Newsroom

I figured out the deal with Aaron Sorkin's new HBO Series last night whilst watching it On Demand, it's just liberal porn.  That is to say that in each episode there are 2 or 3 minutes of interesting shit (let's call it "the facial" for the sake of the metaphor) surrounded by the worst acting and writing any show has ever mustered, really.  In fact, I have seen more compelling love stories play out in actual porn films.  Yes, I agree with the views of the show, but the pretense and smuggery of Sorkin's masturbatory politics are too much to tolerate.

The best part of the last episode is when a younger producer punches a monitor on which Rush Limbaugh is seen doing his normal schtick.  This might have been the stupidest and least convincing moment of TV in the last 30 years.  I remember moments of West Wing that came close to being this idiotic, but not quite.  Besides, the shows were fundamentally different.  The West Wing was a counter-narrative to the Bush Administration.  It followed the events of the day fairly closely and imagined what a reasonable President might do.  Newsroom is revisionist history.  It takes us back four years and attempts to show what things might have been like if we only had a free and skilled press.  Sorkin is right to see the American media for the failed, prostituted servant of the rich it has become, but his inability to be so self-congratulatory gets in the way.

So it's liberal porn.  You can watch it for 10 minutes, get your leftie rocks off and move on.  Like actual porn though, it gets old.  You start to think that maybe if you weren't watching porn all the time, you might get laid.  Newsroom won't win over any hearts or minds, and it won't change the media process.  In the real TV news world, even Al Gore will fire Keith Olberman.  In any case, as cheesy as it is, True Blood is better written and more interesting than Newsroom.