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I’m not really a Sorkin fan. I liked what little I’ve seen of The West Wing but even that felt inundated with a critical lack of subtlety in every aspect. However, due to a sustained burst of profound idiocy and self-loathing, I find myself in the position of forcing myself to watch The Newsroom, a show I’ve seen about five minutes of and thoroughly hated, out of a desperate need for some bullshit to occupy my time. Now, I almost certainly won’t manage to update nearly as frequently as Occupation has been. I’ll try to keep it to two a week unless something comes up or I grow more comfortable with the format. I also can't do any work on this on most weekends. I highly doubt I'll finish the first two seasons before the third premieres on November 19th, but I toxxed for all three, so I'll be doing those too. And just judging from this promo image that just got released: It's not gonna get much better.
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Oct 3, 2014 22:26
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Season 1, Episode 1: “We Just Decided To” The episode is, first and foremost, trying to sell me on the merits of Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), and it does a terrible job at it. He’s spent his entire career as a cable news anchor cynically burying his political beliefs in favor of being completely inoffensive until, due to pressure from a moderator, he has a total overreaction to an innocent if somewhat insipid question at a debate, letting his true feelings be known. Will’s portrayal throughout the episode is bizarre. Parts of the episode seem convinced he’s an unrealized genius, and the rest paint him as the biggest rear end in a top hat to ever live. His old executive producer Don (Thomas Sadoski) quit because he screamed at him, he knows his assistant, Maggie (Alison Pill) by two different incorrect names, is mindlessly callous, and upon finding out the network president Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston) hired MacKenzie MacHale (Emily Mortimer), his ex-girlfriend, as his new EP, immediately renegotiates her three-year contract into a 156-week contract in which he has firing power over her at the end of every week, which seems completely horrifying to me. At the same time, Charlie and Mackenzie keep talking him up, and the speech at the debate, while also making him out to be a huge rear end in a top hat with strange, gratuitous insults lodged at millennials (WORST PERIOD GENERATION PERIOD EVER PERIOD) and the religious, is clearly meant to endear the audience to him because he speaks "truth," here defined as centrist swill. You could argue that him being an rear end in a top hat is the point and that he’s supposed to be wrong, as evidenced by Don calling him out for shouting all that at a college student, but the episode clearly doesn’t support that. The speech is painted as a grand, triumphant moment, the triumph of a man’s true ideals. In that case, making him an rear end in a top hat serves only to undercut what he just said. It’s all irrelevant anyway, because at the end Charlie (the nice old character who is full of wisdom because of course he is) says he loved the speech. The show clearly can’t decide whether Will is totally right about everything or a huge rear end in a top hat, and it seems to end with the conclusion that he’s somehow both, which is absolutely maddening. I can see the problems forming already. The end of the episode presents News Night with Will McAvoy’s coverage of the BP oil spill as the way the news should be by showing that the other stations only covered things like the leaked iPhone prototype, but News Night only got that story because Jim (John Gallagher, Jr.), one of the team members Mackenzie brought with her, happened to have an ex-roommate at BP and a sister at Halliburton. That’s not just coincidental, it’s loving supernatural. There’s no way the other networks could possibly have gotten the information you had access to. Now, granted, they make a point that the Associated Press rating hadn’t gone up yet, so the other networks weren’t giving it the attention it deserved, but it’s still an insane comparison to make, and that’s ignoring the awful, awful “here’s what they should have done” connotations of writing a story about the way your fake TV people did everything right at a time everyone else did something wrong. Only Don urges caution, and he’s clearly painted as in the wrong. Using real stories is a neat idea but you’re gifted with hindsight, and it’s bad form to write your characters like they’re immune to the mistakes others made. Even parts of this I enjoyed I ended up turning on. While I actually liked Mackenzie as a character, she’s also, unfortunately, second only to Will in terms of wearing her ideology on her sleeve, totally unconcerned with bullshit like “ratings” and only caring about putting on a good newscast. While I like the idea for the character it doesn’t help the show’s clear problem with being almost insufferably unsubtle. And the way it goes about using that idealism is just terrible, especially when she goes on about how they need to “speak truth to stupid.” That absurd sentence is really the cornerstone upon which Sorkin works. He believes that a Great White Talky Man can solve every problem by talking at it enough. In something like The West Wing, though, it was excusable because the stakes were always high and the characters most prone to it were ones like Bartlet, who was the president. The other reason The West Wing was able to get away with it was because that show was incredibly idealistic. The Newsroom, however, is cynical from the very start, as evidenced by the repeated potshots taken at millennials to the terrible, terrible “it sure used to be” moment in the debate speech. And the worst part is that even Mac’s idealism is being used to promote this cynicism. The entire pilot has this ugly destructive sentiment running through it that I just can’t get behind. Cynicism has its place but it's not actually in service of anything good here. It's just there to make the protagonists look awesome and smart. So much of this episode is spent on bizarre character and thematic decisions, or gross when I actually went back and looked at it. It's funny. I went into this thinking I’d run out of things to talk about in a few episodes. I definitely don’t think that any more.
