Monsters of Television

“That’s — not Spanish.”

“So how do I do it?” “All you have to do is relax your face and make your eyes go dead like you’ve been lobotomized and wouldn’t put up much of a fight. It’s like playing a sexy possum. That’s Munn-Face.”

When Aaron Sorkin moved to paid cable, we had no idea that what we really needed for him to do was stay on network or ad-supported cable television because those advertisements, the time we waste looking at products we’ll almost certainly never buy but fully support their presence in the middle of our programs so we don’t have to shell out unnecessary dollars on content and, instead, spend them on shoes and snacks and drugs or whatever else we please, the lapses in between the “arias” of dialogue, were essential so we didn’t feel the crushing weight of paragraphs with unpronounced punctuation that are now the mainstay of a series on which no one from studio exec to writer’s assistant seems to say no to Sorkin, which enables him to lay down as many soapboxes as can fit within the same amount of time Game of Thrones entertains several enclaves of characters spread across continents but Sorkin barely has time to tell the story of one or two or less than two characters and do it with poor, sit-com-worthy gimmicks while filling all the negative space with an incessant volley of letters that run together like a traffic jam in a commercial for his and her body spray and, by doing so, possibly torpedoing a decent premise for a show the same way he crushed a promising show about sketch comedy five years ago that turned into something political and too serious and, if I may say so, icky when it came to the Jordan/Danny relationship, an act for which he apologized to the crew, the network, and Matthew Perry in GQ (scroll down past the bad CMS garbage) so he at least insinuates that he has to know what he’s doing now, what mistakes he’s making, and how to improve on those mistakes after going down with two busted ships and one that sailed into the history of television, all of this information begging the question:

Are you in or are you out?

After I finished my review of the pilot, I felt like, after reflection, this could be good. There was a lot of promise in what the series was attempting to do, both by the ambitious journalistic revolutionaries in the interior show and by the commentary on the media provided by the exterior one. This was a show Sorkin had been preparing to write about his whole career: a situation where people are tense and constantly discussing the issues he has so many opinions on. I mean, when you try to fit political commentary into a show about putting on a fake SNL, you have problems.

What’s troubling, however, is everything else about the exterior show. In addition to creating a vehicle for commentary, The Newsroom is compelled to tell stories about the characters on the show and so far, not so good. As this is a late review, you might’ve already heard the highlights of these laments: poor representation of women, a coarsely-plotted inciting incident between Mac and Will, and, of course, the suffocating dialogue (which I feel I’ve already addressed).

Reply-All has been a television villain since email was mainstream so, for this show to use it here, on a network that is famously not TV, feels amazingly cheap, almost as if Sorkin used it in order to explain away some Outlook-oriented misstep he recently took. I’m not sure what IT team makes it so easy to send an email to 100,000+ people at the same time but they should all take a long, hard look at their careers. Maybe they miscalculated how often people will typo an asterisk. You know, when your fingers are flailing across the keys and you mean to type “l” but you hit Shift+8 instead. They really should’ve accounted for that. This sounds more like an plot development for Pretty Little Liars than a show by a seasoned and lauded author. Maybe A just wants to send a message to Toby or something and s/he sometimes presses the 8 too many times and gets an asterisk. Oops.

The most troubling thing, however, is the repeatedly awful depiction of women in the episode. Not that there aren’t some idiot male characters on the show (the University of Phoenix academic is pretty priceless) but they’re one-offs that serve a purpose of ignorance and, pointedly, don’t talk nearly as much as the female guest they accompany. The pageant runner-up makes has the unfortunate job to bring a voice to empty, shallow cliched patriotism. To be fair, however, she might’ve caught her childishness from a contagion spreading only to the white girls in the office.

Maggie, who rode the edge of naive and bold but with a penchant for some vulnerability for most of the pilot, turns into a big baby for this episode, both in her professionalism and her outside-the-office life. Petulant is the word I’d find for her. What I found last week to be watching a foal stand on wobbly legs in pursuit of a graceful, powerful future this week could best be described as squeezed from the tantrum of a ten-year old with a fake ID. “You drank a whole drink by yourself? That’s not good for you!”

Worse than than juvenile antics produced by our blond Natalie was the fall from grace of our brunette Dana. Mac turns from tough cookie with a plan to an error-prone, clumsy little girl. She knocks over the easel! She can’t send email right! She whines and carries on about how Will has always been a great guy and he’s not an “ass” — he’s just simply wonderful. She effuses this to everyone she can be in a room with and, finally, when the cat’s out of the bag about their history, all she can do is make herself tiny, both in body and voice. She tries to redeem herself in the end by standing up to him and demanding he contribute to their cause rather than play the journalistic integrity and ratings cards at the same time. But it rings hollow compared to an entire hour’s worth of backsliding into adolescence.

To make matters worse, Jim and Will have to “save” Maggie and Mac respectively, the former by taking the fall for her dumb Bozo mistake, and the latter by vamping and carrying guests during the abysmal broadcast. Men! Always around to save you.

So am I in? I can’t know that for sure. I want to give this series four episodes so I hope and pray that this is the end of the stupidity. I’ve read tweets, however, that tell me episode 4 is the worst one yet. Like “break stuff in my house” bad. Well, at least there’s Munn-face to look at, right? (grumble)

More stuff:

• Nope. They didn’t shorten the credit sequence from the pilot. It’s still the most self-important opening on television. I’m surprised Sorkin didn’t want to take it down so he could fit one more breathless, whiny, reasonless, unaccountable monologue from one of the female characters.
• 2.0? Hey, 2008 called and they want their phrasing back.
• MAC: “Anybody know what that meant?” There wasn’t even any technical jargon in there. Autocomplete is pretty self-explanatory, even in 2010. I think the big problem with this show is that we’re not recognizing they’re space aliens.
• Sorkin thought he could pull off character exposition by putting in the mouth of Will under the premise that he’s learning everyone’s name. Do you remember when Jeremy did something similar on Sports Night with the letter to his sister? It’s just as clunky here.
• Interesting that Olivia Munn found a role that matches her IRL reputation: a woman who is pretty good at her job hosting a show with ambitions that supersede her talent and can be an awful human being off-camera. I don’t know that that’s really how she is but it’s interesting all the same.
• The “okay”/”you’ll let me do it”/”no, I just think it’s okay you want to” joke is tired by the time Maggie and Jim start their first painfully-long conversation. Ring ring.
• Again, for me, the actual show production makes up for the awful everything else. You can tell it’s the part of the process Sorkin really admires.
• MAC: “Be the moral center of this show.” Oh, gawd.
• Has Alison Pill ever been drunk? I guess it doesn’t help when you have to execute Sorkin dialogue which demands strong elocution.
• “High and Dry” — The nose. It’s on it.