The Newsroom

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mfunk9786
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Re: The Newsroom

#51 Post by mfunk9786 » Sun Jul 01, 2012 10:07 pm

Michael Ian Black has been tweeting "#possiblenewsroomdialogue" and I recommend going through it, because it's hilarious.

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Matt
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Re: The Newsroom

#52 Post by Matt » Sun Jul 01, 2012 11:10 pm

She couldn't just have accidentally hit "reply all" to an all-staff email instead of accidentally typing an asterisk? You know how hard it is to accidentally type an asterisk? Twice?

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mfunk9786
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Re: The Newsroom

#53 Post by mfunk9786 » Sun Jul 01, 2012 11:15 pm

You know what, Matt? Democracy is hard.

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Polybius
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Re: The Newsroom

#54 Post by Polybius » Mon Jul 02, 2012 4:39 am

Mr Sausage wrote: Can we call misusing big words in a printed column an Armondism?
If that doesn't pass muster, I suggest "S.E. Cuppism"

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: The Newsroom

#55 Post by matrixschmatrix » Mon Jul 02, 2012 2:02 pm

wattsup32 wrote:I finally got the time to watch the pilot. I'm on the fence, but I'll stick with it for a season at least (very easy to do on HBO). It has all the hallmarks of what I like about Sorkin: directness excused only by the quickness of the situation, intelligence bolstered by arrogance trumped by intelligence grounded in humility, and the a conviction that if you present yourself to the public as though you have faith in their intelligence they will come.

At the same time, it felt mostly flat for most of the time. LIkely due to how unlikable almost every character was. In Sorkin's past efforts even the detestable characters had their charms for the most part. That didn't happen here. And, the underdog characters I normally root for simply because of their station (the assistant) grated in ways that made it tough to get through.

But, in the end, I'm pretty much a sucker for Sorkin. So, I'll keep at it.

Did anyone who read the interview with "Internet Girl" think she was taking a shot at another HBO show with this paragraph:

"Sorkin doesn't see this. He denies being either an ideologue or a modernist, agreeing only that the show is written in his voice, and that said voice is “authorial” (both my word and his). I’d posit that creating an authorial drama in a time of mumbling, precarious, voice-of-a-generation comedy almost absolutely constitutes an ideology, one both modernist and masculinist."?
Having actually read that interview now- it seems as though she is using 'modernist' in the sense of believe that there is exactly one, findable truth, as opposed to the postmodern belief that truths are myriad and opposed to one another, and as far as that dichotomy goes I think she is correct. Also, Sorkin comes off as a tremendous jackass.

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domino harvey
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Re: The Newsroom

#56 Post by domino harvey » Mon Jul 02, 2012 2:36 pm

Decent second episode. The Will/Mackenzie stuff didn't do anything for me (but I didn't h8 it), but I liked the whole thing with Maggie blowing the pre-interview. I also though it was wise to show how the fly by the seat of your pants approach to putting on a news show can just as easily result in terrible messes like that night's broadcast. A lot of reviews were rolling their eyes over the Maggie love triangle last week but it's still the only really compelling human interest aspect thus far. Plus I liked her weird dorm room story.

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domino harvey
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Re: The Newsroom

#57 Post by domino harvey » Mon Jul 02, 2012 4:15 pm

Look forward to another year of internet arguments: The show's already been renewed for a second season

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Mr Sausage
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Re: The Newsroom

#58 Post by Mr Sausage » Mon Jul 02, 2012 4:33 pm

matrixschmatrix wrote:Having actually read that interview now- it seems as though she is using 'modernist' in the sense of believe that there is exactly one, findable truth, as opposed to the postmodern belief that truths are myriad and opposed to one another, and as far as that dichotomy goes I think she is correct. Also, Sorkin comes off as a tremendous jackass.
Except the belief in stable, universal truths isn't modernist, either. That's nineteenth century and earlier. Modernism is chiefly famous for giving precedence to subjective experience and mutable phenomena. This was the era in which Virginia Woolf was writing novels in which three different people could look at a banner dragged behind an airplane in the sky and each think it says something different; where T.S. Eliot was composing poems out of fragments of different voices and the detritus of culture; where James Joyce was having the language of his novel playfully alter the novel's reality wherever he saw fit, so that now a character is a random Dubliner, now the Irish hero Cuchulain, now some parody of the two, all at the whims of his language and all equally true.

