<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" When I saw The Social Network, in which practically everybody was an amoral, cynical, cutthroat dweeb \u2014 seriously, it was like watching Wall Street if it had been put together by the folks at Nova \u2014 I thought that this collection of money-grubbing dorks might just be the saving of Aaron Sorkin. Nobody was noble. Nobody thought they were saving anything worth saving. Nobody, god help us, sang any Gilbert and Sullivan. (There are two ways to know that a Sorkin vehicle is about to go off the rails: one, Joshua Malina shows up, and, two, somebody breaks into a chorus from Penzance.) Sorkin&amp;#039;s Zuckerberg and friends were so utterly arrogant and, at the same time, so totally grasping, that I thought they just might shove his writing in the general direction of the far outskirts of the fringes of the suburbs of Mametland, which I thought would be all to the good. Now, though, we have The Newsroom. And while it has some undeniable virtues, which we&amp;#039;ll get to in a moment, and which will keep me coming back, it generally sinks once again up to its wheel wells into the kind of morass that has plagued Sorkin ever since people started talking about The West Wing as though he had reinvented television drama. (That would be David Simon, by the way.) Sorkin is television&amp;#039;s last great nostalgic, forever pining through his characters for a Golden Age that never was. Occasionally, this leads him straight into a moral quagmire; in A Few Good Men, people were so busy memorizing Jack Nicholson&amp;#039;s big speech from the dock that hardly anyone noticed Sorkin had nuanced himself right past what can be gracefully called The William Calley Question, which had been raised only briefly, and just as briefly dismissed, in a hallway argument between Tom Cruise and Kevin Pollak. In The West Wing, there was so much of the Good People Trying To Do Good Things going on that Sorkin&amp;#039;s Washington became the only place in the world where you could find actual moderate Republicans with the power to get anything done. (A moderate Republican saves Leo McGarry from being embarrassed before a congressional committee. And a moderate Republican saves \u2014 ! \u2014 the estate tax from being repealed. This latter was not nostalgia. It was science fiction.) And, in The Newsroom, Sorkin softens the edges of everything he got from Paddy Chayefsky&amp;#039;s groundbreaking Network with an unwieldy hankering for the days when giants walked the networks. &amp;quot;Murrow had an opinion, and that was the end of McCarthy,&amp;quot; says the grizzled old veteran Charlie Skinner, played by Sam Waterston, to Will McAvoy, the troubled anchor portrayed by Jeff Daniels. &amp;quot;Cronkite had an opinion, and that was the end of Vietnam.&amp;quot; And, up in Rhode Island, when I was a kid, ol&amp;#039; Salty Brine had an opinion \u2014 &amp;quot;Brush Your Teeth And Say Your Prayers&amp;quot; \u2014 and that was the end of tooth decay in New England. Cronkite did his famous &amp;quot;We are mired in a stalemate&amp;quot; in 1968, which was about six years at least after said stalemate was obvious to people like Neil Sheehan. A year after Cronkite&amp;#039;s broadcast, a solid plurality of Americans polled were still in favor of &amp;quot;total military victory,&amp;quot; whatever the hell that meant, and the war groaned on for four more years, more than 20,000 more dead Americans, and god alone knows how many more dead Asian peasants. Murrow certainly contributed to Joseph McCarthy&amp;#039;s downfall, but not as much as Joseph Welch did, and Murrow did it while still hosting a show where he had to ask Liberace when he was planning to get married. Sorkin is so attached to his own personal Great Man theory that he applies it retroactively to events most of his audience is old enough to have lived through, and, at those moments, he seems to be relying on the general American historical amnesia so many of his characters spend so much time decrying. Things fade in on a panel at Northwestern University, although it&amp;#039;s hard at first to determine whether or not it&amp;#039;s an episode of Real Time. A liberal and a conservative are yapping at each other like angry Muppets and McAvoy is sitting between them, obviously uncomfortable. He is, it appears, famous for not making waves. People call him &amp;quot;Leno.