The Newsroom Is Bad

Ok, to start out with, I know I've been AWOL for a while.  Well, only a couple weeks, but it feels like a long time.  And the truth of the matter is I just haven't been watching TV lately.  *GASP*  Oh, I watched Mad Men, and I caught up on Veep over the weekend, but mostly my pop culture time (which hasn't been much, since I've started a new, full-time job) has been consumed with reading the Game Of Thrones books. They are just SO GOOD!  I could read them forever!  And I pretty much have been, to the exclusion of almost everything else.  I'm gearing up to start doing Dawson's Creek recaps pretty soon, but I've got to finish Storm Of Swords first.  SORRY!  But some things take precedence in life, and amazing books are one of them.

It's no surprise, then, that I slept a little on the premiere of Aaron Sorkin's new drama, The Newsroom.  And  then when I saw pictures of Kristin Davis macking on Sorkin, I remembered OH!  This show!  I am excited about it!  So I took a break from Arya and Jon Snow to check it out.

And....oh.  This face. :/

By now you've probably seen the opening speech that Jeff Daniels makes, where he talks about how America ISN'T the best country in the world:



It's wonderful and honest and informed and really great and exactly what I hoped this show would be.  But then...he says this (italics mine):

"But [America] sure used to be [the best] (ed: REALLY?  IT DID? SINCE WHEN???).  We used to stand up for what's right (again: REALLY? SINCE WHEN???).  We fought for moral reasons (like all those Native Americans we killed for 'moral reasons'?), we passed laws for moral reasons (like all those laws to keep black and white people from getting married?), we waged wars on poverty, not poor people (REALLY? Like all that help we've given poor people during the decades-long War On Drugs?).  We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors, we put our money where our mouths were and we never beat our chests (AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA).  We built great big things (Congratulations, America, on building big things.), we made amazing technological advances, explored the universe, cured disease, we cultivated the world's greatest artists (okaaaaay) AND the world's greatest economy (ummmmmm).  We reached for the STARS (vom).  We acted like men (VOM).  We aspired to intelligence, we didn't belittle it, it didn't make us feel inferior (If that is what you'd like to believe, Sorkin).  We didn't identify ourselves by who we voted for in the last election and we didn't...we didn't scare so easy.  We were able to do all these things and be all these things because we were informed.  By great men, men who were revered (Yup, W.R. Hearst was super great and kept us EXTRA informed).  First step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one.  America isn't the greatest country in the world anymore."

So, as you can probably tell, I've got some problems with this speech.  America isn't the greatest country in the world ANYMORE?  So when was it?  When we had slaves?  When we shoved our immigrants into tenements to die of tuberculosis and starvation and factory fires?  Was it during the Trail Of Tears?  When we outlawed alcohol?  When we lynched black people?  When we put Japanese-Americans into internment camps?  Was it when we put "under God" into the Pledge of Allegiance or when we continually denied equal rights to women, and gays, and racial and ethnic and religious minorities?  When we entered in to multiple wars and armed confrontations against small countries because we disagreed with their ultimately ineffective and self-defeating ideologies? When we watched our citizens ravaged by AIDS and did so little to help?  When we freely armed horrible, genocidal people around the world?  When we allowed the Supreme Court to elect a president?  When we put our money where our mouth was and never beat our chests on Imaginary Island in Never Never Land?  Tell me, Aaron Sorkin, precisely WHEN America was the greatest country in the world.  Because by my count, that was NEVER.

Stuff We've Got To Talk About

Ok, I've got 45 minutes before I have to get in the shower and head off to meet a friend, so let's get to it!  So much going on...so here it is, in absolutely no particular order.

