The Newsroom

Haven't started watching Newsroom yet, but John Marbury is one of my favorite ancillary characters on West Wing.

Riff for a Sunday morning, following the ep “News Night with Will McEvoy”:

One near-ubiquitous cliché in television that I really, really hate, and that even TWW falls prey to (though only once, IIRC), is the Whiny Spouse. It’s almost always the wife, and the dialogue starts with something like “ You’re never home anymore!”

Well, gee, honey. You knew when you married him that he was a doctor/LEO/first responder of some kind and not a 9-to-5er and once in a while you were going to have to eat dinner alone or adjust to his coming home bone-tired after a double shift, so quit your fucking whining because you’re making the rest of us look bad.

Q.v. Jenny McGarry RE: Leo’s being late for their anniversary dinner because, yanno, he’s only the White House Chief of Staff and he was dealing with a crisis that affected lots of people.

Okay, had to get that one out of the way, because it’s a cringe-worthy moment that sets up a cascade of plot points and it could have been done differently. Don’t see that it's likely to happen in The Newsroom, but ya never know.

So, back to The Newsroom and, Mac: No, just no. Anyone who’s ever lived with a vicious drunk can tell you there is no Happily Ever After, and you don’t forgive someone who’s never asked for your forgiveness. Your advice was misplaced, and while you’re usually the bitch-slap Will needs to get him to pay attention (Yes, shootER, you’re right – she is Abbey Bartlet), you were dead wrong this time and you really need to STFU on the topic.

Just my two cents.

While I agree, if they do decide to go that route (cliche'd as it is) it would actually be realistic. The divorce rate in the industry is high, especially if one spouse doesn't work in the business. I work with a number of people who are divorced and, recently, another coworker was dumped by his girlfriend because she felt he valued his career more than her.

The ongoing Dana/Gordon storyline on SportsNight was pretty accurate.

Never saw SportsNight. Will have to give it a look someday. I gave Studio 60... one episode and ran away screaming.

Be advised that SportsNight was written as more of a straight-up, half hour comedy. The early episodes even include a laugh track which, thankfully, they dropped at some point during the first season. For me, it got very good, though, and if nothing else is a good primer for newbies to the Sorkin style of storytelling.

I watched all of Studio 60 and it was a huge disappointment. The reason it flopped, IMHO, was because each episode episode was so tied to the one that preceded it that a new viewer tuning in to the middle of the season couldn't really understand what was going on with the story arc. Lots of shows have ongoing storylines, but Studio 60 went overboard with it, IMHO.

SportsNight ran two seasons, from 1998-2000.

The first season of The West Wing was 1999/2000.

Sorkin had two shows on simultaneously for one season on two different networks (ABC and NBC).

I'm almost through S2, and I can safely say if you're a West Wing fan, you'll enjoy The Newsroom.

I'll be curious to see if Sorkin borrows any more from his own past scripts with any plots or subplots in The Newsroom. He's already kinda done it once with the therapist/abusive father bit with McAvoy/Bartlett. He also borrowed heavily from Sports Night with The West Wing. Sam Seaborn's cheating father storyline in "Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail" was lifted directly from a SportsNight episode called "The Sword of Orion".

It's not a Sorkin invention, but the staff poker game was featured in a few episodes of SN as well.


Sorkin did surprise me when he didn't "borrow" from himself with the episode title for the S1 finale. The last episodes of the first season in his three other series all had the same title, "What Kind of Day Has It Been". I was disappointed he didn't use it again.

Oboy, I've got a whole list of "borrowings" to address, as soon as I've seen "Election Night I and II."

I have never seen a writer in any medium so blatantly borrow from himself and get away with it. I should be roasting Sorkin, but I can't stop chuckling.

Just some character comparisons for now:

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!
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Will = Jed Bartlet (the fair-haired Leader, the parallel so-your-father-used-to-beat-you shrink sessions)

Mackenzie = Abbey Bartlet (splash of cold water whenever Will starts dithering)

Charlie = Leo McGarry (right down to the model ship on the credenza behind him)

Sloan = Sam Seaborn (brilliant, exceptionally attractive, but oddly insecure and socially inept)

Maggie = Donna Moss on Xanax (oblivious to her own abilities, a complete mess vis-à-vis relationships, the Africa experience parallels Donna’s trip to the ME)

Don = Josh Lyman (this one took me a while)

Rebecca = Oliver Babish (slick, overconfident, overpriced, likeable in spite of all that)

Characters not yet comparable to West Wing characters (so far, as far as I can tell) but who may be comparable to characters in the Sorkin shows I haven’t seen, or who may develop similarities in subsequent seasons:

Leona, Reese, Neal and, most importantly, Jim, though Neal may turn out to be a little bit Will Bailey.

Absent from comparison, my two favorites, C.J. Cregg and Toby Ziegler. Also missing: a sassy secretary a la Mrs. Landingham or Debbie Fiderer.

Lots more to say, including mega-spoilers, in other installments…

Until you brought it up, I hadn't bothered to make any WW/NR character comparisons other than Will being Jed Bartlett. After I thought about it, though, I immediately thought of Don as Josh Lyman.

I'll be curious to see how they continue to write him because, like Josh in the beginning of WW, Don is my least favorite character (closely followed by Maggie).

He deserves a punch in the mouth.