&amp;quot; Anyway, in an answer to a student&amp;#039;s question about why America is the greatest country in the world, he goes off on a rant about how it&amp;#039;s not, really. Daniels gets to do some discreet scenery-chewing here, and he clearly enjoys it. He gets to wax lyrical about how the country &amp;quot;once went to war for moral reasons, and once struck down laws for moral reasons,&amp;quot; thereby confusing the hell out of everyone who ever took an American history class in college. It&amp;#039;s what Howard Beale would have said, had he been a professor of American studies, and not a network anchor. Daniels is mad as hell and he&amp;#039;s going to throw his BlackBerry across the room. Soon, he realizes that his speech not only both cost him almost his entire staff, but also has energized his former lover, MacKenzie McHale, perhaps the most clumsily named character on television since Captain Wilton Parmenter. She&amp;#039;s returned from war-zone duty in west Asia and wants to reinvent television news \u2014 specifically, cable television news, so, yeah, good luck with that \u2014 into what Sorkin imagines it once was. Emily Mortimer is one of those things I mentioned earlier that will keep me coming back to this show; she&amp;#039;s smart and funny and it&amp;#039;s not her fault that, at least once an episode, she has to push one of those Sorkinized sermons up a dirt road. If Gilbert and Sullivan rear their ugly heads before this is done, I fear it&amp;#039;s Mortimer who&amp;#039;s going to be the sad victim of it. She puts together a staff, and they&amp;#039;re a mixed bag. Dev Patel plays a cyber-cowboy who&amp;#039;s treated as only marginally less of a stereotype than Apu from The Simpsons. (Will calls him &amp;quot;Punjab&amp;quot; at one point, and Patel refrains from throwing a stapler at his head.) There are dueling young tyros who are trying to pull Will in different directions, and also trying to score with Alison Pill&amp;#039;s Margaret Jordan, one of those earnest young things that are forever inexplicably the romantic centers of a Sorkin universe. (Sabrina Lloyd in SportsNight and Janel Maloney in The West Wing are your archetypes.) Pill teeters dangerously close to being the female Joshua Malina here, and really ought to be rescued from that grisly fate. Once the crew gets together, they&amp;#039;re forced to respond quickly to the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf. (Sorkin has decided to marry his newsroom to actual events, beginning in 2010. This may be the riskiest thing about the project.) Here, Sorkin&amp;#039;s speechifying blessedly gives way to his real gift for kinetic action through dialogue. There&amp;#039;s a lot going on in the background of every scene, the way there should be, and the characters speak to each other with some real snap. The show, which immediately prior to this had lumbered through a lengthy expository passage in which MacKenzie and Will renew their relationship in a fashion that is going to make absolutely nobody forget Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, goes from indolence to remarkably vivid life when responding to actual breaking news, which makes it very much like every actual newsroom I&amp;#039;ve ever been in. Waterston comes in for some grizzled celebration at the end. Quite simply, Sam Waterston saves the entire thing. His Charlie Skinner was clearly designed to be the cardboard old-school conscience of the project, but Waterston invests him with so much twinkling charm that it&amp;#039;s as if he&amp;#039;s finally able to unleash all the humanity he largely had to curb for nearly 20 years as Jack McCoy on Law and Order. Charlie wears a bowtie, plays video poker against teenagers in Iowa, and drinks more during the day in the office than any news executive on TV since Lou Grant hung &amp;#039;em up. At first, it seems that Waterston&amp;#039;s going to be left gasping by all the walking-and-talking; Sorkin&amp;#039;s scripts can be fearsomely aerobic. But there&amp;#039;s a moment in the first episode when Skinner goes off on one of the young tyros \u2014 &amp;quot;I am a Marine and I will beat the shit out of you no matter how many protein bars you eat!&amp;quot; \u2014 when you can see Waterston find his character in one of those snappers that redeem Sorkin&amp;#039;s writing from all the preachy oatmeal that fills up the rest of the script. It is said that, in The West Wing, President Jed originally was supposed to be an off-stage character, but that the sheer gravity inherent in even a fictional president pulled the show to him. If Sorkin&amp;#039;s not careful, Waterston&amp;#039;s going to make off with the whole enterprise here. And that might be all to the good, because Charlie Skinner seems to be the only one here who knows that what he told Will early in the show is at least 50 percent bullshit mythology. He&amp;#039;s an idealist, not a nostalgic. He probably saw Murrow take down McCarthy, but he also saw him interview Liberace and get shoved out the door at CBS because of the same forces that The Newsroom has set itself against almost 70 years later. Charlie Skinner is an institutional memory, and they are cold, realistic things, which is why they make us uncomfortable, and which is why we abandon them in favor of what never was. AND COMING SUNDAY TO THE ESQUIRE.COM: The The Newsroom Recap, with Jeff Bercovici "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a14564/the-newsroom-hbo-review-9919051/?hootPostID=388a0bc2a6f51db7b4d62cb8c17224c4>