Is it wrong to want fanfic of her and Charlie in the Vietnam years? Because you know that happened.
Spoilers within.
Quick takes: You know, it’s too bad Sorkin hates the Internet so much since mostly what he’s writing about here iswhat the Internet has been saying for years. It’s also kind of telling that, when there’s finally a mainstream show that espouses nearly all the points the lefty political Internet has been making for years, the Internet responds with scorn and mockery.
I was talking to Doc about this last week, about why I seem to be taking this show so fucking personally, and he thinks it’s that every time I watch it I see election night in my old newsroom, with somebody running through with pizza and everybody yelling numbers at each other. And I feel like these people, crazy as they are, are my friends who I love … I mean, I could tell you stories. I’d get sued, but probably only if I used names.
Seriously, Jim. Could he be more adorable? I mean I just want to brush him and put him in a hamster cage. I have this sudden hunger for a Jim flashback ep where we see him riding around in a Humvee with the guys he was embedded with, all Generation Kill-style.
I like Elliott pointing out that the Maggie/Don thing is just as dysfunctional from Don’s point of view as it is from Maggie’s. Maggie gets a lot of crap for making shitty relationship decisions, but Don doesn’t exactly look like a genius here either, like a girl tells you to get gone, you get, fucko.
I continue to want to do FILTHY things to Mackenzie when she’s doing stuff like running around yelling for various graphics and swigging water and not paying attention to where her boyfriend is. Though I feel like they could be dressing her less from Talbot’s and more from somewhere either full-on ’50s aesthetic or all lean and sunburnt like she has just come from the desert.
The weekly Will: Including Russert in a list that includes Murrow and Cronkite should be a firing offense. As in firing SQUAD. And I refuse to believe that the Tea Party began as some noble enterprise that was then co-opted by the evil Kochs. Let’s talk about this for a sec. Are people being taken advantage of, people who aren’t smart enough to know better and people who just got caught up in something? Yes. Yes, absolutely. But the vast majority of people who became Tea Party fuckwads were already Republican fuckwads and I so resent this storyline that the gay-hating and the racism and the god-bothering that formed the foundation of the Republican Party for decades was all just fine until they started doing it in less than perfectly polished prose.
Is the present Congress exceptionally filled with morons? Sure, maybe. But what they’re espousing isn’t in any way different than what Republicans have espoused for years. Three eps in, there is nearly always a moment in which I’d like to kick Will in the face and that was one of them, this idea that it was okay to hate gay people as long as you didn’t use the word hate. Or the word gay. You could hate government but just keep it on the down low. This idea that as long as you used economics to destroy poor communities, it was perfectly fine, but you couldn’t talk about it in impassioned terms while wearing a tri-corner.
There is no Tea Party. It’s just Republicans, being ruder about stuff than usual. They were shocked by it but shouldn’t have been, and it might have been nice had someone asked what, precisely, separates decent Republicans who vote against equal rights and against raising the minimum wage and against anything that might in some way benefit an imaginary poor black person from Tea Party people who do the same things?
By the by, levitating the Pentagon has killed exactly nobody, unlike all the wars we’re fighting to levitate our national penis. SDS and everybody else Will is equating with the Tea Party happened to be fucking right about most things, and good CHRIST am I sick of re-fighting the Vietnam War. Maybe when we’re done re-fighting the Civil War we can stop this other shit, too. But the market for hippie-bashing is always a good one, and Will is a bag of penises, and Jim and Neal and Maggie are awesome.
Don’s awesome too, in that he’s a constant cautionary tale. He sidles up to Jim, jealous that Jim’s on fire, lit up from within with the rightness of what he’s doing. And Don says, you know, I could have done this, too, but I was too cool to want to. Which is another thing that happens in the world all the time, despite everybody’s carping about how unrealistic this show is. I could have not sucked. I could have been you, any old time I wanted.
And Jim looks at him and says, so start right now. And Don slinks away, full of excuses. Forget everything Will and Charlie and Leona (holy shit, do I love Leona and can we please have a show about Charlie and Leona back in the day?) and Mackenzie were on about. That was the show to me, that moment between Jim and Don. That was the story we were being told.
A.
After such a short time with the series being aired I think it’s fantastic that they’ve renewedThe Newsroom for a 2nd season, means it’s probably gonna be lots of drama and good stories.
Last week there was a “You Think?!”, this week there was a “Can I help you?”.
In some ways I wish I hadn’t seen that otherwise awesome Sorkinisms video 🙂
The AV Club has been spot on in its criticism of this show so far, and I think they nailed its biggest problem in their recap of this episode:
“The show and its creator, Aaron Sorkin, are making completely valid points about how and why the media, specifically broadcast news, has let down the electorate. But the problem with the show is that it can’t help making those statements explicit. The Wire is a great show because it reveals, season by season, the futility of the ‘War On Drugs’ and its corrosive, wide-ranging impact on a city’s social institutions and its people. It would not be a great show if Bubbles came out and said, ‘Man, the ‘War On Drugs’ has really had a corrosive, wide-ranging impact on the city’s social institutions and people like me.’ Granted, Bubbles doesn’t have a camera in front of him so he can voice such an opinion, but Sorkin’s habit of stating his thesis over and over—rather than demonstrating it in the day-to-day reality of putting on a quality news broadcast—is The Newsroom’s biggest problem. And it doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon.”
@Robert: I take the blame, uh, credit for the Sorkinism video. Still cannot believe how much time someone spent on that.
@Mark: The literal mindedness bugs me too. Sorkin is a very didactic writer and it sometimes undermines his work.
I am really sick of the McKenzie/Will storyline. He’s a douche but she keeps acting like an unprofessional ditz. Enough already.