plot of the american president.

Yeah, Daniels is the main reason I wanted this to like this. He needs a great series.

yeah, i agree that daniels was great

Too bad Daniels didn't have a single line that wasn't screamed.

yeah, so much detail about a real, old news story...i mean, both sports night and the west wing flirted with ripped from the headlines type stuff but never so directly, and on the west wing eventually sorkin developed an alternate, parallel reality to accommodate this kind of thing, replete with fictional middle eastern countries.

― horseshoe, Monday, June 25, 2012 12:39 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

i was sorta feeling them going with "ripped from the headlines" until it turned out to be "literally the headlines + the granular facts of the story" because the way they went about that just seemed really out of touch to me

like, what exactly is the audience for a show that pretends that the nightly news is still the most important entity in journalism? i know the answer to that question, but i found a lot of that show to be really embarrassing. it's weird to see someone of sorkn''s stature really advertising his own ignorance, like with that dumb twitter crack. i guess it's surprising to me that someone like sorkin would so willingly and proudly display his "old man yells at cloud" mode

the opening scene was really terrible, too

and yet. he managed to wring some subtle moments out of that. i'm kind of okay with big sorkin speeches as long as they're undercut a little and not treated with the kind of rapt worship indicated by schmaltzy music and that moment when daniels was ranting at northwestern and they cut to a college student looking awed--that moment is straight out of the american president! which is a movie i am fond of but come on.

i don't know, sometimes i don't even understand why i like sorkin.

xxp

i do think sorkin scripts make a lot more sense with cursing

there was a heated exchange on sports night once where jeremy was like, "you think i'm SCARED?" and natalie was like, "i think you're SCARED CHICKEN!" and it was like ...

Yeah, there's a lot about this that feels about 15-20 years old, at least.

in the scene where daniels yells at his ex-exec-producer for bailing on the show, and then ex-exec-producer yells at him for being mean, and then sam waterston starts yelling at the ex-exec-producer for reasons that weren't clear to me, all i could think of was steve carrell's character in anchorman. "LOUD NOISES!!!"

i'm kind of okay with big sorkin speeches as long as they're undercut a little

― horseshoe, Monday, June 25, 2012 12:52 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

also when they're not total bullshit, like daniels's whole "we used to be good" speech at the beginning

not that american exceptionalism, this american exceptionalism. my old man version!

Note how the trailer only showed the first half of the speech. Whole other story once you hear the whole thing.

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/600887_464639143564325_373923033_n.jpg

o plz plz plz internet don't let me down again

Aaron Connects

if he had any kind of sense of humor he'd start every response w/ 'listen internet girl/boy'. but as anyone who saw studio 60 can confirm he does not have any kind of sense of humor.

never forget
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZoJQhkQedU
never fucking forget

Like I just muttered over on balls' FB page, Aaron Eckhart really is going to play him in his self-penned biopic about his own life story one day. And he will capture his utter dickishness to a T.

this kinda gave me a rush during the broadcast part of the episode but it was largely really annoying

― J0rdan S., Monday, June 25, 2012 12:31 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

i felt the opposite -- was fairly engaged with it through the first hour, then started to check out during the whole THE ELECTRICITY OF LIVE TELEVISION bit.

Mortimer deserves equal credit w/ Daniels for making this easier to watch than it ought to be imo

i have to make myself forget that her character's name is 'Mackenzie MacHale'

i feel like every detail of this will be forgotten in a couple months

i'm going to write a compelling dramatization of how we should've made fun of it 2 years from now, though

Sorkin is literally the worst writer in the world. It's incredible how terrible he is at understanding how human beings and the spoken word work both independently and in interrelated ways.

Also the casting for this was terrible.

I really enjoy just watching daniels just do his thing though. didn't know that about myself!

is this programme basically just meant to make journalists feel great?

I actually really enjoyed the live production of the news show part very similarly to how I enjoyed the west wing. every other aspect of this endeavor was absolutely unbearable.

not the journalists who broke the stories that newsroom takes credit for xp

i checked out the newsroom hashtag last night and there were a lot of people saying variations "of course journalists don't like this show, it reveals how bad they are at their jobs!"

i thought this was pretty okay? i enjoyed it? or i'm trying not to reflexively hate on it just because some of it was obviously pretty standard in pretty standard ways. it would be nice if he could do something to transcend the network cliches but i don't know that they're awful for their inclusion, more just disappointing. like the working with an ex relationship in which each side conceals an enigmatic history & still smoulders thing - it is such a pre-fab timebomb, & it was in studio 60, but it's lazy writing more than it is bad tv, i think. i wish alison pill wasn't such a klutz, because she's great, also her dress was v nice, but i can get with the peter parker whippy new newsroom guy. it would be nice if her bf became slightly more complex rather than just spitting out fodder to justify our affection for his rival. i think this is gonna be particularly problematic if the audience is already privileged with the gift of hindsight & knowledge of historical irony, so we always know who we're rooting for, who'll be vindicated & who'll be a stupid hubristic asshole. & the waterson guy seems like a missed opportunity. there should be some awesome intriguing back room network man. a david carr man. instead it is a guy in a bow tie. do you remember this guy from studio 60? i hated him. like a budget kevin bacon.

http://www.seriesadictos.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/studio-60-weber-300a121206.jpg

Is that Steven Weber?

it's ricky sargulesh

i thought Weber was one of the more redeemable parts of Studio 60, actually

o easily

this thread and emily nussbaum's (otm, at least based on the pilot) review of the newsroom are making me kind of want to watch studio 60, which i couldn't stomach at all when it was airing.

in a perverse way, just to help me catalogue all the ways in which sorkin shows are embarrassing

really?
i'm trying to find a picture of one of the simpsons characters who wears a suit and works for a network and represents corporate interests to include, whom he seemed to be the live action version of. iirc he was just a kinda james murdoch guy with occasional displays of pre-programmed emotion.
xxp

to be clear, "better than Sarah Paulson in Studio 60" was not meant as high praise

omg that actor is so annoying. sarah paulson, i mean.

if i were kristen chenoweth, i'd be like, her? really? thanks, dude.

really nobody could've played the Kristen Chenoweth cipher besides Chenoweth herself, but Paulson was pretty amazingly ill-fitted for it (xpost)

i wonder if i have a lower standard for judging this - like if its flaws are all the things we can file under _ways in which sorkin shows are embarrassing_ i think i'll be okay with it; it won't be the sopranos that manages to be generally complex, but its lazy failures are the kinds of lazy failures that we're super used to - un-fleshed-out female characters, predilection towards syrup & happy endings & rootsy belief, &c&c&c. it was when those things sorta overtook the interplay of characters or blunted the occasional exchanges of people having well-rendered arguments in the west wing or studio 60 that i tuned out slightly.

can i just say the murky moody Greg Mottola direction is a terrible look for this show? it could've at least been a better, more Sorkin-y Sorkin show if it was a little more crisp and clear.

this has been mentioned but i think the problem is that tv has gotten a lot better and there's enough good tv to watch that i don't feel especially compelled to watch the aaron sorkin hour esp if it's kinda lousy?

can i just say the murky moody Greg Mottola direction is a terrible look for this show? it could've at least been a better, more Sorkin-y Sorkin show if it was a little more crisp and clear.

― some dude, Monday, June 25, 2012 9:24 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

maybe you're right but i experienced mottola's direction as the one refreshing change because everything else about the show down to phrases of dialogue was such a retread.

if it had that thomas schlamme sports night look (which i love) i would just have popped in a sports night dvd because at least robert guillaume can deliver sorkin dialogue.

yeah true. but to me it felt a lot like Moneyball, which similarly tried to be brooding and meditative in a way that brings out the worst in his dialogue.

yeah sure. but i guess it's a there-if-you-need-it thing that delivers media-y distraction for people who are eligible/interested in it, with a good cast more, than it is a bold new take on anything. there is something funny about the west wing existing slightly before an advance and change in quality and style of tv - i watched some a while back & you could sense how it was slightly constrained compared to how it might've been a few years later - it'd occasionally go for a big cinematic gambit, use of some weird mike oldfield style orchestral music or of bold percussive flourishes, but it never seemed to go that much further. maybe sometimes. maybe with the canteen 9/11 episode.

some of the look of this was pretty nice, i thought. daniels & the exec's walk & talk, the exterior thing on 6th ave.

this thread and emily nussbaum's (otm, at least based on the pilot) review of the newsroom are making me kind of want to watch studio 60, which i couldn't stomach at all when it was airing.

had a swell old time watching the pilot, but by ep 3 or so the novelty of an SNL-based drama wore off. May revisit.

granted, i came into it like I did Tommy Wiseau's The Room.

i have fondness for greg mottola because of the daytrippers + adventureland, so i might have just decided to like his direction when i saw his name tbh

the direction reminded me of Adventureland and i kinda hated Adventureland

yes i remember being mad at you about that

Studio 60 would have been fine if a. they had better skits, or just never showed them and b. sorkin could have left his anti-christian right boner off tv.

even if they had better skits I'd then say "well why don't you just do a great sketch comedy show instead of a self-righteous drama about one"

another problem for me is that iannucci's vision of how politics works resonates a lot more w/ how i believe they work than sorkin's. when west wing was out, that kind of critique (where the horseracing stuff can take backseat to the ethics) was still fresh enough (and i was young enough) that i was willing to buy it - that even if WW lacked a certain kind of verisimilitude, i still appreciated the implicit subtext (people are essentially good, politicians are trying to do the right thing in complicated environment, the vision that there is something greater than us that connects us). but in 2012 for a variety of reasons (my age, the changing political landscape, etc) iannucci critique of politics as just selfish, narcissistic, incompetent vapidness feels more real to me, and it's hard to go back to the sorkin narrative. but like, this is kinda what it is for everything -- once the critique exhausts itself, it's hard to care quite as much. not that this forgives the terrible writing and dumb ideas of Newsroom, but that it's already pushing the wrong way against the culture.

Iannucci and Sorkin feels like a false binary to me, and neither places a big priority on realism.

i don't know about realism, but my impression is that both are trying to indicate something that is true about how our politics + political systems work. i think sorkin is more interested in the potential of politics, and iannucci is more interested in its failures.

if i wanted straight realism i'd just watch CSPAN all the time

if I wanted to listen to a newsman yelling all the time, I'd watch the actual news.

the one great thing i like about the west wing is that, although its never said, bartlett was quite obv a shitty president who got nothing done. maybe its because they were always talking about ethics and being good and shit

better than that empty suit Newman or goddamn Lassiter!

tv has gotten a lot better

as long as you don't turn it on.

it turns me on

classic Morbs xpost

For me, this fared worse because we've had the ace look/feel/editing of The Social Network and Moneyball, and this didn't match up.

Sorkin mentioned in an interview how a cable show means not having to write for commercial breaks every 10 minutes, but I think what Fincher and Bennett Miller both figured out is that there needs to be some breathing room between the gushes of language--and so the most memorable parts of both films are the quiet moments in between as much as (or more than) the dialogue.

Funny how David Milch and Aaron Sorkin are maybe the two best and most rhythmically complex writers of dialogue in TV but are now probably incapable of making a fully satisfying show. Maybe movies are the way to go. Or maybe a 30-minute show would push either them into a good haiku zone.

This is streaming free on YouTube and HBO and everywhere, btw.

So, my studio note is: needs some scenes of Jeff Daniels in a cab looking out a window, making a sandwich, whatever. Needs some rests.

I think that's exactly otm. I couldn't put my finger on what was wrong even setting aside the Sorkinisms and I think that's it.

Having those beats would also have served to make the live broadcast section feel even more tense than it did. Newsrooms in my experience are long periods of boredom punctuated by total frenzy. This was a long period of soap-opera-level screamy shouty punctuated by mid-frenzy.

this thread has made me resolve to watch Sports night. i watched a few eps when it was airing but i didnt 'get it' back then, im sure i'll be more receptive now

i started it this year, i didn't get addicted to it but i liked it. i also noticed the weirdness of the laugh track - it felt like the most reluctant laugh track ever.

overall, i found the 90s-tv vibe a bit distracting, tbh. not the show's fault.

