The Newsroom

#8
#8
I'll have to check this out as soon as I get caught up on Breaking Bad.
 
#11
#11
Pilot was awesome. Losing interest fast. It seems too contrived.

What's so original about painting the Tea Party as lunatics? So much for doing something outside the box.
 
#12
#12
I don't know how anybody would have expected anything substantively different from the West Wing, unless you aren't old enough to remember the West Wing. I can't conceive of the show working without going back a couple years prior, Sorkin is trying to create his ideal journalist, an heir to Murrow and the other great original TV journalists. A political bend is unavoidable.

The quality of dialogue and character development is what keeps me watching, and IMO Sorkin does it as well as anybody making television.
 
#13
#13
It's a soap opera at the end of the day, but it's at least immersed in real-world events as the news covered them the past couple of years which provides an interesting stage and presentation of the storyline.

I used to work in a newsroom way back when so it brings back some fun and not so fun memories.
 
#14
#14
Haha, his ideal journalist sucks. The Tea Party was not started by right-wing religious gun zealots, backed by Koch, or whomever. It was started by Ron Paul's money bomb on the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party and then later hijacked.

That's the real story, and they missed it...even on a show about the "real story" with 2 years of hindsight to draw from.

When they're not actually doing the news, it's a very good show. All of his guest analysts/pundits are so conveniently dumb. It doesn't seem real.
 
#15
#15
_vol said:
It's a soap opera at the end of the day, but it's at least immersed in real-world events as the news covered them the past couple of years which provides an interesting stage and presentation of the storyline.

I used to work in a newsroom way back when so it brings back some fun and not so fun memories.
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My bro-in-law is editor for a morning show on Headline News. He hasn't seen the show, but of course it has his co-workers buzzing. General feedack is that they nail a few things, but hollywood it up, mostly.
 
#16
#16
To be fair, he didn't say it was, he said it was started by fed up middle class people then co-opted by fringe nutjobs, then the Koch bros., etc. or something along that line.

Now, well if you're feeling like you've got a chip on your shoulder because he left your boy Ron hanging, then I can't help you. :)
 
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#17
#17
milohimself said:
I don't know how anybody would have expected anything substantively different from the West Wing, unless you aren't old enough to remember the West Wing. I can't conceive of the show working without going back a couple years prior, Sorkin is trying to create his ideal journalist, an heir to Murrow and the other great original TV journalists. A political bend is unavoidable.

The quality of dialogue and character development is what keeps me watching, and IMO Sorkin does it as well as anybody making television.
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Exactly. It's preachy and romanticized but it's Sorkin, and that is pretty much what he does. Doesn't mean the writing isn't extremely good.
 
#18
#18
milohimself said:
To be fair, he didn't say it was, he said it was started by fed up middle class people then co-opted by fringe nutjobs, then the Koch bros., etc. or something along that line.

Now, well if you're feeling like you've got a chip on your shoulder because he left your boy Ron hanging, then I can't help you. :)
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I do have a chip on my shoulder, but it's more about the fact that the news is generally presented from a 2-party system perspective closed to any outside view, and this show is no different.

The main character takes it as a given that government is supposed to fix whatever may seem wrong. It's still the same old intellectually lazy journalism.
 
#19
#19
This is the kind of stuff I'm unable to verbalize about my feelings on the show:

All of my training and experience and education has been in playwriting. I have no political sophistication or media sophistication, so if I was talking to Howard Kurtz or you, you could easily dismantle whatever argument I’m going to make. It is a layman’s amateur argument. Oftentimes, I write about people who are smarter than I am and know more than I do, and I am able to do that simply by being tutored almost phonetically, sometimes. I’m used to it. I grew up surrounded by people who are smarter than I am, and I like the sound of intelligence. I can imitate that sound, but it’s not organic. It’s not intelligence. It’s my phonetic ability to imitate the sound of intelligence. - Sorkin
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What’s frustrating about Sorkin’s wheedling when talking about The Newsroom is that journalists aren’t really smarter than everybody else. They are not the elites. They never were. They are more curious and more well-read, because that’s part of the job, really. Most anybody can do the job of a journalist provided they have the capacity to learn new things very quickly and the internal drive to do so.

Sorkin lacks this type of curiosity, so The Newsroom was bound to fail. In the pilot, McAvoy’s staff gets its scoops about the leaking oil platform not through work, but by a pure coincidence of connections by one of the staffers. Sure it happens sometimes, but throwing it out in the very first episode invalidates the entire concept behind the show and turns it into a celebration of newsroom connections by D.C. media elites. At one point, a staffer spits out scientific information about why underwater oil drilling presents such a geological hazard. When asked how he knew this information, the answer is not, “I’ve been studying this for the past two hours while you dip****s have been arguing about ‘speaking truth to stupid’ and referencing Don Quixote.” Instead he says he built a volcano once for a school science fair, which is insulting to everybody involved.
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The Newsroom: Finally, a Show About Elitist American Nostalgia! - Reason.com
 
#20
#20
Hah. Most tv writers aren't experts of things they write about.

Any cop could poke massive holes in nearly every police drama ever made, but tens of millions of people have watched them, do watch them and will continue to do so.

If you can't help taking a cynical approach to the show, then you probably won't enjoy it. I understand where you're coming from, but I had to learn to occasionally shut off my inner hyper critic to enjoy stuff like this, or most anything else put to film.
 
#21
#21
milohimself said:
Hah. Most tv writers aren't experts of things they write about.

Any cop could poke massive holes in nearly every police drama ever made, but tens of millions of people have watched them, do watch them and will continue to do so.

If you can't help taking a cynical approach to the show, then you probably won't enjoy it. I understand where you're coming from, but I had to learn to occasionally shut off my inner hyper critic to enjoy stuff like this, or most anything else put to film.
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That's my real problem...I want it to be The Wire. I can turn my brain off for True Blood, but not for a show about the news.

Last week in SoCal I met my bro-in-law's college friend who is LAPD narcotics unit, on special assignment with a partner from the FBI. As you can imagine he had some good stories. He was making fun of cop movies/shows, claiming all of them were pretty stupid. I asked him about The Wire and he totally changed his tune.

The Wire was amazing. It was written by a journalist who has some disdain for capitalism, and the free market, but he had his character Bunny Colvin think outside the box and incorporates a market solution to the drug problem. That show will never be topped, IMO.
 
#22
#22
Well, not everything can be The Wire.

But, as I mentioned, if you ever watched The West Wing, then you knew what you were getting.
 
#23
#23
n_huffhines said:
My bro-in-law is editor for a morning show on Headline News. He hasn't seen the show, but of course it has his co-workers buzzing. General feedack is that they nail a few things, but hollywood it up, mostly.
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Newsrooms are typically a whole lot fatter than the one portrayed in this show.
 
#25
#25
Probably the best episode of the season last night, right there with episode 1.

If you cant take it for what its worth politically then you are not going to like it.
 
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