Post-modernism is generally the idea that nothing can ever be new again (counter that with Pound's famous dictum, "make it new").

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Matt
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Re: The Newsroom

#59 Post by Matt » Mon Jul 02, 2012 4:34 pm

domino harvey wrote:Look forward to another year of internet arguments: The show's already been renewed for a second season
I'm sure most of the chatter is due to its novelty and its being the only thing on right now.

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mfunk9786
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Re: The Newsroom

#60 Post by mfunk9786 » Mon Jul 02, 2012 6:45 pm

Novelty is a kind way of putting it.

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Re: The Newsroom

#61 Post by wattsup32 » Mon Jul 02, 2012 9:13 pm

I fundamentally reject the notion that Olivia Munn has the chops to get a Ph.D. in economics and be an adjunct professor at Columbia.

I agree with Dom about Maggie's love triangle being the only compelling part of the show so far. It's just not a great (or even good) show so far. But, it's Sorkiny in all the right ways. I'm digging it.

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Andre Jurieu
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Re: The Newsroom

#62 Post by Andre Jurieu » Tue Jul 03, 2012 1:31 pm

Matt wrote:She couldn't just have accidentally hit "reply all" to an all-staff email instead of accidentally typing an asterisk? You know how hard it is to accidentally type an asterisk? Twice?
As soon as they introduced that whole asterisk-email thing (which, I agree with Matt, is kind of unnecessarily complicated when almost everyone has experienced the "Reply All" mistake), I immediately groaned at how obviously it was going to be used, but I guess it was basically like placing/mentioning a gun in act 1.

While I enjoy that Sorkin decided to show his characters are fully capable of screwing up, I was frustrated that Maggie somehow knew the guy conducting the pre-interview. Sorry, but is the entire industry and all associated high-powered industries staffed by a pool of 50 candidates from the exact same graduating class? Maybe this is because they only have a handful of episodes, so Sorkin is trying to jam everything he can into each episode, but this re-occurring plot device is starting to become irritating.
wattsup32 wrote:I fundamentally reject the notion that Olivia Munn has the chops to get a Ph.D. in economics and be an adjunct professor at Columbia.
Perhaps it's because she's possible one of the worst offenders when it comes to humblebrag on twitter, but I'm just exhausted by how often Munn's contribution to various creative projects boils down to the idea that she's attractive, but still very capable. Just once, I'd like her to accept a role where she just shows off that she's capable, instead of taking some time to mention how hot she is.

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Matt
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Re: The Newsroom

#63 Post by Matt » Tue Jul 03, 2012 4:22 pm

I think the Olivia Munn character is another symptom of the show's overreaching. It would not be enough to have a character based on Maria Bartiromo, an extremely capable and extremely attractive financial reporter who has a double-major BA from NYU. No, this character has to have a PhD and is an adjunct at Columbia when she's not delivering the financial report. And she looks like Olivia Munn. In a couple of episodes we will surely find out that she's also a medical doctor and has adopted seven kids, each from a different continent.

Just like it's not enough that Maggie used to date the guy who works for Jan Brewer. No, she had to have an extremely humiliating experience with him that somehow became her fault for lacking courage. And then her character becomes all about THAT VERY TELLING DETAIL, not just that she was too green to stay professional on a phone call. And her snappy insult to the ex was dependent on him flubbing the name of the Race to the Top program? [-(

At this point I'm just watching the show to marvel in the extreme lengths Sorkin will go to to move the plot along or populate his newsroom with romance novel characters.

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Andre Jurieu
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Re: The Newsroom

#64 Post by Andre Jurieu » Tue Jul 03, 2012 5:49 pm

Matt wrote:Just like it's not enough that Maggie used to date the guy who works for Jan Brewer. No, she had to have an extremely humiliating experience with him that somehow became her fault for lacking courage.
A part of me was kind of disappointed and astounded that Sorkin grabbed a plot-point that could easily have been dropped into some typical sitcom or was pulled directly from He's Just Not That Into You. Unless of course this type of thing is now commonplace in society and I'm just missing out on experiencing/inflicting this type of trauma on people.

