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News & ArtsMonday, June 25, 2012
TV The Newsroom: Another Awful Avalanche of Aaron Sorkin Words
Posted by David Schmader on Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 10:13 AM
The Social Network was so good it seemed that history might forget Aaron Sorkin's nightmarishly bad post-West Wing series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. But with his new The Newsroom, Sorkin proves that cutesy, gabby, stultifyingly self-congratulatory dreck is his true legacy. From one of the many delightfully savage Newsroom reviews, published at Huffington Post:
"The Newsroom" isn't about to stoop to dumb stunts like telling stories or exploring the nuances of human nature. No, these people exist to Tell Us What's What, especially Will, yet another middle-aged Sorkin hero who bears the heavy burden of being smarter than everyone else. Can he help it that he's fated to save the stupid people of America from themselves? It's not easy, you know! I think we're meant to think that Will is a flawed, yet brave man, but I found him to be a smug, self-absorbed windbag.
Perhaps I'm the only one immune to the charm of his lectures (he actually says, more than once, "I'm on a mission to civilize!"). There's a scene in the third episode in which Will makes yet another What I Believe speech, and the camera swoons through dozens of upturned faces in the newsrooms of Will's cable network. These people don't look like fellow employees, they appear to be acolytes in the Cult of Will, dazed at the good fortune that allows them to be in the presence of greatness. Maybe that moment would have made sense if Sorkin had given us believable examples of the man's personal charm or magnetism. No such luck.
Of course the show is drowning in Sorkin's faux-sparkly patter-speak, suggesting a world where every single person is a crappy playwright. The sound of Sorkin speak makes my skin crawl—it's like nails on a chalkboard combined with the smell of burning hair. I've only been able to watch about 20 minutes of The Newsroom—in two ten-minute chunks—before I became nauseated. I'll watch another ten-minute chunk tonight. By next Monday, I'll be done. Stay tuned.
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The only reason The West Wing worked was because Sorkin's messiah in that case was the actual most powerful person in the world. He was in a position to be a little high-and-mighty. A news guy, however, can shove his smug bullshit. It's when his characters feel like he's just writing about himself (ahem, Studio 60, Sports Night, Whatever this new crap is) that I most want to poke Aaron Sorkin in the eye.
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Another in the string of recent HBO duds.
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I'm a huge fan of Aaron Sorkin's work. Unlike Schmader, Sorkin Speak makes me hard enough to drill wells for African villages. But Studio 60 was a serious swing-and-a-miss.
Mistake 1: It was autobiographical to a degree that struck many viewers as pretentious. Matt and Danny were Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme with the serial numbers barely even filed off. Harriet was Kristin Chenoweth. Ricky Tahoe was Rick Cleveland, and so on.
Writing a show clearly about yourself, and then writing characters to rave about how smart and clever and big-dicked and whatever you are is off-putting, even (perhaps especially) to fans.
Mistake 2: Sorkin doesn't know comedy. And that's fine...writing sketch comedy is a very different art from what he does. But the in-show Studio 60 is supposed to be borderline genius, while every sketch they show, or even hint at, was a grade-A stinker. Sorkin realized this and brought Mark McKinney (of Kids in the Hall) in to funny things up, but it was really a case of too-little, too-late.
Mistake 3, and this is the biggest one: Sketch comedy IS NOT IMPORTANT. The show was supposed to be about the backstage workings of a sketch show, but instead it was almost entirely issues episodes about the political leanings of the various cast members. You can do 100% issues episodes on a show set in the political world. You can't do it when you're backstage at SNL.
The viewers who came for the premise of the show left quickly, because it was too heavy-handed and unfunny for what it claimed to be. The ones that were left showed up on the basis of Sorkin's name, and many of THEM left when they got tired of Sorkin praising himself in sock-puppet form while dry-humping Paddy Chayefsky's corpse.
You may have ENJOYED it, but that's not the same thing as it being GOOD. It was a commercial failure that was written for an audience of one.
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Mark McKinney (of Kids in the Hall) in to funny things up
One of the most unfunny SNL cast members? I'm just flabbergasted that that didn't work.
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I did say *one* of the unfunniest, but I'm at least partly scapegoating McKinney for those bleak years at SNL in the mid-90s, shortly after Carvey and Myers left.
Either way, McKinney is not known for being funny. My best guess is that no real comedian would be foolish enough to touch Studio 60.
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@28 Mark McKinney is know for being funny. He was tremendously funny on Kids in the Hall.
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