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And those aren’t the clubs that I think may well put THE NEWSROOM to death. A death I take no pleasure in, because I loved THE WEST WING and I like living in a world where Aaron Sorkin is writing for television. I think it would be really nice if, over the course of the run, Aaron Sorkin learned some things about how journalism happens and put them into the show. I take no issue with the pilot episode’s lack of nuance, or the fact that it’s a polemic.
But, as a middle-aged white man, I take issue with the notion that it takes a Great White Man to fix the culture, and that shitting on every woman in the room to do it is just quirky, grumpy collateral damage. I’m pretty sure that’s been tried, over here in the real world. And here we are.
Warren Ellis » Some Notes On THE NEWSROOM
Warren Ellis’s take on the new Aaron Sorkin show.
Ellis mentions this piece in the Globe & Mail, where Sorkin’s behavior is amazingly disturbing. Such choice bits as:
“Listen here, Internet girl,” he says, getting up. “It wouldn’t kill you to watch a film or pick up a newspaper once in a while.”
OR
“I’m sick of girls who don’t know how to high-five,” he says. He makes me try to do it “properly,” six times.
OR
“I think I would have done very well, as a writer, in the forties,” he says. “I think the last time America was a great country was then, or not long after. It was before Vietnam, before Watergate.”
Sigh
You know what I just fucking love? I love hearing that the best there was, the best there ever will be, happened before I was born. That my generation just doesn’t fucking get it. That we’re hopeless. That we’re doomed. That we don’t know how to be great.
Sorkin’s the tail end of the baby boom, and I can see how he might idolize that America to an extent, but any such lamentation makes me pissed.
It’s not that we need to have some ever progressive march toward the future and an ever changing society, but lamentation for a past greatness that may or may not exist, that was experienced only so briefly by the nostalgia ridden lamenter is the exact basis for the modern conservatism of the boomers in America. That they are trying to return to the great America of their youth.
I now expect Sorkin to start telling me there are communists in Hollywood. He might take offense to that, but well, I guess I’ve already taken offense to everything that THE NEWSROOM is supposed to mean.
So, when did the fiery liberal TV writer turn into a sexist conservative boomer?
Sort of glad I never invested time in WEST WING, now. Still love SPORTSNIGHT though.