Haven't seen it in a long time but might have powered through some bits because of massive crush on Sabrina Lloyd at the time.

90s-tv vibes are a plus for me these days. though its probably not appropriate for what SN was doing

This episode was filled with hokum but I dunno I kinda liked it.

Sam Waterston is more loopy than usual and I approve of this.

The Jesse Eisenberg cameo on the phone was fun.

The reveal about Emily Mortimer having the signs was hilariously dumb. If that was her, how did she keep changing her face? Is she a Lorathi like Ja'Qen?

didn't catch the Eisenberg cameo!

I mean ... I'm pretty sure. It sounded exactly like him.

it was, he was reported beforehand to have a "small voiceover part" in the pilot.

The reveal about Emily Mortimer having the signs was hilariously dumb. If that was her, how did she keep changing her face? Is she a Lorathi like Ja'Qen?

― polyphonic, Monday, June 25, 2012 7:58 PM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah smh

To me the whole premise is flawed. Does anyone watch TV news anymore?

^^^

do they still make tv news?

http://gawker.com/5920929/dan-rather-reviewed-the-newsroom-for-us-and-liked-it

I kind of suspect that nobody who currently watches TV news would watch this, and nobody who watches this would watch TV news

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S78RzZr3IwI&feature=player_embedded

Alec Baldwin is a handsome man.

haha i'm pretty sure i've said "can we have a civilization???" irl. because of the sorkin. on the other hand, i hate that "breathing guts" thing he does.

I kind of suspect that nobody who currently watches TV news would watch this, and nobody who watches this would watch TV news

You left out people who work in TV news.

how do people do those supercuts? i feel like it would take like weeks and weeks

ctrl + f on transcripts & then just snag whatever episodes you need off a torrent site?

i'm just guessing but that would prob take you like 8 hours if you worked really hard

ya but like finding the sorkinisms would prob take a while too?

and the actual editing

and by finding i mean figuring out which ones were used enough to be -isms

best case scenario, you come up wiht a list of like 25 "isms" and then ctrl-f however many HUNDREDS of transcripts there are, with his several tv shows and bunch of movies. you note where all of them appear. that would take a while! then you get the video files and actually have to find the clips in them. then you select those clips from each of whatever how many dozen video files you've winnowed it down to. THEN you actually have to assemble them and fine-tune the edit. that would all take WAY more than 8 hours!

i bet there's probably a few message board threads out there dedicated to listing 'sorkinisms' and that's where the person who made the video got the idea and culled most of their examples

anyway lol at s1ocki of all people going "that video thing, it looks like it took some work! how exhausting!"

lol

just belatedly, a bad part of this show was emily mortimer talking to jeff daniels & jeff daniels having to say NO, IT CAN'T BE DONE, NO-ONE WOULD EVER WATCH WELL-EXECUTED TV NEWS, SO MANY HAVE TRIED in order to facilitate mortimer's soliloquy.

anyway lol at s1ocki of all people going "that video thing, it looks like it took some work! how exhausting!"

― some dude, Tuesday, June 26, 2012 6:14 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i actually went to bed last night thinking about how much work that is haha

but ya otm about crowd-sorkining

bummed to discover the hbo isn't following newsroom with re-runs of girls and veep. I like the progression: "WHAT CAN WE DO TO SAVE THE WORLD?" "Hi, we're the youth." "oh well, fucking fuck..."

true blood at 8 even provides context for newsroom's concern about America's priorities

Sam Waterston is more loopy than usual and I approve of this.

― polyphonic, Monday, June 25, 2012

He's great! He's also straight up Robert Guillaume in SPORTS NIGHT.

But more obviously drunk, I guess, because it's HBO. Speaking of which, this here is a show that could actually benefit from some sexposition.

http://heyinternetgirl.tumblr.com/

Hahah I was just about to post that.

http://espn.go.com/espnradio/grantland/player?id=8099523
louis ck on studio 60 in this ^^ (from about 7 min) is real good

i kinda dug this!

sorkinapologistsdid9/11

i kinda dug it too, but given the buzz about the pilot vs. the following 3 episodes i'm waiting for the other shoe to drop

yeah that's where i'm at

Sam Waterston is more loopy than usual and I approve of this.

― polyphonic, Monday, June 25, 2012

He's great! He's also straight up Robert Guillaume in SPORTS NIGHT.

But more obviously drunk, I guess, because it's HBO. Speaking of which, this here is a show that could actually benefit from some sexposition.

― all yoga attacks are fire based (rogermexico.), Tuesday, June 26, 2012 11:52 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

okay, but, and i'm sorry to be all indie rock fan here, robert guillaume was way better. he just delivered his lines better. and portrayed a plausible human being better. in the beginning of the newsroom pilot, i was like wtf is with sam waterston? and then, during the conversation about him being easy to get along with because he's drunk, i was like, ohhh he's isaac jaffee. but guillaume was better and there are pretty much guaranteed to be diminishing returns on a character if you keep trotting the same one out.

yeah guillaume was the shit

Waterston seems to be acting more 'old' than 'drunk' IMO

David Denby steps into defend; ILX officially declares the show "a disaster".

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/06/in-defense-of-aaron-sorkins-newsroom.html

He is an ethical writer—a moralist, if you like. He’s neither ironic nor self-deprecating; he dislikes that part of our derisive culture which undercuts, as a ritual form of defense, any kind of seriousness. He’s a very witty entertainer who believes that there’s a social value in truth. I don’t think this belief should be confused, as it has been recently, with self-righteousness.

Pobrecito.

the one example of that refreshing dialogue denby gives

"There’s nothing that’s more important in democracy than a well-informed electorate. When there is no information or, much worse, wrong information, it can lead to calamitous decisions that clobber any attempts at vigorous debate. That’s why I produce the news."

who are the entertainers that don't believe there's a social value in truth.

watching The Sork interview on VH1 right now and he's all "it's a fun show, it's meant to be watched with popcorn"

Beats Whitney in that regard.

denby

DENBY

okay, but, and i'm sorry to be all indie rock fan here, robert guillaume was way better.

― horseshoe, Wednesday, June 27, 2012 6:58 PM

I don't think you need a "but" there, and that's not indie rock it's classic rock. Robert Guillaume in Sports Night was way better than almost anyone in anything.

and there are pretty much guaranteed to be diminishing returns on a character if you keep trotting the same one out

manic pixie dream dad

yeah, 2nd ep way worse than the 1st. all the interpersonal stuff was terribly cringe-inducing.

just watched the first two episodes, this is a beautiful trainwreck that I will continue watching until it completely derails.
i mean what a mess of a show but boy it doesn't bore.

Bret Easton Ellis on the case:

Bret Easton Ellis ‏@BretEastonEllis

While enduring "The Newsroom" and Jeff Daniel's Empire anguish I just kept wondering: do we ever get to see Dev Patel naked?
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3h Bret Easton Ellis Bret Easton Ellis ‏@BretEastonEllis

What I can't believe watching "The Newsroom" is that Aaron Sorkin and I went to the same shrink.
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3h Bret Easton Ellis Bret Easton Ellis ‏@BretEastonEllis

When something as self-congratulatory bull-shitty as The Newsroom is taken seriously by the people it's about: a narcissist wet-dream spews.
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3h Bret Easton Ellis Bret Easton Ellis ‏@BretEastonEllis

Fake-scene after fake-scene in The Newsroom belongs in some terrible off-Broadway remake of Broadcast News. And where are the tits and ass?
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4h Bret Easton Ellis Bret Easton Ellis ‏@BretEastonEllis

"The Newsroom" thinks that good TV is all about clever-fake click-clackity dialogue. It forgets that the best TV is all about subtext...
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4h Bret Easton Ellis Bret Easton Ellis ‏@BretEastonEllis

I'm only into 6 minutes of Episode 2 of "The Newsroom" and it's already driving me crazy with dialogue that sounds like Neil Simon on crack.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maureen-ryan/the-newsroom-women-aaron-sorkin-hbo_b_1641982.html

a love letter to aaron sorkin

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ilene-angel/aaron-sorkin-the-newsroom-review_b_1623172.html

sorry if posted.

its an actual love letter!

oh man, this was actually p bad huh. the whole season is just gonna be emily mortimer's beseeching face & endless cycles of affirmation & reaffirmation & pledging & repledging of commitment to a non-specific noble idea. it could be so good if it chronicled the dismantling of the news & its consequences, or just toned down the personal to procedurally get into the news being made. but it all felt so off. like the bar they were drinking in. i feel you could maybe bleed in some of zadie smith's criticism about sorkin's writing matching or not matching up to the actual texture of life at facebook, this feeling like such a failure for that kinda thing - the bar scene & the slinking up to the cocktail supping slurring bad-day worker. if your writing just lapses into familiar feedback loops of syrupy vague idealism at the expense of looking outward it's failing, i think, like what Louis CK was saying about Studio 60's baroque prose about total bullshit.

also/pedantically: is there an apartment like will's that would overlook the statue of liberty, like one of the avenues but railroaded straight down to the tip of manhattan? it seemed like such a funny cutaway, i couldn't work out where he was meant to be.

that article on women was pretty otm. also trying to present any merit to "both sides" of something batshit like the arizona bill is like straight from the pareene guide to pointless kowtowing to the imaginary rational silent centrist majority.

http://i.huffpost.com/gen/669256/thumbs/r-NEWSROOMMAGGIE-large570.jpg?4

It's like Jim & Pam's Office baby grew up.

she's cute but something about her face reminds me of a barbie doll's face when you smoosh the head down longways

How to get under Sorkin's skin:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/television/how-to-get-under-aaron-sorkins-skin-and-also-how-to-high-five-properly/article4363455/

we've been over that a bit already

it's weird how that article switches from q&a to a far foggier description of the conversation as it gets more argumentative. Not saying there's anything she could have said to merit his comments at the end, but it would be nice to know what exactly she DID say re: "authorial" voice and the "intrinsic conflation of art with the truth itself."

Dude is just playing the game. Show me an equivalent interview where they fixate this much on how nice a gentleman the subject is.

if they exist it's definitely because the subject never said "write something nice"

Spit in one hand, wish in the other

I made it about 16 minutes into episode 2 before I had to bail.

Heard they actually say S-O-T instead of "sot." That's dumb.

jesus, the second episode was astonishingly bad. Can't decide which character i'd like to murder first, although Alison Pill edged it this one. And what was all that shit with the email system?

i thought it was funny when she stomped on the phone and poured coffee on it

it was like bad "techie" slapstick out of 1998. "there's this thing called email!!" (xpost)

Does anyone in real life destroy a phone in anger?

no, but if you have a camera in front of you you definitely throw your black berry at it

she wasn't angry, she was frantic!

how can anyone find this show boring?

i only find it boring during the third act 'magic of live television' bits tbh

yyyeah, okay. that part is a little boring. but it's also kinda painful and that pain keeps me from being bored.

renewed

what is wrong with hbo

that surprises me! have the ratings been good? because this is fucking terrible in a terribly good way!

Not that great. If Sorkin had killed some horses this show would have been pulled by now.

Ratings are decent. Not as low as Luck. Room to grow.

A lot of people really like this show. Remember that True Blood is still the channel's biggest hit, and that show's been terrible for a while.

Add some tits and they'll be fine.

i've never been able to watch true blood
i really appreciate the lack of sexposition and am wondering if there's anyway newsroom will maintain that pace through the season

If not, it'll be some awkward ripping-off-the-blouse-on-TV moment like Julie Andrews in S.O.B..

the stuff about Daniels' character being some super-hot tabloid lothario was really weird.

you don't really have to do anything to get renewed on HBO -- i mean the Luck cancellation happened AFTER they had greenlit and begun making a second season. in the last 5 years since John From Cicinnati afaict pretty much the only scripted series that HBO has actively decided to cancel after one season is The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.

renewed for a 2nd season seems easy, sure, but lots of shows have gotten axed from hbo after a few weak seasons in a row.