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Oct 3, 2014 22:27
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The show is literally Aaron Sorkin smugly telling news networks how they should act while at the same time he writes some of the worst female characters ever brought to TV and spends most of the show having Will being this magnanimous "great man" but being a smug, borderline sociopathic monster most of the time. Oh and his "Benghazi" analogue was an entire season of cringe-worthy "dramatic moments" force-fed to the audience via such compelling methods of delivery like "slowly printing off tweets one by one and reading them aloud". I couldn't tell if Sorkin was trying to mock attempts by Fox to create fervor over Benghazi or it was just his "Modern news networks are wrong and he's my TV show proclaiming why using year old examples and hindsight"
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Oct 3, 2014 22:43
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I have to ask, have you seen the season 2 opener or is your narrow use of punctuation going to become really funny?
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Oct 3, 2014 23:08
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I haven't seen anything from the future so I have no idea what you're referring to.
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Oct 3, 2014 23:09
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Well then this thread is going places. Godspeed goon sir.
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Oct 3, 2014 23:11
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have fun with this piece of poo poo, i loved TWW and watched every season of it, even though only about half of them were any good, and even by the end of s1 of the newsroom i was fuckin done with this nonsense
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Oct 3, 2014 23:31
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Toxxupation posted:have fun with this piece of poo poo, i loved TWW and watched every season of it, even though only about half of them were any good, and even by the end of s1 of the newsroom i was fuckin done with this nonsense The show is great fun to watch, because the sheer unfounded arrogance on display with Will and the numerous and hilarious examples of how bad the woman characters are (except Olivia Munn, who actually does a pretty good job). The "accidentally sending an email to the entire media world" could have been one of the highlights for worst writing for a female character in 2013.
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Oct 4, 2014 04:27
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Seeing that video of Will at the college go viral (or "viral", since it was a PR stunt) on places like Upworthy and Facebook was loving annoying. Liked the review, partly since echoed all the same criticisms I had.
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Oct 4, 2014 04:46
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pentyne posted:The show is literally Aaron Sorkin smugly telling news networks how they should act while at the same time he writes some of the worst female characters ever brought to TV and spends most of the show having Will being this magnanimous "great man" but being a smug, borderline sociopathic monster most of the time. Yeah, that is basically the most annoying aspect of this show for me. Sorkin uses the benefit of hindsight to make "his" newsroom be right about everything forever, often through the use of ridiculously improbable connections, sources, and insights, and then uses that to uses that as a standard for the rest of the media, which they obviously can't live up to. I mean it's not like there aren't a lot of legitimate criticisms to be leveled at the media, but this amounts basically to "gently caress you for not being prescient". I only dimly remember most of the episodes I've seen, but one of the worst moments was when Will lied to MacKenzie about something fairly important and personal to guilt her into doing as he wants. When it later comes out, MacKenzie is understandably very upset about it, yet the episode still ends with her apologising to Will for being upset. Perestroika fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Oct 5, 2014 |
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Oct 5, 2014 18:09
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It's not "good" by any stretch, but the Colonel Kurtz factor alone makes for an interesting train-wreck. There's an awesome hubris to the show, at least of the season I saw -- seeing one of the progenitors of the current prestige television era as he returns to the medium and, given carte blanche, ignores all the formal development that's happened since he left. Maybe it could have worked ten years ago. OP's right that the show plays at a certain cynicism, though in the long run it can't even sell us on that, because the writing operates in a mode that's inherently uncynical. Part of which is where I think Will's character gets lost. Is he Don Draper, or is he Dr. House? The show doesn't elevate the character beyond the level of the talented rear end in a top hat. It's constantly on this knife-edge between conventional network drama and more "serious" cable prestige, and the result is consistently off-putting. So we end up with these weird interludes of ~sweeping television romanticism~ amid the cynicism of the world and the unpleasantness of the characters and the fundamental pointlessness of the work they do. Obvious example being the (small spoiler for later in the season) "Fix You" montage scene. It's a strange show.
