In Defense of Aaron Sorkin's 'Newsroom'

I haven’t had cable in a few years now, so I’m not quite up to par on TV culture. But I scored a lucky break with a family sign-in for HBO GO to get my Game of Thrones fix, and through that detour to Westeros I’ve found myself in Aaron Sorkin’s slightly revised tour through recent history, Newsroom. After watching the first season’s ninth episode, I checked Wikipedia to find out when I should expect the sure-to-be season ending cliffhanger (NB: it’s set to air this Sunday). I was shocked to find out that absolutely everybody hates this show.

Okay, not everybody. But it’s sitting at a middling 57 on Metacritic and it’s garnered some rather vitriolic reviews from the Wall Street Journal, Time, and, maybe worst of all, The New Yorker. Those oh so high-minded, high-brow elites that the show--a tale of a news anchor and his feisty executive producer hellbent on reforming nightly news culture--is supposedly catering to have absolutely demolished it. So now here I am coming to the defense of Newsroom against the media high culture’s cannibalization of its HBO brother.

The detractors all offer some version of the same basic complaint--Newsroom is Sorkin being a pretentious blowhard. That’s Time’s word for it, anyway. Apparently, the show’s depiction of anchor Will McAvoy and his team has sacrificed plot and subtlety for dull and infuriating commentaries that can’t carry the personal stories of the characters and we’re left with a dead fish floating on college-educated disgust of the media’s coverage decisions. As The New Yorker tells it, the show is something like a step-up in douchebaggery from college frat boys who proudly declare that they get their news solely from The Daily Show.

Ignoring the irony of The New Yorker declaring something too pretentious to watch, the fact that Sorkin’s scripts don’t hide his characters’ elitism is the show’s most interesting aspect. Newsroom simply is a depiction of what might have happened if someone in the media had taken all the discussions about what’s wrong with the media seriously. It chronicles McAvoy’s elitism--and the effort to not piss off absolutely everyone. (An effort that seems to be failing, it seems.)

But given how obvious (and common) the criticisms of Fox, CNN, MSBNC, et al. have become, it’s just silly to hate Newsroom for using them. It is incredibly stupid, as the show covers in the first season’s final third, that our country spent so, so much time worrying about Casey Anthony and Anthony Wiener’s wiener. If simply saying that is too smug for The Wall Street Journal, it may be time to give up hope. 

But perhaps Newsroom’s detractors would be fine with the show if the dialogue wasn’t so damn uppity, so wordy and over-articulate with “perfectly formed op-eds fall[ing] out” whenever [the characters] speak, as Time’s James Poniewozik puts it. And that’s fair--Sorkin’s dialogue has always been a little overwrought. Nonetheless, it doesn’t ruin the show anymore than it did Sorkin’s other dialogue-heavy drama, The West Wing. And it certainly isn’t bad enough to garner some of the hate these critics have put on Newsroom.

In fact, it provides an interesting cultural criticism. We’ve reached a point where the criticism of the media (and politicians, corporations, and on and on) has become so trite that to voice them--even in an superbly crafted, hyper-articulate manner--is somehow bankrupt. If you speak publicly about Fox News being a terrible news source, you’re saying something obvious. And, what’s worse, apparently, you’re being a smug asshole while you do it. That’s the heart of criticisms against Newsroom--that it needs to stop being a smug asshole and calling out organizations everybody already hates. That’s the source of Sorkin’s terrible blowhard-ness. But all Newsroom is doing is pointing out exactly how everybody sounds when discussing these issues--issues that do actually need to be discussed. So now it’s too realistic, I guess.

Now, by no means am I saying Newsroom will be changing cable news forever. In fact, the fact that our criticisms of news consumption habits are coming from a fictionalized cable drama is rather telling about where the issue stands in our collective unconscious (that is--not highly). But it voices its criticisms in a way that pokes subtle fun at us for our own diatribes against CNN’s obsession with tweets, at our own air of superiority. 

But I guess maybe the Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker are above that.