Shoop and The Newsroom

Saw the first episode of Aaron Sorkin's new show, "The Newsroom." Rather like my last subject, Sorkin and his show seem to generate a great deal of heavy reactions. I'm not exactly a full-blown Sorkin expert--I've seen "A Few Good Men" and "The Social Network" (enjoyed both), and a couple of episodes of "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" (strange on many levels). Never saw "The West Wing." I'm fairly familiar with Sorkin's style, both in his own work and the various parodies of it--it pretty much boils down to Sorkin's being a breed of playwright/screenwriter heavily influenced by the film "His Girl Friday," perhaps the ultimate example of characters spouting reams of hyper-articulate dialogue at a rat-a-tat clip (Glenn Gordon Caron, who created "Moonlighting," is another writer who absorbed that movie). When it works at its best, you're too busy enjoying it to realize how incredibly clever it all is. When it works at its second-best, you have plenty of time to think, "Gee, that's incredibly clever." So, I like the pilot episode of "The Newsroom" more than I don't, but I think it falls into the 2nd tier of incredibly clever more than the 1st, if you're still following me. I'm going to casually go into some of the elements I like, some I like less, and comment here and there on some issues that other commenters seem to have.

First, I like Jeff Daniels in the lead. You believe him as an established news anchor, because after a long career of flirting with, but never quite closing the deal with, major stardom, he's attained something he's never had--weight and gravity. (Actually, I think he started to attain it with "The Squid and the Whale.") Plus, he's funny as hell screaming "YouTube! YouTube!" (It almost makes sense in context.) I also like his little "Network"-y rant at the beginning, including the seemingly controversial line "Worst--Period--Generation--Period--Ever--Period," a line that has truly enraged some columnists and commentators over at the A.V. Club. Personally, I'm fine with the line because a) there's evidence that we're meant to see that line as curmudgeonly and out-of-touch, as Daniels' character is indeed curmudgeonly and out-of-touch at other points in the episode, and b) it doesn't rank on a generation so much as rank on people who put periods after every word in a sentence, and these people deserve to be mocked on every occasion possible. Moronic habit.

I like Sam Waterston, too, but that's no surprise, since I've liked him dating all the way back to "Capricorn One" (go look that one up)--he's clearly having fun, and I'm having fun watching. And I like the points where the news-gathering and the let's-get-this-on-the-air atmosphere and the Sorkin-style dialogue get in synch (again, shades of "His Girl Friday"). 

There are some parts of the show I'm less on board with--the executive producer who has some sort of romantic past with Daniels seems to serve as a Collective Conscience, which is a little irritating, despite Emily Mortimer's best efforts. (Her character's name is also problematic--MacKenzie McHale. Seriously? "Shaft" writer Ernest Tidyman came up with a better character name by looking absently out a window at an air shaft. But I'm talking about MacKenzie McHale--then we can dig it.) And, unlike a lot of more vociferous commenters, I'm not absolutely sure I have an opinion about the newsroom gang getting information about Real Stories from History (in the case of the pilot, the BP Oil Spill). I could see that turning into Peabody's Improbable History after a few episodes ("This is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello, folks!" "Good boy."), but I'll probably give it another couple views to see how it pans out. And there's a cast of younger people who have made very little impression on me, except that guy from "Slumdog Millionaire," because I remember saying, "That's that guy from Slumdog Millionaire."

One other moment I liked--at one point, "Mac" (that is, MacKenzie McHale, who's a bad motherf----r) recites a couple of lines from the title song of "Man of La Mancha" to rouse Daniels' conscience regarding What News Shows Could Be, and then closes with appropriate gravitas, "That was Cervantes." And just as I was saying to the screen, "That's not Cervantes, that's Man of La Mancha," sure enough, Daniels says pretty much the same thing. Thus, Sorkin gives us a moment when we, in turn, can feel incredibly clever, which is pretty damn clever.