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Oct 5, 2014 20:11
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Oh my god, this is painful.
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Oct 6, 2014 14:32
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i want to loving die right now
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Oct 6, 2014 15:06
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MrAristocrates posted:i want to loving die right now  can't wait for the next update now
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Oct 6, 2014 15:12
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MrAristocrates posted:i want to loving die right now
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Oct 6, 2014 15:17
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SpiderHyphenMan posted:You deserve this. I did nothing to that thread that it wouldn't have done to itself.
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Oct 6, 2014 15:20
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Season 2, Episode 2: “News Night 2.0” That was just an awful, awful episode. Good lord, what the gently caress did I just watch? I’ve been sitting in front of a blank word document for 20 minutes struck dumb by the mere thought of somehow describing this episode. Fundamentally, this episode is about a massive, embarrassing fuckup that nearly sinks the entire concept of Mac’s “News Night 2.0.” If only the episode didn’t have to destroy my confidence in the basic competency of its characters to get there. The episode is about the newsroom’s attempt to shift from coverage of the BP oil spill, which was a huge boon to ratings but contains no new information at the moment, to the story of SB 1070, the infamous Arizona anti-illegal immigration bill that essentially gave free license to racial profiling. This upsets the guy who runs ratings numbers for Will, who tells him that Mac’s ideas are going to bleed viewers. Don agrees, because Mac is cutting all the popular segments he created, and he’s worried that no one is going to be watching at 10 if News Night bleeds all its viewers by 9, which is a fair point. I figured after the pilot that the next episode would be more about Will being a huge dick but the episode only kind of addressed that. He has a running gag about how he’s memorized the names of everyone in his staff to prove he’s nice and he has a minor, mostly justified blowup. The episode is more about the ways other people gently caress up, and it doesn’t really work. The show manages to secure Jan Brewer, which is where the first huge mistake comes into play. Jim preps Maggie for a pre-interview with a press agent for Jan Brewer, governor of Arizona. While the scene where he gives her the mock interview is thoroughly insufferable arguing that the characters themselves acknowledge has absolutely no purpose(I could barely sit through that scene it was so bad), it’s amazing compared to what we find out later. Jan Brewer unexpectedly cancels (after about six hours of promos had already aired, no less) because Maggie was so desperate to prove herself as an AP she didn’t tell Jim the press agent she talked to was her ex-boyfriend. Not just that, she made a premature ejaculation joke to the guy. I’ve known this character for one episode and I already don’t believe that she’s capable of being that stupid, though both of the pilot’s prominent female characters seem to be having some serious problems in that regard. Speaking of Mac, god drat, what happened to you? She’s able to convince Sloan Sabbith (Olivia Munn), a PhD economist to take a spot on the show for a recurring five-minute segment (though she admits that she’s passing up hypothetically more qualified people for the position because “they don’t have your legs,” ugh), and then, at the slightest provocation, spends what feels like twenty minutes trying desperately to convince Sloan to tell people that Will is a nice guy who didn’t cheat on her while trying to comply with her promise to Will to not tell anyone why they broke up. It’s an absolutely excruciating scene. The worst part by far, though, is when it comes up again later. Mac wants so badly to convince Sloan of the truth that she sends her an email explaining that she actually cheated on Will, not the other way around. What happens instead is that she, in an ironic repeat of a hi-larious joke from earlier in the episode, sends it to the entire staff of News Night. And then it gets accidentally forwarded to corporate. OOPS! Eventually it makes its way to everyone in the company, which is about 178,000 people, and Mac is standing in the newsroom, hysterically trying to convince the staff to delete the email, stomping a co-worker’s Blackberry and telling people to smash Will’s computer with a baseball bat. I didn’t buy what Maggie did and there’s absolutely no way any part of Mac’s decision makes sense to me. I don’t buy