No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency was pretty good compared to some of the junk that stuck around too...

lol @ "lots of shows have gotten axed from hbo after a few weak seasons in a row" like that means anything. once a show is on for a few seasons period it probably means it's popular enough that it's pretty much got its ticket punched for as long as it wants to stick around. Entourage got to wear out its welcome just as much as any show on ABC or CBS.

three seasons seems to be HBO's minimum for anything with a pulse -- Hung and Bored To Death just finally got canceled after s3 finales. even Treme is looking to get a 4th season now, though.

If Sorkin had killed some horses this show would have been pulled by now.

ahem you, like everyone else, must have missed this delightful sorkinesque crack last week

getting out of this show graciously may be hard for hbo, as the horses being beaten are already dead.

― da croupier, Monday, June 25, 2012 3:45 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not shocked if this does well in a "preaching to the choir" way

not shocked now that i've seen what the positive tweets are like, i mean. show's perfect for people who wish tv news was better, horrible for people who know better than to watch tv news.

if anything HBO's probably smart to give Bill Maher fans more content

yeah it seems like there are enough haughty olds and late adopters to The West Wing to make this a middlebrow fave. there are still people that unironically rep for Studio 60 like it's some kind of 'brilliant but canceled' gem.

xposts.

eh. luck was on the bubble even before the horse deaths. how to make it only got two seasons. carnivale got two seasons. extras got two seasons (but maybe because the producers only wanted to do two?) lucky louie got one season. the comeback was one season. conchords was two seasons (but again because of the creators?). rome was cancelled after two seasons. in treatment was three seasons.

i'm just listing facts from wikipedia now, so i might as well stop... but yeah, i think you're right that almost anything will get picked up for a second season, but they're less forgiving with the third. also i think they have different criteria for big-budget shows with expensive actors than for the more quirky half-hour episodics which i'm sure have much cheaper budgets.

well i was talking about just the last 5 years, Rome and John From Cincinnati were the last major cancellations that seemed to be the network just cutting the show loose and not trying to let fans down easy -- they obviously TRIED to make things work with Luck, doesn't matter if it was 'on the bubble' if they actually did give a full season 2 order before other factors came into consideration. Conchords and Eastbound & Down set their own end dates. it's amazing that How To Make It In America got even ONE renewal.

HBO show creators always point out that ratings don't matter so much as subscribers to the network, but I wonder how much HBO has to go with as far as who joins up for what show, what metrics they do use to measure the value of keeping a show. or maybe they still focus at ratings, but more in an accumulative, long-game sense than regular networks do. it's not how you do the first season, but how you grow on the 2nd, etc.

i think maybe HBO realizes that 'smart TV' nerds and critics tend to hold grudges about shows they like getting yanked way more than they praise networks for putting on those shows to begin with -- it's like they're doing everything they can to cultivate goodwill with every auteurs' fanbase they can after burning the Milch stans a couple times.

They wanted Luck to work because they want to be in the Milch/Mann/Hoffman/Nolte business. Cancelling it cost like 35 million or something like that. The oddest one was always Tell Me You Love Me, which was renewed and then cancelled before the second season started shooting. Rome was a cost issue because it was a co-production with the BBC and various other international companies that decided they didn't want to put the money up for anything after the original two season contract or whatever they had.

not just to pacify you croup, but i appreciated the original horse gag

the luck horse shd start watching newsroom imo

LUCKHorseOnGirls
@LuckHorseOnGirl
I died on the set of HBO's Luck. Now I hate-watch Girls.
Santa Anita track

glad to meet an ilxor who can high five, forks

(insert snappy sorkalogue here)

i think maybe HBO realizes that 'smart TV' nerds and critics tend to hold grudges about shows they like getting yanked way more than they praise networks for putting on those shows to begin with -- it's like they're doing everything they can to cultivate goodwill with every auteurs' fanbase they can after burning the Milch stans a couple times.

― abandon al ships (some dude), Monday, July 2, 2012 6:13 PM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah

At some point, therw's also the issue of whether it will have enough episodes to syndicate (Sopranos, Entourage, etc.), so if even a middling West Wing will do that, it's worth e investment,

i think that's way more true w/ tv sci-fi ppl who continue to hold grudges against fox for firefly, dollhouse, whatever else 'fox didn't give a chance/scheduled poorly' while not really noticing the other networks don't touch sci-fi at all really. the only hbo decision that seems to really haunt them in terms of cancellation is deadwood and that came about due to high costs (same thing that shortened rome's lifespan) and hubris (the same thing that led to what is probably the only fuckup hbo has had bigger than cancelling deadwood - passing on mad men). i do wonder how ppl would view hbo if they hadn't brought the wire back after season 3.

man i read somewhere that entourage and weeds are the longest running (in terms of number of episodes) cable comedies ever and i'm pretty sure it's actually curb yr enthusiasm (or maybe sunny? though i think they meant premium cable) but that entourage and weeds are the other strong contenders is a pretty strong indictment of 'cable is better'.

seems like we're kinda in a dry spell for tv sci-fi atm

post-lost burnout, plus there's a network for that now

network for that decided to not be network for that a few years ago iirc. post-lost burnout is right though, i'm guessing after the event and v flamed out the networks finally decided 'fuck it' and the idea of creating a sci-fi show that didn't try to recapture lost's 'magic' was unfathomable.

yeah, heroes, the event, flash forward, there's a new SOMETHING CRAZY JUST HAPPENED SPEND A COUPLE YEARS FIGURING IT OUT WITH US show coming but it doesn't seem worth the investment imo

i mean when have they not fucked that up

i think there were at least 1.5 attempts at another lost a year from lost's second season until the year after lost ended, many of them scheduled after lost which was the worst spot to put a lost clone. iirc the best of these was maybe the alien invasion via hurricane one that was the first 'next lost', had william fichtner in it maybe?

is falling skies worth a damned?

based on the ~3 hour preview of it i got waiting for prometheus to start i'd wager 'no'. wary of tnt drama in general though (slightly curious about dallas, you're gonna need a hotter babe than jordana brewster to rope me though). i am vaguely curious about some canadian show called continuum though. i'm not sure why.

based on the ~3 hour preview of it i got waiting for prometheus to start

lol, otm

heh,not only have i already forgotten promqueentheus i also forgot about the
YOU'VE BEEN WATCHING "THE ROUNDUP" WITH PREVIEWS OF THE HOT NEW TNT SCIFI DRAMA FALLING SKIES THE NEW 2013 INFINITI AND THE US ARMY BE ALL THAT YOU CAN BE

haven't had cable for nearly five years now so these things happen but have rarely felt more like i was living in a foreign country than watching some dudes who bid on the contents of abandoned storage units treated like icons.

lol

i don't want to think of someone not being weirded out by the "behind the scenes on the new storage wars ad" clip i saw before previews at the avengers.

i try REALLY hard to turn and talk to the person i'm with through the entirety of those godforsaken things

...lest ye be confronted with the terrifying visage of Larry Hagman during the promo for the 'Dallas' reboot O_o

heh,not only have i already forgotten promqueentheus i also forgot about the
YOU'VE BEEN WATCHING "THE ROUNDUP" WITH PREVIEWS OF THE HOT NEW TNT SCIFI DRAMA FALLING SKIES THE NEW 2013 INFINITI AND THE US ARMY BE ALL THAT YOU CAN BE

― Authorities don't know who shot the 50 Cent the goose. (forksclovetofu), Monday, July 2, 2012 8:09 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark

ha are they really pushing hard to pretend Falling Skies is a new show to try to pull in people who missed how boring it was last year?

ya know, if there was one person i'd think to ask if i wanted to know whether a new TNT drama was all that or not, it would be sd.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1ETr1i_YNo

Mortimer seems like she's overacting every scene.

More Munn please.

Great dialogue

oh yeah olivia munn was good.
i feel like he hasn't earned 'great dialogue' because the rendering of people's speech can be fine but what they're talking about is such bullshit. it - already! - felt like such a weird retread of episode one - are you in or are you out, let's start this thing over. emily mortimer's speeches make me want to do some hysterical freudian reading about the gender dynamics of the woman needing to be saved by the heroic guy. & the dialogue just rotates around vague allegiance to a noble cause. it isn't a show about what people believe but that they (intensely, admirably) believe. nothing's getting unpacked or explored.

2nd episodes tend to get made so long after pilots that i think sometimes there's a tendency to reiterate and overstate the premise and keep 'beginning' the story, even though the audience usually just saw the first episode a week earlier and doesn't need reminding. 2nd ep of Newsroom had much bigger problems than just that, though, obv.

How is my buddy Kumail in that Franklin & Bash thing?

emily mortimer's speeches make me want to do some hysterical freudian reading about the gender dynamics of the woman needing to be saved by the heroic guy.

this is so otm. i was like, what is up with her ridiculous over-the-top praise of this surly dude at every turn. i mean, i know, she has a guilty conscience and is maybe still in love with him, but honestly it was absurd. the dialogue is not great!

the dumb email incompetence plotline telegraphed itself immediately, but i will admit i laughed at emily mortimer destroying dude from homeland's phone. i preferred sports night's take on unexpected comedy when natalie tried to shock dan rydell out of his writer's block. yes i will be that annoying girl who, for every plot point on the newsroom, brings up a superior sports night plot point.

at this point i just assume there is a site somewhere tracking all the sorkinisms and self-plagiarisms on this show (the one that bugged me most in this episode was lohman echoing natalie's "why isn't anyone yelling at me?" freakout but without remotely as justifiable a context for it).

nobody whose name isn't Franklin or Bash gets much to do on F&B. Kumail was good recently on Bunk, which is a really really funny show, though.

SD, I trust you've seen this already?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S78RzZr3IwI

this part of the New Yorker review made me laugh

The second episode is more obviously stuffed with piety and syrup, although there’s one amusing segment, when McAvoy mocks some right-wing idiots. After that, “The Newsroom” gets so bad so quickly that I found my jaw dropping. The third episode is lousy (and devolves into lectures that are chopped into montages). The fourth episode is the worst. There are six to go.

yeah i'm aware of the youtube, i was talking about tracking the use of sorkinisms in the new show

it isn't a show about what people believe but that they (intensely, admirably) believe. nothing's getting unpacked or explored.

it's not about their believing, it's about their having trouble believing. namely in their ideals (or 'verities', like i saw one reviewer call them), and in themselves (e.g. enough to do what they think they should be doing, or say what they think they should be saying).

the emily mortimer character goes around praising will because the idea is that people in this setup depend, for their belief in themselves, on whether some particular other person believes in them. a lot of the action - i don't know if you want to call it unpacking or exploring, but i don't think sorkin is really going to try to show you anything but what he thinks of as timeless truths, not extremely content-specific insights into institutions like the news (tho some of that, so far as he picks out some of its structural features accurately) or into the present historical moment or whatever - a lot of the action comes in the characters trying to avoid or refuse accepting the belief others show in them.

in the case of the leads that has partly to do with their relationship past, recovery from which is probably going to be spun out for a while as various incidents bring them closer to or drive them farther from being able to fully acknowledge the past. (e.g. in the second episode we find she cheated on him, but she says she only found she really loved him when she did; but she intimates that there was something about him that made him not quite loveable that drove her to cheat; that's probably not accurate or fair at this point, but it's a sign of what will get spun out as will eventually opens himself up enough to being pegged by what she has to say that she ventures to say it.)

i assume that part of it is also that there's some ambivalence about accepting an affirmation of belief in yourself from someone else insofar as these people define themselves by their ideals and their visible, public pursuit of them. you're not supposed to do it just for another person, not just because he or she says you're right, that you're doing right, but because your beliefs are right, or your judgment is right, or because you're on the right side of the issue. this is a setup that tends to repel personal affirmations as mere personal attachments. but it's in tension with the tendency of public pursuit of an ideal to be tempted by, corrupted by, or confused with conformity, pandering, absence of principles or integrity. when the atmosphere is idealistic enough that tends to drive the protagonists back toward looking for affirmations of the only people who could possibly release them from their bind, other people of sound judgment, strong belief, etc.

