Thoughts on the First Seven and a Half Minutes of "The Newsroom"

Here’s my problem with everything Aaron Sorkin has ever done:  It doesn’t feel real.  On an intellectual level, I fucking love it; I eat it up like every other liberal, college-educated post gen-Xer.  But on a gut level, it doesn’t totally work for me.  When watching anything written by Sorkin, I always have a tiny voice in the back of my brain screaming “REAL PEOPLE DON’T TALK LIKE THIS!”

Case in point:  The opening scene to the first episode of “The Newsroom”.  Minutes ago, Jeff Daniels’ world-weary news anchor just snapped and spouted off a “spontaneous” tirade condemning the idea that The United States of America is the greatest country in the world.  Daniels does a grand job of making the speech seem passionate and sincere, but the problem is, this isn’t what people sound like when they’re pissed.  When people are pissed, they are blunt and crazy and they swear a lot.  They don’t spew a rapid-fire list of accurate statistics about the world which provide solid evidence to back up the point they’re trying to make, no matter how fucking smart they are.  Jeff Daniels can give the performance of his career, but it doesn’t matter, because no matter how much humanity he brings to the moment, I am distracted by the fact that this speech SOUNDS SCRIPTED.  By somebody who is so clever in his writing, he’s forgotten that cleverness is a fleeting, elusive element in the reality of everyday life which even the luckiest of intellectuals only attain every once in a while, and even then, only for the briefest of moments.

A great writer does not use every character as a mouthpiece for himself.  Granted, every character is going to have some of the writer in him (obviously no one is so ingenious that he can entirely separate himself from his work and create something entirely unique, even to himself), but a good writer should attempt to create different characters, with different strengths and weaknesses.  But every single person in anything Aaron Sorkin writes is so GODDAMN QUIPPY.  Every character, from the jaded 50-something news anchor, to the ambitious mid-30s producer to the wide-eyed 20-year-old intern is the spitting image of Aaron Sorkin (so to speak).  Every single character on this show, regardless of their apparent intelligence, educational background, or life experience, packs more witty one-liners into one conversation than any reasonably intelligent person in real life is lucky to come up with in a month.  What the fuck kind of pseudo-intellectual parallel universe are we living in here?  This is not realism. 

On some wanky liberal-arts major level, I love it.  But on a gut level, it is both exhausting and entirely unbelievable.   Every conversation occurs so rapidly, in a way that conversations do not occur in real life, because in real life people actually have to take time to process and come up with a response to what the other person is saying, not just spit out brilliant lines as soon as the other actor has finished speaking.  Jesus.

Also, the music is fucking terrible.