Episode 6 of “The Newsroom” was great when it was season 3 of “West Wing.”
“‘The Newsroom’ is just not fun, and maybe that is because Sorkin is no longer having fun. Perhaps he’s too busy being angry at the world (with a hard-to-miss focus on women). Ironically, considering Sorkin’s contempt for the Internet, watching the Newsroom feels a bit like delving into the political blogosphere: either you toe the line or you leave yourself open to bucketloads of verbal hate. Just this week The Chicago Sun-Times had to turn off comments on a story about Alex Okrent, the 29-year-old Obama staffer who suddenly collapsed and died at Obama headquarters, because they were getting so nasty. On “The Newsroom” there is no room to disagree or for the characters to develop; we are basically just waiting for everyone to come to their senses or be punished.” - The television of cruelty: Aaron Sorkin thinks we’re stupid, and he’s punishing us for it
Sorkin, it is increasingly clear, is less interested in vagaries of cable news than he is in telling us how the country should be as a whole, and is busy fantasizing television as some sort of magic wand that might just be able to cast a curing spell on us. Cable’s role in the show is not just a funhouse mirror of our behavior as voters and political theater in Washington; it’s bigger.
Alas, in Sorkin’s world the Internet, the driving force behind everything on cable, remains the domain of a guy named Vinny in his efficiency apartment, when in fact it’s the phenomenon that has both dismantled and reconstructed the media in its entirety, and cable news particularly. (The Internet, Fox News, and “The Daily Show,” three of the most powerful forces in terms of how we consume media and understand democracy in the last five years, have yet to factor at all in “The Newsroom.”)
Has Aaron Sorkin ever watched cable news? “Sorkin has said that critics have found his new show far-fetched because it is far-fetched, because it’s a fantasy of doing television news the right way. But it looks like Sorkin doesn’t know what’s wrong.”
Read more: “The unreal dystopia of Aaron Sorkin” at Capital New York