one option on the table there is that you could simply withdraw if you're satisfied enough that YOU know what's what even if you might not be fully pursuing the realization of your ideals in the world (which is where will is, immediately before the first scene of the pilot). part of the allure of someone else believing in you, believing that you're right, for these sorts of characters would be the prospect of finding someone whose belief in you took the form of love. so the action of the pilot partly turns on will's avoidance of that knowledge, that someone loves him. at the beginning he can't see straight, isn't even sure he's seeing her. after he gets offstage he has to ask, 'what did i say in there?'. her words, on her sign, literally brought out something in him he didn't know he had in him, couldn't recognize.

and he is still avoiding recognizing her at the end of the pilot. he brushes her off (by the terms of their current relationship, which come up again: one hour owned by her, because she says so, and he concedes under the auspices of the job since she's his EP; and a week-to-week contract according to which she's at the mercy of his whims, temper) and assumes this eminently composed attitude (compared to the outburst at the beginning, which was an exception) to tell her a story about a time he displayed composure (when he was really drunk) because of his love for her and/or respect for her parents (cf. the bad-ep pressuring the emily mortimer counterpart alison pill to help him lie to her parents), which story easily disturbs HER composure. when he peeks his head into the control room to thank the (wrong) staff, SAYING that he's no longer going to not tell people what their importance is to him, he's getting it wrong while turning his back on her. then as he's leaving in the elevator he makes as if he's revealing something to her — taking back the lie he fabricated on the night of his outburst about vertigo medicine — by saying that it was that he thought he saw her even though he couldn't have, telling her that he couldn't have recognized her rather than making it a question and letting her tell him that she DID recognize him. (letting himself admit this would also mean admitting that she had gotten him right, known what to say to him, that she had brought out the revealing outburst, etc.)

holy fucking shit

lol

http://www.quarterlyconversation.com/images/paragraph-bw.jpg

ignore this damn philistine j., i'll read your big ass thing

after i eat lunch

the whitespace is so youze can initiate a generations-long tradition of commentary

putting contenderizer out to pasture right there.

i just can't believe anyone has that much to say about anything concerning this show

i swear i read the first para, started to scroll down and thought 'contenderizer' post before seeing the dn xp

oh my! ty for engaging w/me, j., i was actually super proud of the concise, all-encompassing wisdom of the one-liner which you're responding to, i went and pulled it verbatim from the gchat in which it arose to post, here, but i feel pretty inequipped to go in as deep as you -- the characters aren't deep enough yet to go so far into motives or conflicting pressures.

for me the believing/having-trouble-believing thing is just going to be a generic tv cycle, in which the waver in the pursuit of something is a stage in the episode, part of the inevitable drift towards things coming good - the moment of doubt before the valiant reversal or whatever, chandler & monica's break up before their marriage. i don't think that JD's cynicism about the news is fleshed out enough to feel real or support his oscillation between I'M ON BOARD & fuck tv news or w/e. we derive our satisfaction as viewers from the guy coming good & putting on a good show, that being a successful delivery of news programmes that are generally viewed as a positive thing. what i'm trying to say when i say that it's about the act of belief rather than the subject is that the only tension seems to relate to whether or not they are in or out, not the texture or feasibility of the thing itself. i'm p sure some of the west wing actually debated tenets of american exceptionalism - like Josh in the cafeteria with the kids, they don't just hate us for our freedom, c'mon or w/e, which i guess maybe the guy's opening intro did. but for me if it isn't ~about~ the ~role~ of the news, it should be kinda more a procedural, or if it is about the news then it should be more nuts-n-bolts, less lofty bullshit. how do you feel about it so far? you have a much better recall of the nuances & significance of the various turning points of the plot - like shit that whole elevator thing - do you think it's succeeding?

at this point i just assume there is a site somewhere tracking all the sorkinisms and self-plagiarisms on this show

fwiw i was kinda disappointed by the ny mag thing about dialogue recycling - so much of it was broadbrush enough that it's kinda understandable that it'd be a topic the guy had revisited a couple of times in similar contexts.

i thought it was gonna be - Aaron, Tuesday, 3 July 2012 18:57 (59 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink, tbh

i just think the guy recycling THAT much is ridiculous. like, either he has too much contempt for the audience to think they'd notice or that it matters to them, or he's cynically plugging the same elements into a formula over and over because it "works" (even when it doesn't), or he lacks the self-awareness or memory to realize how much he repeats himself. and any of the above is pretty lousy.

xpost

i kinda saw it more as just a - maybe woody isn't the perfect fit, but - woody allen kinda thing, covering the same territory again. i guess if we're talking dialogue, like actual lines, here, then that's slightly more awkward, but to me it felt more just like he was running around the same themes. it's less problematic to me than his enduring failings, ie staid or bloated character types &c, anyway.

but it's not even one thing or another that's recurring -- bits of dialogue, character types, plots, relationships, physical gags, settings, even episode titles, EVERYTHING he does just gets regurgitated out of the same blender over and over, to an unusual and remarkable degree.

i think there's something to be said for artists letting their unconscious mind shine through and allowing the unintentional repetition of themes to speak for itself as kind of a subliminal statement on what's important to them. but at a certain point guys like him need a collaborator who's seen his other stuff and is welling to say "wait let's not do that again, people have seen it before."

sorkin needing a collaborator is otm in general - his instincts veer him towards such whirlwinds of syrup. that this episode was called & frequently referred to 2.0, & sorta plastered some contemporary facade over its general ninetiesism, seemed so backwards. everyone otm about the unfired chekhovian pistol of the "new e-mail system" too it could be dynamic but it isn't.

schlump, i don't know if it's succeeding. that depends an awful lot on what sorkin does with a season's worth of episodes. i kind of find myself hoping he uses the shorter season to force himself to write an arc that integrates this kind of relationship-logic with the initiating event.

but i was very disappointed by the reviews i've read. studio 60 did seem kind of ill-advised to me at the time, but i would've thought that with all the recap nerds out there now parsing glances and dress colors and stuff for mad men and speculating about gus's motivations on breaking bad there would have been some better watching/interpreting out there on the internet for a sorkin joint. i've always found the self-congratulatory viewers he attracts distasteful, but particularly because they cloud the question of what's any good about sorkin. like, the question of whether he really has any ideas, or really is writing intelligent tv or whatever. he's written some good-sounding monologues, but i think too many people get distracted by the blustery features of his dialogue and then think that what they're supposed to be doing is deciding whether they're hearing good arguments, or whether people really talk that way, or whether it isn't just speechifying on the writer's part, or whether he is or isn't right to be sticking it to x idiots. i think it's pretty clear that as a writer he invests a big part of his thought in the dramatic structure. when he loses his shit and when he's working at a really high level that can be obscured (because the structure falls apart or because there's so much going on thanks to it that you don't notice it all working), but it seems like the contrasts between the characters across the episodes, what they say and do, admit and don't admit, etc., are very clearly drawn in these first two 'newsroom' episodes. clear lines.

what i wonder about, though, is how formalist he is going to be about it. it strikes me that he seems to have purified some of the elements from past shows. like, it's a workplace drama. and a backstage workplace drama. and the main relationship is one that bridges the onscreen/control room divide. and the job is one that is defined by its being public, in the public's interest, for the good of the public. and letting your personal life manifest itself in your job is considered to be bad in all kinds of ways (as well as just unprofessional re workplace drama when it's ratcheted up to sorkinian hyper-competency levels). but to excel at it you have to have the kind of strong personality that is liable to overflow and show up in your work, i.e., in public. the set is kind of like the sportsnight set, but more starkly split between public/private visible/hidden: will has an office, the office, and though mackenzie has one you don't see it until the second episode, there's a conference room for group-dynamic scenes and for looking into from outside when there are arguments and trainwrecks, there's a massively public open office (where the lower-level characters have to play out their conversations and become exposed, and where the upper-level characters are constantly going to be storming in and out of to try to conceal themselves and their conversations), there's the news desk (facing dangerously out into the public - like in mackenzie's threat to assert her control over will when he's there) / control room combo…compare that to the warrens and the compartmentalization of the west wing, where a lot of the particularities of the relationships between characters were developed with the use of their offices and their access to others (josh and donna, toby signaling by throwing the ball at the window, leo, not to mention margaret and charlie and mrs. landingham, as intermediaries to the president).

the main relations to the outer world seem more simplified/purified here too. being in the white house made the relation to the outer world complicated on the west wing. on sportsnight, there was the relation to the network, and the question of ratings and such, intra-network competition ('10:00' versus whatsername the overnight anchor on sportsnight), but they kind of had to puff themselves up, or slip off-topic, a bit to get plots that hit a sorkinesque level of idealism since they were basically just doing sports news. on the newsroom the idea of the public point of the work seems less contestable, which is kind of why i was attracted to that 'believing in' talk. on the west wing to try to realize their ideal they had to fight among themselves, fight with their own party, the opposing party, deal with the citizenry, deal with the events of reality, all of which could involve competing claims from the other parties about what exactly they were all up to. here it seems like people know what is called for in doing the news, it's just that well-known forces (inner and outer) conspire against doing it.

that tends to make me think that there isn't that much to say about meeting this ideal, in terms of 'what the news is'. and a procedural made out of that would be pretty boring on sorkiny terms; he can't do the week-to-week novel story that a police procedural or a medical show can do (just because he can't make himself / pull it off, i think - he needs a story idea that his structure lets him intensify or clarify, more than one that he can try to detail finely or poignantly; and there's something about the repetition involved in the crime procedural or the medical investigation that seems repugnant to him). which is another reason i found it interesting that he drew the dramatic lines, as they connected with the relationship-and-ideals lines, so clearly. it seemed like a good reason to trust him when he says that he just does relationship stories about people who do the news.

the question will be how or whether he lets the history between the characters that happens in the episodes accumulate and come together in ways that throw any of the relationships into question. i think almost every reviewer has rightly seen that it would be cheap to do this with romantic relationships, and they see the potential for doing it (especially with maggie and her bad-boyfriend/good-senior-producer triangle, but i wonder about who they're going to throw olivia munn's character up against, will seems way too easy). sorkin certainly hasn't been able to resist that in the past, but it's hard to recover from. big historical relationship-changers on the west wing were bartlett's lying to his staff about ms (contrasted with the public), and his concealing his assassination of dude from his family. i don't know about smaller ones. sorkin tends to effect relationship/history-changing things like that by having the characters fuck up somehow and become ashamed / temporarily lose the faith of their peers or betters. i suppose 'making compromises to get the story / quash the story' is the main well on 'the newsroom'.

another way that sorkin could fill out the very formal framework is with some reality. that seems pretty dangerous. he has a really conflicted relationship with it, i think. (that's partly why all the facts, as if to prove that he is writing a show that is about reality, i.e. that the ideals the characters pursue are realizable). bartlett getting shot, pretty good reality (one of the better dividends: its effects on charlie and on his relationship to zoey). 9/11, good stimulus in certain ways. the 'rescue my kidnapped brother from terrorists or whoever' arc in the second half of 'studio 60' seems like the biggest, most improbable failure to add 'reality' to a show ever. from the start he has a constrained relation to 'reality' with the 2010 'newsroom' stories, which kind of makes me expect him to reach for showbiz/corporate intrusions into the proper-newsworld. (i hear there's going to be a tabloid/scandal story?)

but i was very disappointed by the reviews i've read. studio 60 did seem kind of ill-advised to me at the time, but i would've thought that with all the recap nerds out there now parsing glances and dress colors and stuff for mad men and speculating about gus's motivations on breaking bad there would have been some better watching/interpreting out there on the internet for a sorkin joint. i've always found the self-congratulatory viewers he attracts distasteful, but particularly because they cloud the question of what's any good about sorkin. like, the question of whether he really has any ideas, or really is writing intelligent tv or whatever. he's written some good-sounding monologues, but i think too many people get distracted by the blustery features of his dialogue and then think that what they're supposed to be doing is deciding whether they're hearing good arguments, or whether people really talk that way, or whether it isn't just speechifying on the writer's part, or whether he is or isn't right to be sticking it to x idiots. i think it's pretty clear that as a writer he invests a big part of his thought in the dramatic structure. when he loses his shit and when he's working at a really high level that can be obscured (because the structure falls apart or because there's so much going on thanks to it that you don't notice it all working), but it seems like the contrasts between the characters across the episodes, what they say and do, admit and don't admit, etc., are very clearly drawn in these first two 'newsroom' episodes. clear lines.

this is very otm

will let you know if the second paragraph is otm in october

Watching this even if it nose dives.

killer post j.

killer post j.