that Mac would be stupid enough to send the email incorrectly once and there’s no way I could believe she’d do it twice. I also don’t believe she’d feel the need that badly to inform Sloan, who she barely knows, of the truth. It gets to a point where I don’t feel I understand the character at all any more. Later, in a scene with Will where she’s trying to apologize, she ends up trying to retroactively excuse her cheating: “I didn’t know how I felt about you until I was with him again. So technically, I wasn’t cheating on the man I loved, I was falling in love with the man I loved.” Are you loving serious, Mac? Are you loving serious, Sorkin? The actual show is actually somewhat entertaining. Having lost Brewer, the only people News Night can find to defend SB 1070 are three absolute morons Will has to lead by the nose to get anywhere. And then Will makes his own mistake: realizing the show is going to be terrible, he told a staffer to run an inane Palin clip at the behest of his ratings guy so he can be the one guy to not criticize. The problem is that it’s completely against the philosophy of Mac’s “News Night 2.0” and he comes off as a total hack, bending over backwards to excuse it and failing miserably. In the end, due to this, he calls Mac and tells her that he’s fully on board. There’s some nauseating sexism running rampant through this episode. This episode calls into question the basic competency of both Mac and Maggie—both due to their inability to properly deal with a past relationship, no less—and it’s absolutely unreal. Will’s mistake is nothing in comparison; it’s even excused. By contrast, Maggie gets told (by Jim, even, before she leaves to go apologize to Don for an argument they had, which is a whole other can of worms) that she won’t do it again. It’s just gross.
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Oct 6, 2014 18:02
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Sorry, I'm not quite over the fact that a character is called MacKenzie MacHale. Did nobody say that name aloud until filming? e: and Will's last name is MacAvoy wtf nuzak fucked around with this message at 15:15 on Oct 7, 2014 |
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Oct 7, 2014 15:05
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nuzak posted:Sorry, I'm not quite over the fact that a character is called MacKenzie MacHale. Did nobody say that name aloud until filming? I'm pretty sure both of those things get mentioned as jokes at some point.
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Oct 8, 2014 10:07
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Season 1, Episode 3: “The 112th Congress” "We do the news.” “For the left?” “For the center. Facts are the center.” I’m really sensitive to proper tact in media. It’s not just about conveying ideas but about doing them in ways that are both clear and appropriate. The latter one’s the key, and it’s incredibly difficult. When Will McAvoy gives an on-air apology for failing to properly inform viewers for the past several years, it’s a moment with real gravitas and weight behind it, but it all collapses under itself when you realize that it’s ultimately meaningless because Will McAvoy isn’t in a position to be making this apology. He’s not real. Maybe it would work better if we’d seen more of his pre-pilot self so we had something to compare to, but ultimately it just falls flat because the show feels the need to restate its own mission statement once a week. The show needs to let actions speak for themselves before it can actually try to say anything, and it hasn’t yet. Lines like the above and last episode’s discussion of the news’ “bias towards fairness” give the impression of a show that wears its political leanings on its sleeve but it’s casually revealed in this episode that Will is a Republican for seemingly no other reason than to head off the accusations of left-wing pandering (which the show is absolutely guilty of). A Republican who’s willing to call out the Tea Party? Incredible! “Balance is irrelevant to me. It doesn’t have anything to do with truth, logic, or reality.” Instead, The Newsroom wants to be a show about people who think in different ways joining hands to provide the truth. That’s fine, I suppose, but the show has yet to prove it knows how. One possible solution to these issues might be to have more level-headed opposition to News Night 2.0 that isn't just Don's complaining that he's going to lose his job if they scare away all the viewers.This episode does not do well in that regard. But we'll get back to that. The first two episodes took place mostly over the course of single days, both within the same week. "The 112th Congress," by contrast, takes place over the course of the seven months between then and the 2010 Congressional election. It's also intercut with a board meeting Charlie gets called to the night after the election in which he has to answer for News