That was my initial reaction (then again, the first time we see/hear Josh he’s beating his chest and doing his “Victory is mine!” speech ), but once Don got shed of Maggie he seems to have mellowed – the way he bolsters Sloan’s fragile ego after the revenge porn incident, the way he responds to “He doctored the fucking tape!”

I started out not liking Don, but garamet is right...once he shed the baggage that is Maggie, he's become a downright likable character, and one of my favorites.

And while I can see the Maggie/Donna Moss parallels, there's at least one MAJOR difference between the charcters...Donna was VERY likable. I don't really know anyone who likes Maggie that much.

double

While the character has gotten a bit more likeable, I look at Don as if I worked with him.

We wouldn't get along.

You can be a know-it-all, or you can be a house cat. If you try to be both, we're going to have...words.

Speaking of Sorkin borrowing from himself (contains some mild spoilers):

OMG! Gawd, I think I pulled a muscle!

Little West Wing/Newsroom mashup:



What's funny is that John Gallagher is in both scenes.

Watched "The Stackhouse Filibuster" last night. Sorkin really ripped himself off with that one. The "letter to a relative" storytelling device goes back decades (how many times did we see it in M*A*S*H?) but he lifted a lot of the actual language from a Sports Night's "How Are Things in Glocca Morra?" an episode about a tennis match that goes on much longer than anyone anticipated.

Another observation: I can't believe The West Wing was never even nominated for lighting design. It's just beautiful.

Yes, and it seems to completely collapse somewhere around season 4 or 5. What is that?

I don't know. That's around the time that Sorkin left the show, so maybe that had something to do with it.

There were also a handful of ill-advised "shakycam" episodes after he left, too. Very out of the "visual character" that the show had established

Another nitpick: Mac uses the term "vamp" when she needs Will to ad lib or otherwise fill time.

I know what the word means, but I've never heard it used (or heard of it being used) in a news setting here. The US term for that is "stretch" (the hand signal the studio crew gives the on-air talent is to mime like you're pulling taffy).

Must be a Brit thing.

@garamet , what was your take after seeing the last two episodes?

Yeah, I've been neglecting this thread. FWIW, I'm still hooked. Thoughts later...

Soooo...I need to go back and watch all of these again, but as I say, I'm still hooked and eager to see if S3 can hold up.

(Just one of what are probably lots of Easter eggs: When Sloan has her meltdown over the cyber-porn incident, you can see the bright-yellow cover of Roone Arledge's bio in the bookshelf behind her right shoulder.)

Lots of spoilers ahead, so be warned...















Not sure how I feel about Mac and Mc's engagement (at least they won't have to change the monogrammed towels), but I'm assuming it'll just ratchet up the tension in some areas ("You're just saying/doing that because you're engaged to him/her!") while at least releasing the sexual tension...or not. TBD.

And Leona as an ally all of a sudden instead of the Borg Queen? Interesting possibilities there.

Marcia Gay Harden - - fan-fucking-tastic! Woman never gives a bad performance, and she plays the stone-cold bitch better than most. Handles the Sorkin dialogue as well as Allison Janney, and that's not an accolade I give out lightly. "Becca" and "Lee" stoned and gossiping like schoolgirls at the Big Bash? Priceless!

Nitpick: Lisa just happens to be a server at the Big Bash, she just happens to show up on the illicit cameraphone feed, and Jim just happens to notice her so he can rush upstairs and try to 'splain about him and Maggie?

But let me concentrate on the Willie Pete arc for now. Yeah, I have to say something about it smelled fishy from the outset. It was too big a story, and too easily handed to them, not to have been leaked somewhere else. The thing that impressed me was how it was revealed to be a fake. Never, ever saw that coming. And, yeah, you can argue that "revenge for my son's death" was a little too deus ex machina, but damn. Did not see that coming. And what's most valuable about the arc is that it shows you what kind of stuff these people are made of. The Newsroom meets the Kobayashi Maru scenario, for want of a better metaphor.

So, yeah, bring on S3!

As for "vamping," I've heard theater people use it (stolen from musicians, obviously):

"Where the fuck is Charlie? That's his cue!"
"He's in the head. Bad oysters. Get out there and vamp while I send the prop girl to get him."
"Vamp? How the hell am I supposed to vamp in Richard II?"
[A.D. shoves actor onstage and flags down the prop girl]

Maybe Mac heard it there?

^^ I want to know what happens next on that stage. More than what happens in NR S3.

As for the dead son deus ex machina, it's one of the few plot points I really appreciated. (I coast along quite well on most of the momentum of the scenes and the dialogue, enjoying those parts, but the plot specifically grates too often.) That seemed very real to me -- it comes completely out of the blue for our hero, and yet it is something that completely defines our antagonist's life. This is how you'll get an enemy in real life, rather than by blowing up their home planet while cackling evilly.

But now that you've seen the whole season -- didn't the suddenly lost recording from season one, followed by the complete personality transplant on son and mom, throw you right out of any suspension of disbelief you had left? I couldn't believe Sorkin would be so lazy, both times.

^
I was a little disappointed by that as well. It seemed a bit too convenient. I'm still rewatching TWW (about halfway through Season 3 right now) but I don't recall Sorkin resorting to that kind of plot contrivance.

Oh, I know it has roots in theater. I've just never heard it used in teevee news.

Like I said, maybe it's a British thing.