― Black_vegeta (Hungry4Ass), Tuesday, 3 July 2012 21:22 (46 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^
i'm really awed by how orderly your view of this is. i'm less optimistic about a neat union of relationship history/narrative progression than you, i think, maybe having been so thoroughly burned in Studio 60, which - spoiler, fwiw - offered a couple of engrossing complications but unashamedly just satisfied everyone possible at the end; the various realities of what it's like when people are together and then apart and then thrown together weren't explored beyond the bad moods the-chandler-guy & the lead-actress-woman would be in. i might be bringing something personal to the table, here, but long-running submerged never-spoken or lingering romances can feel unconvincing to me, & so i think i'm thinking of will & mackenzie as a slow-release eventual-reunion timebomb more than i am an interesting influence upon their future interactions.

but that was a really great post, particularly wrt the privacy and effect of spaces & hierarchies. will watch extra-hard next week. iirc there are gonna be some monologues to discuss.

i still haven't seen an episode of this, but j.'s post is the first thing that makes me want to...

cautiously optimistic about the introduction of Terry Crews apparently coming in a few episodes

wow, j. thanks for those posts!

i can't help feeling like the newsroom hasn't earned that level of attention yet, and i think the nussbaum review is good! but you've given me a lot to think about.

but they kind of had to puff themselves up, or slip off-topic, a bit to get plots that hit a sorkinesque level of idealism since they were basically just doing sports news.

i'm beginning to wonder if this isn't why sports night turns out to be the most palatable sorkin project to me at the end of the day. because if you're going to do an hour-long show about immigration or deal with the trauma of September 11th or whatever lofty thing an individual episode of the west wing tried to do (alongside sorkin's dramatic structural concerns, which, you are right, are always present and are probably the thing he is best at), you have to not cop out on the level of thought. does sorkin have any ideas?

on sports night i feel like the really amazingly structured episodes, like the one where gordon wears casey's shirt with the implications thereof, bear witness to a social world, a network of relationships that is complex and compelling and gets at that thing in your first post--people needing to be believed in/shying away from people who believe in them, etc. etc.

also i loved how the characters on sports night were really intense about their job and bristled at others' observations that "they were basically just doing sports news."

yeah, i think that's good for audience identification. it's nice to be able to feel that you can see your own passion or intensity for work in that of the characters. but if you see it in west wing staffers then there's something that could be chastening about thinking of yourself on their model, you're not serving the president or your country or whatever, you're not the best of the best.

about attention—to ol forksclovetofu too—i don't think it's a matter of earning a level of attention, so much. it took me a while to type out my posts and i'd certainly like to be able to really sort out what i think in the context of nice readings of the episodes, so there's more attention to give, but i don't really think i paid an excessive amount of attention. this was just stuff i saw, and that i expect a lot of people could see. what i found frustrating about a lot of reviews was that they acted like there was nothing good being done with the writing/show overall, without talking about any of this sort of stuff, which seemed to me exactly what was happening, what WAS being done.

since it's pretty accomplished, at least for me, that sustains quite a bit of interest. i don't know about the other kind. like, i found the first couple episodes emotionally affecting, but don't know what to expect about where it might go. i'm remembering the first season of 'angel', where they go along kind of doing stuff, but it's not until the episode where doyle dies that you're like, ok, i'm all in now. i can't remember what the comparable episode on 'west wing' was. but i find it rewarding to try to think ahead of these things and see if i can follow what the writers are setting themselves up for. whereas watching like, 'castle' or something, or even usa shows that i think are pretty smartly written like 'suits' or 'white collar', i don't so much expect as much of a payoff from close attention to the basic structural setup.

i'm honestly not sure what people are asking for when they want ideas from a show.

maybe "ideas" wasn't the right word. also maybe i'm not reading the show properly. i don't know, i had a whole bunch of stuff i was going to say here about immigration and anti-immigrant sentiment, but i think it probably amounts to my not reading the show properly and the show not really being for me. i will still read your posts about it.

yeah, i think that's good for audience identification. it's nice to be able to feel that you can see your own passion or intensity for work in that of the characters.

zing!

i have no passion or intensity for work tbh; i think it's aspirational in my case

i'm honestly not sure what people are asking for when they want ideas from a show.

― j., Wednesday, July 4, 2012 3:09 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

i think for THIS show the complaint is that Sorkin engages in a lot of serious real world questions about politics and media in a way that is surface-level 'smart' but actually just verbose and not actually informed or insightful.

yesterday i talked to my dad, who is possibly a bigger Sports Night fan than me, and he's enjoying Newsroom so far, particularly the big speech in the pilot. which is basically the kind of speech he gives in his living room to family members on a weekly basis.

OMG the po faced solemnity of this fucking show it is SO SILLY

lol i just realized today that alison pill is in this show, not alison lohman (and that nobody caught me referring to lohman upthread)

add "how much do you love me?" to the sorkinisms reel

allison pill kind of looks like mary louise parker around the mouth a bit

another sorkinism

but she's playing donna moss

Perrin:

The Newsroom opens with a homage to the ghosts of broadcast journalism's past: Murrow, Cronkite, Chet Huntley. Back when the news meant something! When it served a positive social role!

This is a popular fantasy, especially in an era of Fox News. And while those ghosts were better informed and more articulate than our present-day zombies, they served the same powerful interests. Bowed before similar gods....

If Sorkin's characters had the integrity he suggests they have, they'd quit in disgust. Find other ways to inform the public (assuming the public wants to be informed). There's no serious way to do that through a corporate news lens. There it's about ad rates, celebrity, privilege, and manufacturing consent.

The only difference between Fox and MSNBC is the demographic being yanked. Who offers the better tote bag is more open to question.

http://dennisperrin.blogspot.com/2012/07/sorkinlandia.html

lol good to be reminded there's a more pompous windbag than sorkin out there

but she's playing donna moss

― horseshoe, Sunday, July 8, 2012 11:13 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark

that prob makes more sense but i have trouble not thinking of natalie hurley more often when she's onscreen

I'd love it if Sorkin wrote a big, impassioned, righteous TV show about some dude recording a webcast in his basement.

lol can't believe dude is criticising the show that features a storyline about how the corporate interests of a parent company threaten the content of a news show because it's characters work for a news show that is threatened by its parent company over its content.

oh and destroy everything in tonight's episode except Daniel's "Oh fuck..." and the Waterstone/Fonda showdown at the end.

that prob makes more sense but i have trouble not thinking of natalie hurley more often when she's onscreen

― some dude, Sunday, July 8, 2012 11:28 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

she and jim (is that his name?) are definitely natalie and jeremy part 2, yeah

waterston was on some real sub-guillame shit tonight

ha i left the rerun on for a few minutes before going to bed and caught that this show's superman protagonist "graduated college at 19" what

oh god that bit fucking hell with his 95% conviction rate or whatever

and he's never ever sick at sea?

i finally watched the first one on sidereel. i didn't totally hate it. i mean it moved. i like moving things. it's just kinda demented. kinda do want to see how bad it gets. that flustered/surprised/knocking shit over thing is just so weird. i guess its supposed to be screwball or something? the deer in headlights surprised look on everyone's face is priceless. you wonder how these people even found their way to work. i don't know how much nu-jim & pam i can take either. do you think sorkin gives his staff those meaningful looks and says stuff like: hey, you did good today, slugger. keep it up. the big daddy approval thing on his shows is just...blehhhhh.

I'd love it if Sorkin wrote a big, impassioned, righteous TV show about some dude recording a webcast in his basement.

― Josh in Chicago, Monday, 9 July 2012 04:34 (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

man this is so otm! would watch, it could be so scrappy & awesome instead of bloated & blustering.

i actually thought this ep was okay, but i still think we're just being fucked with re: the relationship stuff. like i was on board through the guy's DON'T WORRY I'M IN THE ARMY LET ME SOOTHE YOU dress-down, & alison pill being all yeah that's him (that was nice, i thought), but the reunion-on-the-stairwell thing, w/jeff daniels' & emily mortimer - the emily mortimer of oh man emily mortimer in a baseball cap really now - emily mortimer's sparring partners thing just felt so weak & written.

do you think sorkin gives his staff those meaningful looks and says stuff like: hey, you did good today, slugger. keep it up. the big daddy approval thing on his shows is just...blehhhhh.

ps lol

wld dig sorkin doing wikileaks.

dying at "the emily mortimer of oh man emily mortimer in a baseball cap really now"

stairwell was hilarious; we leave them just nuzzling on the stairs
the technophobia on this show is atrocious

they weren't in the stairwell because they're afraid of elevators, man

pretty sure dan rather's things on this for gawker are even better trolls than their girls recaps.

they should switch up

maybe HE'S the unseen "Danny" in this show

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=745&fulltext=1&media=

His influence is palpable in the work of David Kelley, in the patter of pop series like Bones and The Mentalist, and in the sheer whip-smart capability and moral neuroses of the characters on the The Good Wife.

rilly?

also, i don't care if sorkin is writerly or whatever, the site is called a review of *books*.

TV is books in LA

it's a koan

they're reviewing the novelization

that article was at least good, unlike the NY Review of Books thing about GIrls

the commenter on that article "barry lyons" mounts an incredibly hilarious defense of Studio 60

one, the show was too literate

two, nothing wrong with me

looooool

this is the worst show on television in the most interesting way.

thank god i have breaking bad as a palate cleanser.

after that oft-quoted early review shouted out episode 4 as the worst of the first few, i was prepared for some total garbage and tonight was actually the closest this show has given me to the feeling of the better older Sorkin shows.

this show is hella corny but it almost works as kind of a reverse-satire of the news--like rather caricature the news as hyper venal and stupid do the complete opposite and thus critique the media that way. it's very old fashioned in a "mr. smith goes to washington" kinda way.

That's so gracious

i would say old fashioned in a demented, self-righteous "Bulworth" kinda way only without pras

ok why would everyone come in on a Saturday just because this dude is obsessed with Bigfoot.

also this episode is called "I Will Try To Fix You" and it ends with a Coldplay song that features those very lyrics.

there was a flashback to LAST WEEK'S EPISODE in the middle of a scene to explain what was going on.

i'm gonna watch every episode of this season fyi

^ditto and i don't know why! it's like watching ugly people have sex in a lucite coffin

this show is hella corny but it almost works as kind of a reverse-satire of the news--like rather caricature the news as hyper venal and stupid do the complete opposite and thus critique the media that way. it's very old fashioned in a "mr. smith goes to washington" kinda way.

― ryan, Monday, 16 July 2012 05:03 (18 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah this is OTM. like it's a wildean thing in trying to depict some idealistic super news. it's just kinda problematic that it's so flawed in other areas, & that there are the rendering issues - like the technophobia, &c - about the news show itself.

there was a flashback to LAST WEEK'S EPISODE in the middle of a scene to explain what was going on.