Night's dogged attacks on the Tea Party. “How do you explain people who are on Social Security voting for candidates who could well endanger Social Security?” “I can’t.” “Well, they don’t call you an analyst for nothing.” Putting the rise of the Tea Party front-and-center while the show is still trying to settle in is playing it pretty safe and it doesn't work all that well. The Tea Party is already a patently absurd movement and while the episode does well by pointing out the astroturfed nature of the whole thing instead of just mocking all its supporters any attempt to rebuke them is going to be impossible to approach with any sort of even hand because it just doesn't deserve it. Will says people should be "scared shitless" of them, which doesn't help. It's all framed like an ideological war, with Will making a decision to talk about them at the top of every hour, which seems a bit ridiculous. Will even compares Michele Bachmann to Joe McCarthy. Of course, despite all the attention given to the topic, the outcome is a foregone conclusion. The Tea Party gains a ton of seats and modern political discourse is ruined even further, and anything less would be loving masturbatory. Despite all the talk about the importance of what News Night is doing, they're forever cursed to have no affect on the world. Nothing will change because of these people, which kind of suggests the entire idea of using real news stories was a bad one in the first place. “A lot of people might argue that Will is on a witch hunt.” “And a lot of people might argue there are witches out there.” The scenes in the meeting with Charlie don't work for a different reason. The owner of the network, Leona Lansing (Jane Fonda), is incredibly angry at Charlie for letting Will go off on the Tea Party, partially because of a minor dip in the ratings but mostly because a bunch of her political allies got ousted for people Will has been slamming for months. He also directly linked the movement to the Koch brothers, which cost Leona a fair bit of her clout. In its desire to give the show a real foe it trips over itself here. Leona threatens to fire Will and invoke the non-compete clause in his contract, which would put him out of work for three years and destroy his career if he doesn't step back. The moment feels almost cartoonish. While these kinds of politics feel plenty realistic it gives the impression of News Night as some perfect bastion of news being assailed from all sides from heathens. There are no flaws with the show, just the people who are trying to stop it. “That’s how the progressive movement would be painted for the next 40 years. People passing out daisies to soldiers and trying to levitate the Pentagon.” “I was there. That drat near worked.” I didn't even really dislike this episode. I thought the framing device was neat and the large shift in scale after the first few episodes felt really interesting. All the lines I've quoted? I actually liked those lines in isolation, they just all contribute to these complaints I keep having. I finally understand what bothers me most about this show. Even when it gets hard it feels too easy.
Arist fucked around with this message at 14:01 on Oct 11, 2014 |
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Oct 11, 2014 13:59
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This was as far as I got. I'm not even sure this third episode was worse than the first two but for me it was basically the last chance for the show to demonstrate that it had the potential to not be terrible and completely full of itself. And it failed.
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Oct 11, 2014 14:35
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I unironically liked Sloan and Don in season 2 and Charlie always but the rest of this show is train-wreck garbage that hates women and anyone under thirty. Make the Sloan, Don and Charlie Show.
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Oct 11, 2014 16:29
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I like this show when it's about everyone scrambling to get a scoop or put together a story. But holy poo poo it has the worst romantic subplots of pretty much any show.
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Oct 14, 2014 07:22
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Pierson posted:I unironically liked Sloan and Don in season 2 and Charlie always but the rest of this show is train-wreck garbage that hates women and anyone under thirty. Yeah, Don and Sloan were the best and most enjoyable characters in the whole thing by a large margin. Almost any time the show actually managed to be genuinely funny was due to them. But Sorkin is just so drat in love with Will that they barely ever pop up on the sidelines.
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Oct 14, 2014 10:36
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I am so happy I'm not in this show.
