The Newsroom episode 3 excerpt
It’s hard to put my finger on exactly what it is about Sorkin’s
work that I find so… obnoxious. It’s more than just the smug, self-righteous politically
correct content, which is just his stock-in-trade. It’s more than that. There’s something
nauseating about his characters and how they interact. The dialogue. From the snap-crackle gay repartee between like-minded liberals taking gratuitous potshots at
conservative straw-men to the supposedly sexually-charged dueling between principal
characters, there’s something really ... obnoxious about it.
Perhaps this contributed to the early demise of Sorkin’s
last “opus,” Studio 60 on the Sunset
Strip, which quickly sunk in the ratings despite “critical acclaim”—not
just the repellent, smug, self-righteous liberal politics embedded in
everything Sorkin writes.
News anchor Will McEvoy, played by Jeff Daniels, is the “good”
Republican, a standard device Sorkin uses so we can tell the good ones from the bad. In episode 3, “112th Congress”, even “good” Republican
McEvoy finally balks at the extreme danger posed by the Tea Party, and turns his
nightly news broadcast into a crusade to educate his
audience on the perils of sincere but gullible Tea Partiers who are manipulated
by their evil paymasters. The Tea Party doesn’t merely threaten the viability
of his party, if the public isn’t educated in time, they can destroy the nation
as we know it!
In his wisdom, Sorkin reluctantly acknowledges the necessity of an opposition party. No,
no, a one-party (Democratic, of course) system would not ultimately best serve
the Republic, he charitably concedes. He seeks to save Republicans from themselves. Hence,
The West Wing’s “good” Republican
presidential candidate Arnold Vineck (played by Alan Alda, in a truly inspired
bit of delicious irony) and now The
Newsroom’s Will McEvoy.
Note, Sorkin finds no need to clutter up his narratives
with good and bad “progressives”. You won’t find any racist African-American Al
Sharptons or man-hating lesbian feminazi versions of Hilary Rosen in his
dramatis personae to confuse the storytelling.
Like Studio 60, The Newsroom will undoubtedly reap “critical acclaim” from the Hollywood elites. Because it’s on HBO it isn’t subject to the brutal bottom-line ratings metrics that routinely kill the vast majority of all new major network shows, even the occasional good one. Will poor ratings be sufficient to kill it on HBO? I hope so.
The supposedly charged dialogue between McEvoy and his ex-love newly installed as his producer, doesn’t just not work—it makes me cringe.