― Legendary General Cypher Raige (Gukbe), Monday, 16 July 2012 05:56 (17 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol.

i thought this was pretty okay, too; it's definitely still shoehorned with bold, slightly ill-advised sorkinisms like the bigfoot thing, but at least something was happening. it'll be interesting to see whether there's more Gabrielle Giffords stuff next week, because it was hard to work out how daring/weird its incorporation was based on just that; like in some senses it was obviously awful, what with the coldplay & its co-option as a drum to bang the staff's righteousness on/backdrop for some smallscale James-McAvoy-guy smouldering &c. but then in other ways it feels like you should be able to play with that history a little. at least if it's for the aim of molding a story about how the news should work.

my main takehome from this ep is man i love alison pill so much, it is just unbearable

Is she the weird looking blonde?

she is maggie, she is real pretty i think. she was on in treatment & in some recent woody allen films &c.

Yeah, def less horrible than the last few. If it stays at this level it's better than lots of network stuff (which is not a high bar) but that doesn't mean that it's uniformly smart or enjoyable by any stretch. There's still an undertone of unbelievable condescension towards all women, made slightly less terrible here because it's directed towards maggie who is supposed to be sort of naive as opposed to mackenzie who is supposed to be together or whatever. Nonetheless, both men in maggie's life are, judging by this episode alone, fucking enormous douches.

there is just no restraint in the portrayal of assholish-boyfriend-being-assholish. like has he done one okay thing yet or has each action - even tentatively okaying the RIP screen in this ep - been just some additional straw in the haybail of she should be with the other guy. i am saying this while being 100% on board the swooning over her & the other guy, it's just so clunky.

I'm trying to remember how he worked it in previous series. Relationship stuff seemed to happen at a pace that didn't draw too much attention to itself in The West Wing, even as threads were just dropped for whatever (RIP Mallory and Sam). Sabrina Lloyd/Josh Malina in Sports Night seemed to happen quickly, but they just wound up together and we followed their various trials and tribulations. That worked pretty well for a 30 minute a week thing. He seems to want to get EVERYTHING into a 10 hour span that he can here though. Which, really, isn't that much longer than a 22 episode season of Sports Night with each ep being 20-odd minutes, but maybe he needs to be able to space it apart.

the other guy was horrible this episode too. really repulsive with the whole "go talk to your boyfriend" speech.

I'm trying to remember how he worked it in previous series. Relationship stuff seemed to happen at a pace that didn't draw too much attention to itself in The West Wing, even as threads were just dropped for whatever (RIP Mallory and Sam). Sabrina Lloyd/Josh Malina in Sports Night seemed to happen quickly, but they just wound up together and we followed their various trials and tribulations. That worked pretty well for a 30 minute a week thing. He seems to want to get EVERYTHING into a 10 hour span that he can here though. Which, really, isn't that much longer than a 22 episode season of Sports Night with each ep being 20-odd minutes, but maybe he needs to be able to space it apart.

― Legendary General Cypher Raige (Gukbe), Monday, July 16, 2012 8:44 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

i think this is where the episodes jumping weeks/months apart from one big story to the next has been an especially bad idea. one of my favorite things about Sports Night was how it really felt like you were literally getting the day-to-day of the workplace, watching one situation unfold for a couple days in one ep and then picking up later that day or that week in the next ep (which made the jump ahead from season 1 to season 2 feel refreshing and narratively significant). on Newsroom you're just hopping around and "oh here's a montage so you get an idea of where these people are with each other but we're not going to earn it at all, we're just gonna jump into the big confrontation."

oh, and the fucking date crawling across the screen just as they break the Giffords story, don't get me started

^^^oh god i'm sick of that date popping up, so it's like REVEAL THIS IS AN EVENT

another downside of trying to tie everything into real events.

also i'd like to reiterate that this show is terrible-looking, hate the bleary washed-out look of it all

what really bugs me about this show is its hypocritical sanctimoniousness. tabloids are horrible! we shouldn't be distracted by such tawdriness! oh and btw here's a bunch of adults acting like morons about their stupid bullshit "relationships." and a seven-minute version of "fix you"

you sound like you're trying to civilize the world

playing "fix you" over an emotional moment is so tired and hacky, aaron sorkin you're doing things they did on The O.C. in 2005.

playing "fix you" over an emotional moment is so tired and hacky, aaron sorkin you're doing things they did on The O.C. in 2005.

― deist mountain dew (reddening), Tuesday, 17 July 2012 08:09 (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the music is so bad! like its conspicuous - sad 1997-era radiohead reveals

I'm trying to remember how he worked it in previous series. Relationship stuff seemed to happen at a pace that didn't draw too much attention to itself in The West Wing, even as threads were just dropped for whatever (RIP Mallory and Sam). Sabrina Lloyd/Josh Malina in Sports Night seemed to happen quickly, but they just wound up together and we followed their various trials and tribulations. That worked pretty well for a 30 minute a week thing. He seems to want to get EVERYTHING into a 10 hour span that he can here though. Which, really, isn't that much longer than a 22 episode season of Sports Night with each ep being 20-odd minutes, but maybe he needs to be able to space it apart.

― Legendary General Cypher Raige (Gukbe), Tuesday, 17 July 2012 01:44 (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think the most ominous precedent for this relationship heavy handedness is studio 60, in which something simmered on and off for exactly as long as it needed to until the last ep. otm about the preferable thing of just fading in and out of those storylines, cf mary louise parker's character in west wing.

unless this has a story in which someone misplaces their underwear it's going to remain above sorkin's batting average for romantic whatever

oh c'mon dana didn't LOSE her underwear she took it off

there's nothing much about this show that makes sense

yay p4reene

http://www.salon.com/2012/07/19/aaron_sorkin_versus_frivolity/

The fuck were all those camera ZOOMS in this ep?

The ZOOMS made me think that Altman doing this material could've been a good combo.

Pareene otmfm

Pareene otm but I have two quibbles (why oh why am I defending this nonsense?)

The significance to the company heads of the Tea Party bashing wasn't that it was bad for ratings, it was that they became congressmen and some were going to be on the communications subcommittee and the boss needed their support. Which is a much better critique than "ratings drop stop being mean".

Also weren't major network news divisions massive loss-leaders for a long time, as in that was their point? Also, British networks sink money into their news programmes and they don't make any profit at all and they're still good. I'd say Channel 4 News is still the best nightly news broadcast around actually, so Sorkin is right there.

I don't watch this show and I'm saying this as an outsider but...

"The significance to the company heads of the Tea Party bashing wasn't that it was bad for ratings, it was that they became congressmen and some were going to be on the communications subcommittee and the boss needed their support. Which is a much better critique than "ratings drop stop being mean"."

is some trade federation BS why would I want to watch this show

You wouldn't, hopefully!

Though I do think that "the problem with news is the interconnectedness of huge media corporations and elected officials and the gladhanding and backscratching that goes on to keep this shit running" is much more dramatically interesting than "The News is terrible because Murrow is dead and there aren't HEROES any more who will fight for the truth and it is called....GALILEO!"

Figaro.

A dumb girl (dumb girls are this show’s primary villains) asks what makes America the greatest country in the world

this feels like a very 'hey internet girl' meme-fueled observation, virtually all of the antagonistic/unsympathetic characters on the show are male except jane fond, who is def not portrayed as a 'dumb girl'

also lol at giving this ugly-ass show points for how it looks. most of the rest is fair game, though.

although i just remembered the lady from TMI (haaaa) and she was a 'dumb girl' i guess

lol at giving this ugly-ass show points for how it looks

Yeah, was gonna say, this smacked of "I need to say something nice about this show or else it will look like I'm just ranting, so I'll praise the thing that has the least to do with Sorkin."

The thing that has least to do with him is usually the best thing about his projects.

morbs what do you think of his old-timey banter? like do you consider it an accurate or inaccurate throwback to a style you do or don't particularly enjoy? i just imagine you and sorkin having a lot of the same favorite movies

he is no Ben Hecht.

although i just remembered the lady from TMI (haaaa) and she was a 'dumb girl' i guess

there was her and the other woman he went on a date with in the same episode who liked reality TV, and threw a drink in McAvoy's face after he called her a bitch

the third woman he dated was not portrayed as dumb per se, just dumb for having a gun I guess

The thing that has least to do with him is usually the best thing about his projects.

Well, yeah. That's what I imagined the article's author was thinking too.

Sorkin fired everyone

http://www.thedaily.com/page/2012/07/19/071912-ent-sorkin-newsroom/

honestly why does anyone else but an ex-girlfriend need to be there anyway

wow dude is dating kristin davis? i saw her on TV this week and she looks insanely good for her age. h8 u sork pimp.

i'm picturing interviews for new writers and a young hotshot walking in and giving a sorkinesque "here's what you're doing wrong" speech and the bossman just smiles and tells him he's on the team.

that whole episode was about dumb girls, come on

fuck aaron sorkin; why can't i stop watching this show

that whole episode was about dumb girls, come on

― horseshoe, Thursday, July 19, 2012 11:17 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

well by own admission i spaced on that when i made my post, so, retracted. show is not v memorable tbh.

fuck aaron sorkin; why can't i stop watching this show

― horseshoe, Friday, July 20, 2012 4:17 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

“The Newsroom” is phenomenally bad good TV.

Was too soon to say it this morning, but now we know what season three will feature...

jesus christ, that was the wrong way to get me to look at the front page of the nyt

this show has now officially transitioned from a somewhat guilty pleasure into an actively offensive piece of shit

the comparison of the wisconsin union battle and the arab spring
the line of fucknuts giving checks to help support the multimillionaire saving a poor brown boy from overseas
the inane valentine's day subplots
this show can fuck off

smackdown of the gossip columnist was just woefully horrible

"i'm a middle aged man who never achieved his potential"
uh

I will watch Olivia Munn in anything but man does she seem out of place here. I guess its just her past work that's creating this impression but I just can't suspend disbelief enough to transform her into a doctor of economics.

'there are eight hundred thousand websites?'

do u think that was sorkin or one of the guys he just fired

i need some better tv shows because currently this is the thing i catch up on in the rare moments my laptop is working and i could probably be doing better, maybe

yes - Your Ten Favorite Shows Currently on Television

this show is fascinatingly bad now, huh. i still kinda like it. this week's was so bad though! there is some kind of decadence to how satisfied sorkin is with his arsenal of tropes, his vocabulary of behaviours to squeeze in between sentences. maybe there are situations in which the pratfalls would usefully punctuate the all-go nature of the station, but now they just happen all the time. the reflexive-sarcasm is the kind of thing microsoft word could have a shortcut to generate after you write a line of dialogue:

olivia munn: did you-
emily mortimer: yes
olivia munn: really
emily mortimer: no [<- punchline]

this happens every episode! & shit like the bit where everyone talks at once, in a control room or in the meeting room like actors in a crowd scene in a school play (i like the actors, they're all really good!, & carry the weight and demeanours of their intended real-life analogues, but their interplay is so often so cartoonish). there is always a throw-away reference to huh we talked about this last night at 3am!!! (when you called because you were worried about this because you are neurotic), just lazy character-burnishing w/o any restraint. it's wandered into the same territory as studio 60 in just assigning moral trumpeting to characters - so the tech guy gets to wheel out 7/7 & get a moment of piano music - & it's never even for anything broader than episode conclusion. we don't talk about guns after gifford, or journalism after the COOL MAN SEE YOU WHEN YOU GET BACK FROM THE MILITARY FORTRESS INFERNO guy goes missing on assignment (okay i guess we do, but only to the extent that journalists are tough, which is kinda fine but feels like an unearned conclusion given that he just walked a few people into doors and wars). so much of it stretches logical belief - the paramount importance of the guy uncovering his face, the bribery of the gossip columnist & daniels' potential adherence to it, the profile of a show's executive producer (really?, maybe i am wrong about this). & they all spend their time in horrible empty purple-lit bars with dramatic asian decor, which is fine, only maybe some of them wouldn't, i don't know. i am kinda curious to know what the dynamic of the writing room is like (you know how everyone in an office adoringly cowers under the gaze of their paternalistic moral heavyweight of a boss), it reminded me of that thing about how mark e. smith has to stop new musicians from trying to play like the fall, as if the guy just has people spoonfeeding him generic snappy dialogue.

big fan, will watch again.