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Oct 14, 2014 10:43
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Season 1, Episode 4: “I’ll Try To Fix You” This was just a laughably incompetent episode in pretty much every respect and I have no idea where to begin. Sorkin somehow managed to cram in pretty much every one of his defining flaws as a writer, which I found more impressive than anything else. Absolutely nothing about this episode works, to any degree. The plots are terrible, the character decisions are bizarre, and nothing loving happens at all. Worst off, the romantic plots are front-and-center for this one. Buckle up. The episode starts off on New Year’s Eve, which is the first problem because the episode spends a third of its runtime there. It’s an absolutely interminable setup for two terrible plots and a godawful running joke involving Neal’s obsession with Bigfoot. Yes, really. After about 12 minutes of Maggie trying to convince Don not to set up Jim with her roommate and Sloan trying to coach Will into talking to women I began to believe the entire episode would be set at the New Year’s Eve party. At this point, I can’t tell if that would be better or worse than what we got. Will ends up talking to a gossip columnist who is writing a “takedown piece” on one of the Real Housewives of New Jersey and instead of dropping it like any sane human being he decides to give her a big speech about how he has absolutely no respect for her profession and she’s encouraging human terribleness and blah blah blah. Will’s plot through this episode is him setting off on some bizarre “mission to civilize” which is hilarious because it involves him making a total rear end of himself over petty bullshit and horrible because it consists entirely of him talking down to his dates. That plot is just horrible. After the party the columnist does a takedown piece on Will instead, accusing him of groping her. Then, he goes on two dates, and it just gets worse. The second date ends quickly after Will mentions the piece he stopped the columnist from writing and the woman launches into a tirade about the target because of course she’s totally vapid, and Will calls her a bitch. This also lands him in the tabloids, which triggers the insane jealousy of his first date who he didn’t call back after he found a gun in her purse (though he didn’t leave before successfully disarming her when she tries to prove her proficiency with it, because of course Will has to prove he’s smarter than these people). It’s misogynistic as hell. In the end, the focus on Will turns out to be Leona’s doing, making good on her promise to manufacture a reason to fire Will, which adds a hilarious conspiracy element to the whole thing. The actual news story nearly gets lost in all this, relegated to the last seven minutes of the episode (all scored to “Fix You” by Coldplay, which caused me to burst out laughing when I looked it up). The now-irrelevant news story of this week is the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, tying into a different news segment from the episode where Will debunked the myth that Obama has done basically anything to make it any harder to purchase a gun. Even with only seven minutes to dedicate to the subject they still manage to cram in more smug shots at the rest of the media. An NPR report called Giffords’ death too quickly, and wanting more than one source, the newsroom waits a few minutes. Ratings Guy freaks out because they’re not current but it turns out she was alive! Score one for News Night! I don’t understand this scene. The viewers probably know Giffords survived the attack on her life. Dramatic irony only works if the characters are about to make the wrong decision. There’s no tension in “let’s wait for more information” because we already know what they’ll find out. It’s pointless back-patting. The major B-plot in this episode is Jim/Maggie, and it’s garbage. I’ll try to sum it up briefly: Maggie doesn’t want Don to set up Jim with her roommate but she can’t get her out of it and then they go on a date and then Jim tells Maggie he won’t see the roommate again and then Don tells her that he lied and then Maggie calls him about a news story and Don calls the roommate at the same and she hears the roommate’s dumb ringtone in the background because Don is kind of a hilarious dick and then Maggie gets really mad at Jim and Jim tells her she should be mad at Don or something and oh my god who caaaaaaaares. It’s a terrible plot with nothing interesting going on in any part of it, full of petty bullshit and dumb drama. Don is supposed to be the dick here but I’m on his side because he doesn’t give a gently caress and I can relate. There’s also Neal, who is, again, obsessed with Bigfoot for some reason. He brings it up in every single scene he’s in. He tries to convince Jim. He tries to convince Will to impress his girlfriend. He tries to get Will to talk about it on News Night. He calls the newsroom in on Saturday to convince them about loving Bigfoot, what the gently caress is wrong with you dude. It’s not that funny and it starts coming off as really really pathetic after a point. I don’t understand the point of that plot at all. This was probably the hardest writeup yet for me because I had a ton of trouble coming up with much of a throughline for this one because I’ve already forgotten most of it. Just none of it works. There’s like a single good moment where Will apologizes to Don by shouting “You’re a fuckin’ newsman, Don, I ever tell you different you punch me in the face!” but other than that I didn’t even really like much of the dialogue in this one. It’s strange that I can come out of this episode finding so much of it terrible and still come out of it with no strong feelings towards it. This episode is probably objectively worse than the second one but that one made me angry. I don’t really feel anything but exasperation towards this, even if the misogyny is really bad in this as well. There’s really nothing else to say. This is just a bad, boring episode.
