The Newsroom is one episode away from being out of our lives forever, but when it comes to infuriating the more discerning minds among us, it’s not done yet. (A few examples: Here. Here. Here.) To be fair, I didn’t see it, and probably won’t. Life is too damn short. But maybe some of you might like to know why I wouldn’t bother.
This brief piece came from my weekly column on new DVDs and Blu-Rays at Daily Grindhouse. It covers my overall feelings on this particular series:
The two main characters on this show are named Will McAvoy and MacKenzie McHale, so I would humbly venture to suggest this show would be overwritten even before any of the characters were to begin to speak.
The central conceit, that this is the story of a fictional team that breaks the news centering around real-world news stories that happened two years beforehand, strikes me most frequently as unintentionally comedic and not remotely as intelligent or as self-aware as its defenders will attest. Here’s something that can be hard to understand, but still true in my opinion: Something can sound intelligent and still not at all be intelligent. No matter how voluminously-composed the monologues are, I can’t help feeling that show creator Aaron Sorkin is what I would call a Bad Good Writer. Obviously he’s a big talent, able to attack social concerns in a way that appeals to a broad audience, and so many fine actors line up to work on his shows that clearly there’s significant merit in Sorkin’s work, to them at least.
But his work can be howlingly self-important, and overly wordy to the exclusion of telling a good story. To be fair, I haven’t watched anywhere close to all of The Newsroom‘s three seasons, but I did watch all of the indulgent and deathly anti-comedic Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip (Sorkin’s show about the making of an SNL-style variety show) in uneasy fascination, and that’s what everything I’ve seen of this show reminds me of most.
In my opinion, the best projects I’ve seen connected to Aaron Sorkin’s name are CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR, MONEYBALL, and THE SOCIAL NETWORK.
Movies.
With directors.
Directors who know how to take a dense script and make it visual.
Sorkin’s TV work is all about pointing the camera at actors, so they can hold forth with his prolonged text-volleys. Sometimes the camera follows the characters as they walk and talk, but that’s about as cinematic as it gets. If Aaron Sorkin had to tell a story without words he’d be dead in the water.
And that’s not to my taste, to say the least. My storytelling inspirations are generally the kind of people who can tell a story without words, as well as with them. In the silent era, Aaron Sorkin wouldn’t have worked a single day. Then again, they didn’t have blogs back then, so there goes half the stuff they rail against on The Newsroom anyway.
Follow me on Twitter, which Aaron Sorkin hates, at @jonnyabomb.
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