^good post
the problem is that this show is starting to fill me with murderous rage, otherwise i would totally be into it for the lulz

i wish i could steal this : (

?
i can't work out whether you mean download or commandeer the reins of to steer it in a better direction, which is how i feel when watching

well it sounds like there might be some job openings, but i don't think sorks is gonna tolerate any writers' room uprisings.

but i meant the former. my housemates are phobic of illegal downloading and would freak out at me if they happened to get a cease-and-desist-letter.

i liked 'do you know what you're ow know what you're ow what you're doing'

watching a sorkin show means accepting that the people in it will act in certain constrained modes of behavior and (especially) verbal habit; i think it's only a problem when it rubs up against the other problem viz. the implicit claims that we are in a fictional universe that doesn't drastically differ from the real one

sometimes, watching this, i wish that he had, instead, written something where the stakes were not high, or not purportedly high - the stakes here aren't high in the way the show likes to insist they are; this is a remarriage comedy in less superficial ways than it is a backroom drama - but other times, watching this, i am glad to watch it fail in interesting, troubling ways

olivia munn is interesting in this in that she's trying to avoid falling into the same set of inflections as everyone else; the charlie guy also, a little; both are attempts to find slightly different ground for performing the guy's dialogue

-

if you can list ten favorite shows currently on television i am not going to trust yr views on anything, least of all television

Louie, breaking bad, mad men, game of thrones, boardwalk empire, justified, community, 30 rock, parks and rec, curb idk pretty easy to come up with ten programs better than the lowest of low-rent sorkin circle jerk

only people who don't watch television have credibility with thomp. or maybe has painful memories of Chauncey Gardiner.

game of thrones and mad men and parks and rec. okay got you

both are attempts to find slightly different ground for performing the guy's dialogue

this is true!

watching a sorkin show means accepting that the people in it will act in certain constrained modes of behavior and (especially) verbal habit

this is generous, i think. i don't think those habits have to be actually limited to the point of repetition. other stuff of his has been way punchier than this, hasn't seemed as formulaic. re: behaviours more broadly, i think there is a good case for this show being melodrama, operating in its own universe, maybe occupying some weird Wildean position as idealistic-satire, but it isn't the kinda 'stock character traits' thing that's bothering me: it's that this veneer isn't really used to any weightier end - we talked a while back about whether this should ~mean something~, & perhaps it doesn't have to, but for it to be fairly traditional in format without doing anything more interesting or interrogative on another level just makes it seem kinda perfunctory. like the how will this telegraphed love triangle resolve angle isn't interesting & the what is the role of the news thing isn't thoughtful.

btw has anyone actually stopped watching this yet, i wondered if horseshoe was still on board

other stuff of his has been way punchier than this, hasn't seemed as formulaic.

i think i like this about it, maybe, or want to be able to rearrange it as a positive: other stuff hasn't been as thoroughgoing exhibition of sorkin doing what he does well for an hour at a time (well, with ten minutes of failed pathos interrupting)

i mean, probably, because aaron sorkin holds me in some kind of thrall, but omg schlump you know what is starting up again soon? BOSS!

xp

i still really like jeff daniels. every episode i say aloud to my sister, "jeff daniels is just better than this show" and she's very patient with me about it. (she doesn't watch the show)

on my facebook the newsroom enthusiasts, or at least the people who were willing to spare ten seconds to post some link to some review or trailer or something, were very predictably 1) concerned facebook liberals (a distinct crowd from leftist-or-further-left types with countercultural sympathies) and 2) walking-stereotype college-aged intellectual aspirants who are into, like, woody allen and tom waits for the first time in their lives and have yet to learn proper attitudes of shame / disdain about 'being cultured'.

i kind of feel like both those audience demos are likely to rest firm on an attitude like 'at least it's better than everything else', but it must be a pretty specialized demo that could be satisfied with that while at the same time not having any knowledge or interest in the slightly more 'substantive' or 'important' tv that has been getting chinstrokers going post-sopranos, and at the same time not of any of the plenty of good but obviously not super substantive shows that would make them cautious about being so self-congratulatory about being into the newsroom.

have you glanced at the comments in Pareene's article? Most reactions: "But there's so much shit on TV! I'm glad someone's being whiny and didactic for liberal causes! WAH WAH WAH."

on phone, xposts, etc

people seem to remember sorkin as having strengths he never did: like, people remember martin sheen yelling at god as being good drama and not high kitsch. i don't know i might have complained about that upthread

it's maybe worth thinking about how everyone on this thread is people the show defines as not being part of its audience, except when er it does (munn as meta casting)

'telegraphed love triangle' - hm - how many minutes into his girl friday do you go on thinking that rosalind russell is going to move to oklahoma city?

boss is probably better than this, actually. so are the two shows i started watching last night, come to that

tempting to think of those as low-information tv consumers

(probably busy off supporting liberal causes, only so much time to unwind in front of the toob and be edified)

what are the two shows you started watching last night, thomp?

yes! so pysched for boss! i am repressing that the trailer made it looks slightly trashier this season but yeah i keep remembering how good it was. this always seems remarkable because there doesn't seem to be a small-scale well-dressed articulately-blogging cult following around it or anything.

& yeah JD is so good; i even sorta cave to his likeable-asshole thing - not when they end an ep with him secretly writing flamboyantly benevolent cheques, but just to his actions seeming to exist as varied manifestations of his character - that his grudges are a part of his beliefs, his impatience a sign of his concern, &c. the acting is mainly really good in this (i am discounting people like the guy who was shouting at mcavoy to pronounce gabrielle giffords dead, not because he was bad necessarily but because some of the parts are just cartoon villains). olivia munn good so far. emily mortimer still kinda head-tiltingly beseechy, maybe that is not her fault idk.
xxxps &c

ugh the noble rich man secret philanthropy bugs me so much about this show wtf

i am basically my dad watching foxnews watching this show at this point. who knew i had such depths of pointless rage.

i have to admit, olivia munn is my favorite thing about this show. there is a sentence i never thought i'd type.

i laughed when emily mortimer asked her "do you have any...human knowledge?" and she replied, "i've been told i do not."

re: not learning proper attitudes of shame, etc.: it's not that i think this is 'good', whatever that means, but that i feel like so many of the pannings it has received boil down to 'but we have better ways of being elitist now'

horseshoe i watched two episodes of 'enlightened' and ten of 'nurse jackie' and then my laptop stopped working again

'telegraphed love triangle' - hm - how many minutes into his girl friday do you go on thinking that rosalind russell is going to move to oklahoma city?

ha otm but this just feels more cynical or at least less sparkly than that. i am satisfied w/it navigating towards obstacles & all but it's been so clunky with the 1000% assholish boyfriend, the studly war-medic tendencies of our guy, the date with the roomie etc. you're right, though, these are kinda par for the course.

it's maybe worth thinking about how everyone on this thread is people the show defines as not being part of its audience, except when er it does (munn as meta casting)

this is so interesting & hadn't dawned on me, i need some time to chew over what it actually means though & which of my complaints i can continue chewing over & drooling on this thread.

i kind of like that they started with the boyfriend entirely unlikable and jimmy olsen totally golden and then humanised the former and made jimmy olsen slide towards douchy. also he always looks on the verge of coming down with a cold

those guys aren't there to exist in their own right, though, they're to throw what the adults are doing into relief / to reenact, dramatise mortimer and daniels's backstory

like that they did, cmon, it was in the stars / formalism

basically if you treat it as a sketch on the ben stiller show, it's awesome.

loooool yes

i think this is unusual sorkin because almost all scenes are supposed to be ha ha witty funny

i'm not sure why people are singling out Jeff Daniels as good in this show, obviously he's talented and doing his best w/ the material but they've done such a terrible job of making his character sympathetic or charismatic or anything he's supposed to be that i basically prefer anytime he's offscreen to anytime he's onscreen.

while i love a good hate-watch i've avoided this because I love jeff daniels too much

good idea

i think this is unusual sorkin because almost all scenes are supposed to be ha ha witty funny

this is probably the less meta reason why i like it, because sorkin's comic writing has always been better than his big dramatic moments. (and yet, the sketches in studio 60 ...)

The opening thing made me think of Tracy Jordan's "Banter!".

Wish I could find that clip.

Hmm, might be better if Daniels simply played Keith Olbermann.

is it me or is Olivia Munn the best thing about this?

Every week it's just "how will they humiliate the women on this show" all the fuck over again.

is it me or is Olivia Munn the best thing about this?

― Legendary General Cypher Raige (Gukbe), Sunday, July 29, 2012 11:57 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

it's possible lately, yeah

sorkin trope watch: shades of sports night in the "do you really want this to be a therapist appointment? i think you do" stuff

Well that whole episode was basically the structure of that West Wing episode where Josh had to see the therapist after the shooting.

riiight that was the other thing it was reminding me of that i couldn't put my finger on

this was pretty good! really. really. like it had really good parts. the only issue with it is that it's far fetched. & actually that first part kinda continued its technophobic stretch, with the BS about ID verification &c&c&c. but it was good. it ended the santorum interview thing w/real drama & grace, & managed to tread the tightrope of Aaron-Sorkin-Battles-Race thing pretty well. also wtg on narratively utilising olivia munn's bilingualism.

it was the best so far by quite some distance. except maybe the pilot, but those were more naive times.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-newsroom-and-the-perils-of-timedelay-drama,83049/

Well that whole episode was basically the structure of that West Wing episode where Josh had to see the therapist after the shooting.

Hawkeye and Sidney, and the chicken. Which I guess is where it originally came from, if it's not older.

there's probably a tvtropes page for it

'hey girl' /:

Even worse than ep4 which I wouldn't have thought possible. The bit with Don and the pilots was awful.

Very gossippy garbage to be sure, but I loved this:

http://www.xojane.com/entertainment/mandy-stadtmiller-aaron-sorkin-newsroom-character

she comes off pretty horrible there but holy shit, what a douchebag this guy is
http://classic.xojane.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/article_full_width/field_image_attachments/article/STADTMILLER.jpeg

^this strikes me as a really complex dick move to send flowers on someone's birthday with this note

really?

yeah! weirdly snide power trip thing to do.

http://www.xojane.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/article_full_width/field_image_attachments/article/flowers_0.jpg

Mandy,
From your rotting body, flowers shall grow and you are in them and that is eternity -- Aaron

wow that was the most repulsive hour of tv i've ever seen

aaron sorkin why you not make it easier to mount defense of your show

(i thought this ep was okay)

i haven't seen it yet, i just assume that every week people that coming closer to the claim 'watching this was literally like descending into hell' is a bad sign

i liked the 'fix you' episode and i would agree that this one was kind of hateful

i like this terrible show generally but i felt like i needed a shower after that one

is he just straight-up calling everyone under 30 a Nazi at this point

From everything i've read and heard in the past couple of months and then that article by the former post journo, this sounds like the worst show!

Are all current tv shows about people being mean to each other

Maybe the newsroom should take a hint from golden girls

wasn't blanche mean to rose all the time?

Yes but it was part of her shtick, and under it she had a heart of gold

vs semi-precious titanium alloy hearts of most tv characters these days

the golden girls were retired, they didn't need alloy hearts to survive in the cutthroat world of tv journalism

every episode in newsroom season 2 ends with group hugs and apologies over cheesecake

The intro to this show (particularly the bit before the actual cast credits) always comes across as low-budget, charmless, and generic. Like someone started working on it before any scripts had been written or casting or anything and was told "I don't know, it's about a news room, you know, have some cameramen, maybe somebody typing 'News' into a computer, etc."

"I don't know, it's about a news room, you know, have some cameramen, maybe somebody typing 'News' into a computer, etc."

hahaha
otm. they just need to cut the first thirty seconds of it, which is weirdly nervous pre-orchestral fussing. the part when the shots of the cast come in is fine, & comes w/its own alterna-west-wing bluster.

the music is so terrible. in the entire show too. there were moments (dickhead boyfriend talking to the pilots, say) that were made significantly worse by the music. not that this episode was up to much anyway. (when the main source of conflict is that a flight attendant is trying to enforce the rules of being on an airplane it's never really going to pop, as far as drama goes.)

every episode in newsroom season 2 ends with group hugs and apologies over cheesecake

Would watch.