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Oct 16, 2014 17:46
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MrAristocrates posted:Season 1, Episode 4: “I’ll Try To Fix You” Maybe you've just become adjusted to it's terribleness. Are you watching other, better tv in between viewings? I didn't realise just how lovely the newsroom was until I started rotating it with Breaking Bad
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Oct 17, 2014 12:55
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hiddenmovement posted:Maybe you've just become adjusted to it's terribleness. Are you watching other, better tv in between viewings? I didn't realise just how lovely the newsroom was until I started rotating it with Breaking Bad I knew how bad it was from the moment of Jeff Daniel's first "great man" speech, and was periodically confirmed with some absolutely atrocious writing for the female characters. Season 2 was their attempt to tell a serial, connected story with Genoa, peppering in their crack at OWS and other current events, but the entire thing fell so flat that only the acting talents of a few characters, Sloan, Don, and Charlie managed to keep the show from being a complete loss. The "dramatic" moments for the Genoa story were also unintentionally hilarious in a way the writers didn't expect but gave the show an entirely different dynamic.
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Oct 17, 2014 17:39
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Willy Pete is the best character in the show.
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Oct 19, 2014 00:49
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MrAristocrates posted:Season 1, Episode 4: “I’ll Try To Fix You” It's been awhile since I have watched this episode, but if memory serves right the points from your review that I quote pretty much summarize the episode and the series in general. This episode really is the one that sets up a "traditional" tone and plot for an episode, and it's a show that tries to take itself too seriously that ends up circling back around at silly than serious. Most of us who watched these episodes live will agree with your thoughts that I've pulled out in the quote. The Fix You scene is terrible. Anything Jim/Maggie is eye-rolling and terrible. Neal's pursuit for Bigfoot continues to show up through the rest of the season (add it to your drinking game and you'll be smashed in no time). The only decent characters on this show are Don and Sloan. The way they rectify Don's original presentation through the rest of the seasons are amazing and you'll root for the one guy who is actually well-written and acted, and just all around... you want him to succeed. And Sloan. Oh glorious Sloan - she's just as awesome to watch.
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Oct 19, 2014 10:19
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I can't wait to see your reaction to Neal's plotline in the final few episodes of S1. Where he infiltrates a secret online hive of Internet trolls and coincidentally finds the guy who threatened Will.
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Oct 19, 2014 16:57
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MrAristocrates posted:Season 2, Episode 2: “News Night 2.0” The best part about this episode is that it's based on Sorkin's relationship with Mandy Stadtmiller who was a Page 6 columnist when she went out with Sorkin. Just let that sink in.
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Oct 20, 2014 17:01
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Ochowie posted:The best part about this episode is that it's based on Sorkin's relationship with Mandy Stadtmiller who was a Page 6 columnist when she went out with Sorkin. Just let that sink in. What the gently caress.
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Oct 20, 2014 17:14
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MrAristocrates posted:What the gently caress. http://www.xojane.com/entertainment/mandy-stadtmiller-aaron-sorkin-newsroom-character I mean, you gotta take Mandy Stadtmiller with a minor grain of salt at least, she's known for stretching the truth like any gossip columnist, but I have no doubt the core of it is true.
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Oct 20, 2014 17:27
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My biggest gripe is Sloan getting turned into a really lovely character later on. For a while she's the coolest fuckin character on the show, the line about twitter followers is hilarious and she has a bunch of great moments. Then Sorkin just hits a point where it seems like he says "Welp, can't have that!" and ruins her completely. I really wanted to like this show, I agree with Sorkin's views (if not his delivery) on things like single-issue voters voting against their own general interests, media whitewashing of politics, etc. But he's just got this smug loving way of ruining everything great for the big monologue and it gets really tiring.
