The Smarts: Fantasy? Or just lousy?

Published on 19/07/2012 02:34

AARON Sorkin, creator of The West Wing, has had a good run lately, with high praise heaped on his screenplay work for the movies Moneyball and The Social Network. His latest TV show, though, hasn’t gone down so well.

What’s wrong with The Newsroom, starring Jeff Daniels and set behind the scenes on a TV news show? It’s “naïve, misdirected and gut-wrenchingly patronising”, huffed the Huffington Post. “The second episode is stuffed with piety and syrup,” said the New Yorker. “After that, The Newsroom gets so bad so quickly that I found my jaw dropping. The third episode is lousy. The fourth episode is the worst. There are six to go.”

Ouch. The criticism has been so cutting, in fact, that Sorkin was moved to respond this week. “The show is meant to be a fantasy,” he told a US radio show – a comment that brought back memories of George Lucas, trying to deflect criticism from the awful scripts for his Star Wars prequels by likening them to old-fashioned matinee movies, not to be taken seriously (yeah, right – that’ll be why you stuffed them with heavy-handed political allegory).

Is The Newsroom really as bad as The Phantom Menace? You can judge for yourself – if you have Sky Atlantic – by tuning in next Tuesday evening. Not everyone has been so unkind – the well respected British TV critic Mark Lawson tried very hard to be positive in a blog this week, but even he seemed to be straining a bit to find good things to say about it. Empire’s critic, meanwhile, wondered: “Is (Sorkin) now perhaps better suited to movies where the likes of David Fincher and Bennett Miller won’t indulge his bad habits?” (ie, overly wordy dialogue that will be very familiar to those who have already seen Sorkin’s previous shows.) He did, however, plan to keep watching. So that’s something.