I really really hate the 'love triangle' between Jim, the girl he works with, and the girl she set him up with. The girl he works with just seems more stalker/obsessed with every episode, she's turned from having a slightly overbearing crush to being a completely controlling bitch. If he doesn't tell her to leave him alone or admit she's in love with him in the next few episodes, errrg.

Lisa >>>>>>>>>>>>> Maggie. What Jim sees in her I do not know. Are we (the audience) meant to be rooting for Maggie/Jim?

otm. Yeah if she's that controlling when they are not dating....

dying at MacKenzie crying out DO IT FOR ME WILL as he gives her breaking news hard and fast

maybe the least annoying of the lot?

i guess if you're stuck recapping this show this is the sanest way to do it:

http://www.vulture.com/2012/08/newsroom-recap-backsliding-blackout-tragedy-porn-casey-anthony.html

i thought this was like, still okay. attaching the news of the world story to the news company seems like the most interesting demonstration of their reuse-the-news strategy; like it could unravel unpredictably, both in tandem and apart from history. when something like the tax ceiling is mentioned offhand at the start, it's too simple, to have that The Ship Too Great To Sink!/pregnant women smoking in mad men knowing wink of historical irony slathered upon the audience. but playing more freely w/the historical universe would be kinda compelling. it's still flawed but is mainly back to being flawed in ways i don't really care about, now? like Charlie probably wouldn't have gone to just talk at Leona, a blackout probably wouldn't have been so neatly punctuated by a one-liner redolent of spider-man cartoons, but it's fine. my magnetic & critical appreciation of this show isn't dimmed, anyhow.

the journalist guy was costumed to look very like A Print Journalist.

MARTINICOW
This show is frustrating because it doesn't hold up against the same level of scrutiny that Mad Men / The Wire / Breaking Bad virtually expect from their audience. And I suppose that would be okay if the show didn't take itself so seriously. I'll still watch because I wish everyone in real life were so tirelessly quippy.

Uuuuuh the people on this show are annoying.

Aaaah all these shots of earnest liberal newspeople cringing at the horrible coverage they are doing. Oh no we are selling out our integrity and even the janitor is so very sad!

thought last night's ep was okayish despite it basically featuring all the elements i don't like. I don't know why I didn't hate it so much, save for Mac's SCREAMING which was one of the low points of the series/Sorkin's career.

yeah "mac" is becoming the most insufferable part of the show imo. was especially pissed at the cannibalization of one of my favorite sorkinisms from sports night ("doing a big thing badly").

Ok, the mock coverage, why on earth did they do that again? The logic in this show is non-existent.

Mac is not believable as a professional, nor really as a stable human being. She should be crying on the floor of a mental asylum or something.

well whattaya expect she's a WOMEN mirit guyz

i've thought about it and while i'm not crazy about the "real news stories from a year ago" thing i can't actually think of a better alternative -- certainly not imaginary news stories that vaguely resemble the ones they want to talk about -- other than the show in general just leaning on them for plots and "how they could or SHOULD have been covered" revisionism way less.

i thought emily mortimer's 'SON OF A BITCH' was a pretty good take. pretty sure three of the male characters have done fairly near-meltdown bits already

Maybe the next episode will have Olivia Munn appearing in a scene where no-one mentions her ass or tits.

sigh

there actually have already been a few of those

Maybe the next episode will have Olivia Munn appearing in a scene where no-one mentions her ass or tits.

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Monday, 20 August 2012 20:24 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah that was really not complimentary
but to recap
-olivia munn's top, the navy one w/lighter sleeves
-terrible piano motif
-renewed ninetiesism
-love triangle has become compelling to me
-mac i think is just the worst? like i can't believe she must emote, so, each episode, so frantically or so enthusiastic about everything. i like emily mortimer. but this is so bad.
-man i love alison pill
-man
-weird takes on GOP caricatures; either wow will is PRO-LIFE or else the dastardly coward in a suit who vetoed the debate

anyway as usual i watched this mainly thinking 'this is just not so great' - like all of the 'funny jim' stuff & mac & people quoting poetry & the whole office of a newsroom daily frequently stopping in an awed childlike silence to get invested in some moment engineered by their work parents, like a trip to the grand canyon they are forced to enjoy - & then realised afterward that i mainly enjoyed it, like maybe not 'mainly' but certainly for its peaks.

For the first time I felt that when the episode was over I wanted to watch the next one.

the whole office of a newsroom daily frequently stopping in an awed childlike silence to get invested in some moment engineered by their work parents, like a trip to the grand canyon they are forced to enjoy

lol

yeah i mean the jim-at-the-door thing & was a neat conflict, & unspooled nicely. poor maggie.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m92lsf4nQD1qi98gto1_500.gif

the direction of this was p bad, i thought. i can't remember specifically how. but the whole thing could be so much livelier, more interestingly made. say with fewer piano motifs. i like will smoking, though. that always seems pretty meaningful.

alison pill killed it i thought

about 50% of the LARB bit on the show i thought was good:
http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=745&fulltext=1&media=

feel no sympathy at all for maggie, gotta say

Yeah, i feel zilch. She's into Jim but she won't do anything about it, and she's constantly meddling in his love life. She'll set him up on a date w her decent-seeming roommate and then act like he's doing the worst thing ever. I could take it more when she was being a super-producer and helping out with stories and connections and all that, but it seems like it's fallen by the wayside. And it's kind of a big stretch to not see that Don has figured things out.

As for Olivia, it's cool and all and yes beautiful people can be smart and intelligent but it feels more and more like her expertise is just a qualifier for whatever sexist comments her co-workers want to make that week. I don't understand the internet troll thing. Is he doing a story on something specific? Is it just about internet trolls in general? Dude has a pretty easy job, from what it sounds like.

Mac, ugh, it's kind of the same as Maggie. She clearly is in love with Will but doesn't want to show it or make any effort towards reconciling their relationship. All we are left with are crazy eyes whenever he has flowers in his office. I'd say the two of them have no chemistry but she clearly is psycho about him so it sort of makes sense.

Not sure why i keep watching this. It's super dumbed-down stuff full of easy liberal thumbs-up moments maybe that's it. Even though the whole mock debate thing was completely dumb and made no sense at all it was fun to see them make fun of how stupid the debates are. But really, if they were going through all the trouble of compromising their principles so that they could land the debate why on Earth would they set up something that was basically a Daily Show skit and then come out and yell "eff you" to the guys in charge. Like alot of things on this show it made no sense.

They did comment on how naive it was, at least.

And Don realises that he's losing Maggie. Don kind of the best character I think.

Don is the closest thing the show has to an audience surrogate who sees how obnoxious and passive-aggressive everyone else is and wants to slap some sense into them

Sorkin fell into the HBO antihero tradition of making the asshole villain sympathetic completely by accident

Don was okay this episode but there's no going back from "they killed Bin Laden for you". Ugh!

Maggie/Jim pressurizing Lisa to do the show was just horrible. Run Lisa! Run far away!

the actress who played lisa was pretty good in that scene. i was a little sad they felt the need to have both the 'eighty million' slip and the abortion bit in the interview.

vulture recap this week notes: "*Have you noticed how zoom crazy the cameramen are on this show? Just rewatch the scene where Mac and Will are talking about the mysterious white flowers in Will's office. There is a zoom with every cut, either short or long." -- as with so much in this show i guess this is another thing which p much falls into 'well, i see what you're trying to do' ...

the actress who played lisa was pretty good in that scene. i was a little sad they felt the need to have both the 'eighty million' slip and the abortion bit in the interview.

yeah she's good, & has become more interesting i think; she was maybe a stereotypical smart-but-'ditsy' sorkin character for the first ep? i wonder what happened w/her & jim. i am counting on the sweet panging frustration of them being together, it feels like a necessary end-of-season carry-over that even schmalzy sorkin couldn't pass up.

i actually thought she was p erudite in the tv interview, i didn't know why they were all so hysterical about 'saving her'

when i was watching i kept thinking about the part in last week's vulture recap, where the writer pointed out that there wasn't a blackout in nyc on the day of the blackout in the show. just thinking of the writer looking it up & feeling really satisfied & then writing his snarky post about how a thing portrayed in a fictional place never happened.

dangerous to be pro-choice in NYC that hotbed of extreme pro-lifers

well tbf i think they were concerned about the national viewing audience's reaction, not the other people working in the studio

The important thing is they freaked out and treated everything as if it was THE END OF THE WORLD. I just feel sorry for Lisa. Go find a new place to live and stop involving yourself with these drama-crazy news people.

Just got to this episode. Truly jaw-dropping. Gonna try and figure out some way to to work "We reported the news" into daily conversation
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m8bmhk2uge1qe3p9bo3_250.gif

lol i cannot imagine in what spirit that gif was made

Ok, all bad things about this show noted, I will basically always laugh at physical comedy involving difficult pants.

save-a-sork

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/24/arts/television/the-newsroom-finale-and-both-sides-of-aaron-sorkin.html?hpw

but Alison Pill and Olivia Munn, as a junior producer and a financial reporter, aren’t summoning the style Mr. Sorkin’s writing calls for, and their scenes can feel flat.

One of the reasons Munn is so great is that she doesn't fall into Sorkin-delivery traps.

yeah that line really stuck out; i'd argue w/it on the basis of other performances/presences being worse (& munn's & pill's being great), but even apart from that it assumes that the programme is being held back by delivery - that it's a clumsy perfect-sorkin-programme - rather than its limits. in straightforward quickfire sorkin mode it isn't necessarily all that, although there have been bits in that vein that've been rad

Bab O'Reilly montage

i may have actually said "come the fuck on" when those arpeggios started in

i don't know, i don't care, i like jello

i feel like sorkin is progressing geometrically to discovering a sort of absolute zero of extra-diagetic music, the Least Subtle Musical Cue. on the other hand, the baba o'riley bit was sort of saved by editing and mixing, for me, when jeff daniels starts clumping around the hospital room and it totally overwhelms the drums coming in and everything sounds jarringly arrhythmic. anyway that is probably the basis of my entire reading of this episode, which was everything i hoped it could be.

i had a little buzz of 'this ain't so bad, hit on enough things Sorkin does well but hasn't literally written before' acceptance mid-season that came crashing down in the last couple episodes. genuinely feel bad for Mortimer and Pill for the bullshit they have to do sometimes.

aaron sorkin has seen the opening credits to sex and the city

aaron sorkin has had the recycle bin explained to him

90% of Mortimer's scenes now consist of her shrieking at Daniels

the fact that she now exists as a completely non-credible person but rather some kind of fantastic disruptive force outside of the boundaries of this as a realist drama, this is actually one of the show's strengths

i am pretty sure she corpses at waterston's line about 'pussy-ass coward-ass pussified pussies', which i wonder if that is him forgetting a line or if sorkin actually wrote the line 'they're just a bunch of pussy-ass coward-ass pussified pussies'

he's written lines like that before, where someone tries to unload something verbose but for once the words don't come. like the one Mortimer had also in the finale.

i thought Mortimer started out with a fairly realistic and well played character before becoming a frazzled Cathy comic strip. Felicity Huffman's character experienced a similar, if milder degradation over the course of Sports Night's run, too.

ack

sloan should've taken the £4m. She and Olivia Munn are above both the show and 'the show'.

Many characters, during the course of the show, run into really promising opportunities to escape the Newsroom and for some reason they never do.

we are coming to be aware that really the lightweight breaking-news dramedy is but an excuse for the sartrean theatre of suffering the protagonists go through, rather than vice versa or the reverse

from everything i have read it seems that 'the west wing' is far superior to 'The Newsroom' and yet i have quite happily watched every episode of this whereas i made it through maybe 3 or 4 episodes of WW.