Monsters of Television

“I’m on a mission to civilize.”

Jeff Daniels is immune to Munn Face.

We all have a measuring stick for when we have to make the important decisions in the time we dedicate to our television watching. Okay, maybe not all of us. Some people don’t actively make decisions what to watch. Sometimes we just turn the channel or turn it off entirely rather than continue watching, a fight or flight response.

But for those of us that do consciously give a show time to convince us it’s worth our precious hour, you can’t do much better than a four-episode rule. Three and it’s barely out the gate. Five and you’re almost halfway through an HBO season and you might as well stick with it until the end. Four is a solid number.

So here we are on episode four of The Newsroom and I’m coming to terms with the fact that, even if I was going to make a decision to run, I couldn’t turn it off because of several factors, not the least of which is the pedigree of writer behind the program. So, instead of giving up on the thing, I have another decision to make.

I have to come to terms with the fact that this show isn’t what we thought it was. We’re not watching an exposé on cable news or a character study on the people that report to people about other people. This is an hour-long sit-com. And if you’re going to stick with it, it’s time you came to terms with it, too.

The Newsroom is basically a melange of everything Aaron Sorkin likes to do with his shows but without a strong premise to bury them in. He loves love stories and banter and pushing an agenda of an intelligent, informed public making communally beneficial decisions (whether I agree with the latter notwithstanding) but the one time this worked without it getting canceled early is when it was couched in a compelling White House drama.

In Freudian terms, this show is Aaron Sorkin’s id playing with a lazy ego.

The newsroom itself is just a reason for people to get together and it couldn’t have been more painfully obvious than in this episode. Literally, Neal calls an all-peon meeting on a Saturday to discuss Sasquatch just to give them all a reason to be there when the news about the Gabrielle Giffords assassination attempt breaks. Why does everyone come? It’s never really clear. Neal is able to score Natalie Morales so maybe he’s an Alpha. The newsroom also provides a profession to which people will wholly dedicate themselves to the detriment of any outside life. It’s a running theme for Sorkin’s television career, to create shows about people fully competent and even expert at their job but half-retarded when it comes to anything else.

Many of the important factors of sit-commery are there: characters acting hyperbolically, comedic motifs, a universe constructed in a way that allows for wacky characters to behave wackily. Have you ever heard of “corporate” bugging a tuxedo to build a tabloid story as leverage? Maybe on Drew Carey but not on anything an hour long, right?

And, to be honest, some of it is pretty funny. I’m a fan of Sorkin banter: the repeated lines, the back-and-forth, characters that are conversationally anal-retentive. But the distance between the parts of the show and the sum of those parts is format and presentation.

Although the camerawork (particularly the unnecessary zooming and readjustment) reminds of The Office or Parks and Recreation without the confessionals, the format is of a drama. I know you probably get up to have a sandwich in the middle of the opening because it’s so stupidly long but check out how sweeping and self-important it is. You would think a show that follows it would be dedicated to the integrity and importance of news in our culture.

Instead we get two sets of quarreling non-lovers, a running gag of a dude getting drinks dumped in his face, and some Bigfoot humor. For an hour.

True enough, it’s the job at the end that brings everyone back to premise. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like the reveals of what historic day the episodes appear on. But I’m not sure if it’s because I actually like it or I’m biologically wired to.

The show is manipulative, or it wants to be. You don’t use Coldplay to finish if you don’t want to be manipulative. It’s a drama playing by sit-com rules and that’s where I feel the betrayal. There’s the line in this episode about how doctors call people dead, not the news, and I felt like throwing up all over the place. It’s sentimental and not an unexpected construction given Sorkin’s track record (I direct you to “Look what we can do”) but something’s off about the presentation. It comes off haughty or pretentious or something and maybe that’s because the rest of the episode is so low brow. You can’t pull of grand platitudes when you’re essentially doing dramatic slapstick the whole time.

The thing is you can’t be mad either. Sorkin’s been warning you in interviews for weeks now that this show isn’t about what you thought it was going to be. This isn’t The West Wing. This is an hour of Sports Night. They’re not around to create deep, intricate intrigue. They’re swashbucklers. And this episode is the epitome of that perspective.

So are you going to keep watching? You have to, right? It’s a train wreck. It’s like watching a baby horse get up wobbly but then learn to run the wrong way so it shambles along all crooked. That’s a weird metaphor. As a drama, it’s the devil’s work. So just watch for the chuckles.

Some other things:

• I will admit that Sorkin has a way to stuff an hour full of his skewed view on current events. See how that financial crisis thing never comes up again? Even though they have a pair of legs with two PhDs in economics on the show?
• Natalie Morales: locking in that typecast of being the Indian guy’s girlfriend.
• Do you think Sam Waterston signed up to be Lou Grant?
• Maggie and Lisa’s scenes are like a passive-aggressive version of Girls with only minorly more likable characters.
• OMG they’re named Maggie and Lisa?
• “You imagined what and how often?”
• “Is it wrong that I’m turned on by that?” “Yes!”
• With as many women that have passed through over the course of four episodes, I’m a little surprised by the lack of nudity in this series. Did HBO use up the female nudity quota for the year on Game of Thrones? Although, with the f-bomb back-and-forth later in the episode, it might just be that this show is run by people that are used to a more prudish broadcaster. They all sound like first graders that just learned “fuck” is a malleable word.
• This show is a comical series of misunderstandings.
• Sometimes Allison Pill’s face looks like a pale button, two dark dots in a circle.
• Re: Lisa — Jim: get you some.
• Maybe this show is just Sorkin doing a show about debunking modern news cycle myths but he couldn’t do a talk show because he’s bad on camera.
• It should be noted that the Coldplay song lasts two minutes longer on the show than it does on the album. I heard that somewhere. Perfect example of this show stretching things out to their conceivable limits.