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Oct 20, 2014 20:02
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Season 1, Episode 5: “Amen” This is the strongest episode I’ve seen yet while also being the hardest to write about. It’s largely carried by the A-plot, which is good, but only by this show’s standards. The rest ranges from serviceable to outright boring, and while it manages to avoid the major pitfalls earlier episodes have fallen into with not trusting the audience to buy into its thesis, it still finds itself mired in the various shortcomings the show has no idea how to deal with. It’s still preachy, for one, even without presenting News Night as an ideal, and the romance continues to lack any real purpose other than making sure that all the characters have something to do every week. The main plot deals with the massive protests in Egypt after President Mubarak’s refusal to resign. After trying to get the story in a deeper context than “sit in this hotel room,” Elliot is injured and News Night has to take over his coverage of the story. To this end, Neal is able to secure a foreign journalist who goes by the name of “Amen” to report for them. This plot isn’t great television or anything but it shows the first real commitment to actually presenting the ideal that News Night is trying to accomplish, something the show was previously content to merely talk about. The show eschews the comparative looks at other networks, too, which helps greatly in this respect. I didn’t love the later bit where Amen is captured by the government for a ransom of a quarter million, but I was even willing to give that a pass for the way it tied into themes the rest of the episode touched on, like the costs of getting the story. The characters actually pay prices in the pursuit of the news for once, though to be fair much of that is through people taking poo poo way too seriously and hurting themselves, like Don hilariously injuring his shoulder trying to break down a door or Neal flipping out and punching a monitor after seeing Rush Limbaugh mock the plight of captured journalists. I feel I may be giving this plot too much credit, though, both because this is the first time the show has managed to be compelling in its own right and because most of the rest of the episode didn’t leave a particularly strong impression. Again, I don’t like how Amen is turned into a tool for that plot and I especially hate the resolution, where after it’s revealed that Will paid the ransom the entire newsroom waits outside his office and applauds him as he leaves, which was laughably self-congratulatory. As for the rest, well, the best I can say is that none of it really leaves much of an impact. The romance isn’t quite as frustrating this time around because at least one of them, Wade/Mac, has ties to the larger plot beyond itself, with Wade tricking Mac into putting him on the show repeatedly to boost his chances for his congressional run, which gets the tabloid reporter from the last episode on her tail. Will, under the advice of Gary, The Black Guy, meets with the reporter to pay her off. While I acknowledge and in some respects even appreciate the ties this meeting has with Will’s decision to pay the ransom, it’s where the episode chooses to get really preachy. Will getting incensed at the journalist’s remark that they’re all journalists is believable for the character, but using it as a launching pad for a speech didn’t work at all for me, not just because I’m sick of the speeches, not just because it was overly righteous, but because the speech just wasn’t very good. It’s about the things the newsroom is going through that makes them real journalists as opposed to her, but it includes poo poo like Mac’s need to count with her fingers and attempts to understand economics. It also takes itself way, way too seriously with lines like “If you touch my staff, you’re walking into a world of hurt,” and “I’m going to make a meal out of both of you and I won’t stop until I’m done,” which sound like lines 15-year-olds would write. Again, while I can’t say I loved this episode, it succeeded in some basic ways the show hadn’t before. If this show would just commit to letting its ideas speak for itself and tying its ideas together it would at least be consistently watchable, as opposed to the mess we got last episode. It makes me cautiously optimistic for the future, even if I know that can only lead to hurt further down the road.
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Oct 24, 2014 05:45
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Who is making you do this, Mr.A? Who won't let you just... die? Seriously. This is the worst show. You can't get anything too funny out of it because it's exactly that terrible. No matter how hard you try, you're just going to find pain.
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Oct 24, 2014 05:54
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Republican Vampire posted:Who is making you do this, Mr.A? Who won't let you just... die? He toxxed himself to do this on the condition that the Dr Who review thread made it to the third season, He made a deal with the devil and now must give him his due.
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Oct 24, 2014 06:38
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Stormgale posted:He toxxed himself to do this on the condition that the Dr Who review thread made it to the third season, He made a deal with the devil and now must give him his due. Surely getting banned... surely getting banned would be easier? I mean, good god.
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Oct 24, 2014 06:55
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At this point I might actually do Dads just as a show of support. Nah.
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Oct 24, 2014 07:51
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