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Re: The Newsroom

#65 Post by wattsup32 » Tue Jul 03, 2012 6:41 pm

Matt wrote:And her snappy insult to the ex was dependent on him flubbing the name of the Race to the Top program?
This is a Sorkin pet peeve of mine. He demeans the opponents of his lead characters by ascribing stupid mistakes to them that make them look like buffoons. I remember an episode of West Wing where NEA opponents were made the fool by Toby because they thought Oklahoma was written by Rogers and Hart AND that Death of a Salesman was written by Arthur Murray. Really? Both of those mistakes in same sentence? That's just one example. It happens constantly.

The worst, however, are the times that he wants the leads to experience some humility he does the same thing to them. I
remember a West Wing episode where Sam puts the town Kirkwood in Oregon when it is really in California just for the purposes of Emily Proctor's character showing him up. This just a few episodes after Sam gets made fun of because of his freakish knowledge of geography.

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Andre Jurieu
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Re: The Newsroom

#66 Post by Andre Jurieu » Wed Jul 04, 2012 5:38 pm

wattsup32 wrote:I remember a West Wing episode where Sam puts the town Kirkwood in Oregon when it is really in California just for the purposes of Emily Proctor's character showing him up. This just a few episodes after Sam gets made fun of because of his freakish knowledge of geography.
I actually remember being annoyed by that exact same opening scene. I recall thinking "does that mistake really nullify his entire argument?" In retrospect, I'm a bit irked that they devoted the majority of Procter's introduction onto the show to displaying just how awestruck/out-of-her-depth Ainsley (Procter) was by her surroundings when asked to serve as White House Counsel. Of course, now it seems like another re-occurring characteristic for all of Sorkin's young female characters.

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Re: The Newsroom

#67 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Mon Jul 09, 2012 10:38 am


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knives
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Re: The Newsroom

#68 Post by knives » Mon Jul 09, 2012 1:30 pm

Well you'll die of alcohol poisoning before your second episode starts.

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domino harvey
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Re: The Newsroom

#69 Post by domino harvey » Mon Jul 09, 2012 1:51 pm

So, after a cringe-inducing opening that comes close to the cluelessness of the ending of the second episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (where they actually showed the whole Gilbert + Sullivan song parody, nulling any claims on the show getting comedy sketches), this episode eventually approached some actual dramatic conflict with the threat of Will's firing (shades of Conan O'Brien with the non-compete clause thrown in) and as always Maggie and Jim seem to be the only human beings on the show. With the show rapidly moving through recent history now, I suspect the "News As It Should've Been Reported" anchor will be lifted for more human interest character things as the series nears the bend-- famous last words or prescient prediction? Only time will tell...

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mfunk9786
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Re: The Newsroom

#70 Post by mfunk9786 » Mon Jul 16, 2012 7:55 am


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Matt
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Re: The Newsroom

#71 Post by Matt » Mon Jul 16, 2012 10:22 am

I quit watching about 15 minutes in. I watched an episode of Thriller written by Robert Bloch on MeTV instead and it was soooo much better.

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mfunk9786
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Re: The Newsroom

#72 Post by mfunk9786 » Mon Jul 16, 2012 3:59 pm

HBO picked up another season of this already! I bet they're praying that some horses die on set

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Re: The Newsroom

#73 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Mon Jul 16, 2012 4:12 pm

Amazingly that news is a few weeks old.

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mfunk9786
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Re: The Newsroom

#74 Post by mfunk9786 » Mon Jul 16, 2012 4:19 pm

Yeah but now I get to consume/analyze it with plenty of hindsight and pedantry, just like my heroes from The Newsroom

wattsup32
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Re: The Newsroom

#75 Post by wattsup32 » Tue Jul 17, 2012 8:46 am

Matt wrote:Olivia Munn. In a couple of episodes we will surely find out that she's also a medical doctor and has adopted seven kids, each from a different continent.
Holy crap, Matt! You were sooooo close! Olivia Munn picked up a second Ph.D. this episode. A second Ph.D.! Oh, and this one was in Economics, too. Why would someone get a Ph.D. in the same field of study?

They seem to have decided to turn Will's show into an unfunny version of The Daily Show.

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