Jeff Daniels radiating flinty truth-telling eroticism as news anchor Will McAvoy
I am watching The Newsroom despite myself. The arrival of Aaron Sorkin’s new HBO series has not been met with the unqualified triumphal fanfare that I expected. I can’t imagine it’s what Sorkin expected either, and the entertainment press (at least, the intelligent, trustworthy entertainment press) has made a meal out of that, as well. I have to admit to reading Toronto Standard alum Sarah Nicole Prickett’s gracefully eviscerating feature on Sorkin in The Globe and Mail with some relish (you go, Internet Girl). And the New Yorker published an advance review, which, while well-rounded, certainly weighed on the side of the negative. The tenor of the early press seemed to be that, now that Sorkin has become a more-or-less reliable television brand, it was open season on his more glaring idiosyncrasies. Sorkin and Women (onscreen — fair, offscreen — forehead-slapping disaster); Sorkin and dialogue (words, words, words, gushing forth in a torrential display of insecure erudition); Sorkin and preachiness; nobody was saying anything new. It was just the first time that it had all been said as a pre-emptive warning.
And still, I watched. And I must admit, I enjoyed. I don’t enjoy it as much as I enjoy its friends and neighbours on HBO: the sweaty, gory pulpiness of True Blood, the raunchy, grimy intrigue of Game of Thrones. But then again, The Newsroom isn’t that kind of show. It’s a Sorkin affair, designed with the utmost effort to be moral and meaty, much like his last successful foray into television, The West Wing. Then again, I don’t enjoy The Newsroom as much as I enjoyed The West Wing (at least, while Sorkin was writing it).
By now, there has been a storied discussion, in the form of essays and reviews of his movies and television, of Sorkin’s Grand Project. He is interested in Grandness: grand men, the grand women who stand behind them, and the grand institutions that they inhabit — the White House, Harvard University, and now, the news media. But this is only a description of the content of his shows and movies. What Sorkin really does is write liberal porn.
The timing of The West Wing couldn’t have been better: everyone I knew (I travel in artsy circles, so I don’t encounter too many avowed Conservatives or Republicans) was reeling from the election of George W. Bush. And here was a balm for our panicked souls, a nirvana, an alternate universe where the most powerful political figure in the Western world was not just a left-leaning Democrat, but also vastly and sharply intelligent (a Nobel laureate no less!), measured, stately and paternal. Josiah Bartlett; like something out of Mark Twain. He was president because he wanted to do good in the world, and so did his staff, a collection of the strongest minds in fictional America. The show (again, with Sorkin at the helm) made it seem like even being sympathetic to Republicans was just this side of irrational. And with each passing year of Bush’s presidency, I clenched around the fantasy of The West Wing harder and harder.
The Newsroom is much the same: Liberal porn in the era of blowhard panel programs and muckraking ratings-driven panic mongering. Amidst the hellish squalor of Fox News, Sorkin crafts for us a network television Eden: here are people who just want to Make News, dammit! Newsmen who are encyclopedically literate and well-informed; producers who value ideas and who think faster than the speed of lightning; executives who long for the days of yore, days of integrity when the news meant something and whose choice of bowtie reflects that yearning (really though, who’s dressing Sam Waterston?).
And despite the accuracy of all the criticism, both of Sorkin and his writing, the show is good. In two episodes, the show has developed some odd tics: so far, Jeff Daniels’ Apollonian beauty has been testified to at least once per show. And everyone is currently saddled with painful exposition: the scene where Daniels laboriously lists the accomplishments of his staff at the beginning of episode two was just silly, even for liberal porn. (Apparently, that entire newsroom has a combined SAT score to rival America’s GDP). It’s wordy, and nobody on that writing team has an ear for naturalistic dialogue — I don’t know anyone who speaks in discrete essays — but it’s still better-written and more tensely dramatic than most shows on TV.
Of course, the show puts me in mind of another Newsroom. Ken Finkleman’s vicious mid-‘90s parody of how the news is made is almost a complete reversal of Sorkin’s Newsroom: moronic producers, sub-literate anchors driven by unfathomable vanity, feckless executives, all fumbling in a mire of their own disastrous inadequacy. Both versions are equally distorted: Finkleman towards sardonic despair, Sorkin towards aspirational greatness. And somehow, Finkleman’s vision rings truer than Sorkin’s.
Perhaps that’s why I’m not clinging to Sorkin’s Newsroom with the amorous fervor that I applied to The West Wing. It’s not merely that I’m cynical about the news media or television entertainment, it’s that those things are cynical about themselves. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have been lambasting the excessive follies of the news media for years now — they are performing a real, pragmatic version of Sorkin’s wish-fulfillment porn, and thus, the latter doesn’t seem quite so relevant.
The opening credits of The Newsroom are interspersed with shots of Great Newsmen of the Past — Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite — to conjure up a time when America was Great and the news was a hallowed institution. Was this ever the case? Was there ever a moment where television media wasn’t ruled by corporate interests, vanity and ratings? This is why Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip failed so miserably, and why 30 Rock excelled: television is such a quagmire of vanity and market absurdities that to claim its institutional greatness is a bit simple.
I’ll still watch though, despite myself. As I said, it’s better entertainment than most shows on television. Besides which, we haven’t gotten to the Jane Fonda episode yet!
______
Sholem Krishtalka is the Toronto Standard’s art critic.
For more, follow us on Twitter at @torontostandard, and subscribe to our newsletter.
