Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom,” the big new series of the summer that premieres Sunday night on HBO, fails to meet the high expectations that greet it, save one: It is crammed with incessant gibber-jabber.
Characters never stop speechifying to one another, replacing believable dialogue with that unmistakably Sorkinesque logorrhea of righteous self-importance. It’s a puppet show with Sorkin as the only hand, expressing his displeasure with the tenor of public discourse. (Which everyone knows has reached an unctuous low.) “The Newsroom” is principally concerned with how American society has been ruined by the blaring insipidity of our 24-7 media culture. The theme song swells with a collage of images of the founding fathers of television news, but if Edward R. Murrow is watching, I suspect he’s chuckling in his grave rather than spinning in it. (Fun fact: Murrow was cremated.)
Hank Stuever
Hank Stuever is The Washington Post’s TV critic and author of two books, “Tinsel” and “Off Ramp.”
Jeff Daniels, Emily Mortimer, Jane Fonda and Kristin Davis attend the Hollywood premiere of 'The Newsroom”--a new HBO series from “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin.
Jeff Daniels stars as Will McAvoy, a straight-down-the-middle prime time anchor on a straight-down-the-middle cable news network. While sitting as a guest on one of those state-of-journalism panel discussions at Northwestern University one evening, McAvoy snaps (an homage to “Network’s” Howard Beale) when a wide-eyed student asks him what makes America great.
His answer is long, contrarian and witheringly mean to the young woman — a cathartic release for the “kids today” crowd. Rather than meet his remarks with applause, the twittersphere collectively blows Will a raspberry. In a moment of managerial crisis control, he goes on a brief sabbatical.
When he returns, his 8 p.m. show, “News Night,” undergoes a complete makeover. An idealistic new producer (Emily Mortimer as seasoned war correspondent MacKenzie McHale) is brought in to rally the bright young things on the staff and redefine Will (her former lover) as an Olbermann-esque truth teller — another “Network” homage, with unenthusiastic dollops of “Broadcast News” on top. During a board meeting, MacKenzie pronounces three requisites for every “News Night” segment: Is the story relevant in the voting booth? Is this the best possible form of the argument? (which means no blowhard guests) And is the story part of a historical context?
Off they go, merging onto what they regard as the journalistic high road. A twist for Sorkin (but not for viewers), is that Will is a Republican who has taken it upon himself to challenge the party’s rightward fringe, providing a novel new way to present a Democratic fantasia. “I’m a registered Republican,” Will says in a prime example of elegant Sorkinese. “I only seem liberal because I believe hurricanes are caused by high barometric pressure and not by gay marriage.” Real events from 2010 and 2011 — including the BP oil spill, the midterm election that ushered tea partiers into Congress and the Gabrielle Giffords shooting in Tucson — form the backdrop of Will’s newly located outrage. His pulpit gets a nightly workout on air and a constant workout everywhere else.
The word pile that once seemed so melodious in Sorkin’s other projects — especially that millennial anti-anxiety medication known as the “The West Wing” — now has the effect of tinnitus. The men talk like Sorkin writes; the women talk that way, too; the 28-year-olds talk like that, as do the 41-year-olds, as do the cast’s septuagenarians, who include Sam Waterston as the head of the network news division and, later on, Jane Fonda as the network owner who puts the arch in matriarch. (In other words, Jane Fonda as Ted Turner.)
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