Oh, the Chevy Chase/Dan Harmon thing makes me SO SAD.  Without knowing any more than what anybody else on the internet knows, my take on it is that these dudes are both just too cranky and too narcissistic to ever get along.  However, in the over-all scheme of things I've got to side with Harmon.  Chevy has been vocal about his disdain for sitcoms since the beginning, and doesn't seem to be able to understand how transcendent Community really is.  Here is a guy who has been, since the real beginnings of his career on SNL, a superstar, and has the ego to match.  I'm betting his agent or manager or someone convinced him to do Community in order to get his face out there to a younger audience and that Chevy didn't bet on the show becoming the phenomenon it has.  Additionally, I think the Pierce character hits a little too close to home for him sometimes.  I don't mean the daddy issue stuff (although, who really knows), but the old man/out of touch/hopelessly un-hip stuff ("Encarta it" ahahahahaha).  I bet before this show Chevy still thought of himself as being a classic bad-ass, but the writing has forced him to look his own old-man-ness in the face.  Anyway, that's just my take on it, who effing knows.  I think it was bad form for Chevy to walk off the set, and it was bad form for Harmon to chant, "Fuck you, Chevy" at the wrap party (although I do think that's pretty funny), but it was really bad form for Chevy to leave such a horrible message for the guy that is his BOSS.  And sorry, but calling D. Harms a bad writer doesn't hold water because everyone in the world knows that the opposite is true and that he's actually The Best writer (and I'm sure that Dan could care less about Chevy telling him to suck his cock).  Threatening to leave the show over this is a selfish, petty, childish, TOTAL DICK MOVE.  Honestly, I wouldn't care THAT much if he left - the incredible cast could pick up his slack - but the threat to do so just pisses me off.  Chevy needs to get over himself, stop thinking he's above doing television, and maybe if he were a little more respectful than stuff like this wouldn't happen.  Hmph.

"Je-sus Christ."

Matt: "How did I get involuntarily deputized as a commandments enforcer?"

Danny: "By working in broadcasting."

Matt: "Nuh-uh, blasphemy isn't an FCC issue, there's no threat of fines."

Danny: "It's a community standards issue."

Matt: "But it's not my community we're talking about."

Danny: "You can't use the lord's name in vain, and that's not going to change and you know it, so move on."

Matt: "It's not my lord we're talking about either."

Danny: "We've had this conversation, and it bores me now."

Matt: "Look, it's one thing to be asked to respect someone else's religion, it's another to be asked to respect their taboos. In my religion it's disrespectful to god not to keep your head covered, but you don't see me insisting that the cast of CSI Miami wear yarmulkes."

Danny: "That'd be an unusual creative direction for CSI Miami."

Matt: "Half the shows in primetime start with two strippers getting strangled after a lap dance. And that's fine with me, but if it's also fine with Jesus than I don't see the need to tiptoe around his name."

Danny: "Matt, you'll be able to have a character tell another character to do something to himself that is anatomically impossible, you'll be able to do it at 8 o'clock on a Sunday before you'll be able to use God or Jesus as an expletive."

Matt: "I can only write Jesus or Christ when I'm referring to Jesus Christ!?"

Danny: "Yes."

Matt: "Let me tell you, if Jesus was the head of Standards and Practices he would pimp-slap the whole lot of us, and not because we used his name in....Jesus as the head of Standards and Practices!"

- Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Nevada Day, Pt. 1

by Thomas Schlamme and Aaron Sorkin

This is one of my favorite scenes from the short-lived series Studio 60 (a show about a late-night SNL-type show where all of the writing except that being performed on the fictional show was pretty awesome). The scene not only takes to task a ridiculous and discriminatory rule that I'm sure many people don't know even exists, but it does it in such a smart way that it's able to subvert the very restrictions that Studio 60 itself has to abide by. Aaron Sorkin...writing like this is the reason that The Social Network makes me sad.

What sucks is that this idea, the Jesus-as-head-of-Standards-and-Practices idea, which may have been the been the best sketch on Studio 60 (where the self-proclaimed and supposedly brilliant comedy writing was often not at all funny) got quashed and never aired (on the fictional Studio 60 - man, writing about this show is confusing). After the terrible-sounding "Crazy Christians" sketch was made such a fuss over, I wished we would have gotten a chance to see that insane mustachioed guy from Standards and Practices shitting a brick over this sketch (which is good! seriously, they do a read-through and the timing is brilliant).

Jesus! Getting back to the point...