Okay, so maybe some people disagree a little.
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‘The Newsroom’ Review: Aaron Sorkin’s New HBO Show Gets Almost Everything Wrong
This job shouldn’t be this easy. But Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom” (premieres Sunday, June 24 at 10 p.m. ET on HBO) offers such a target-rich environment that the phrase “shooting fish in a barrel” does spring to mind.
The biggest problem with “The Newsroom” — and it’s one of many, many problems — is that its goals and its narrative strategies are in direct conflict with each other. The result is a dramatically inert, infuriating mess, one that wastes a fine cast to no demonstrable purpose, unless you consider giving Sorkin yet another platform in which to Set the People Straight is a worthwhile purpose.
The ironies abound, but one of the central ironies is this: The lead character on this show, news anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), bemoans the fact that much of the public discourse has become an unsubtle shoutfest, yet “The Newsroom” displays all the subtlety of a jackhammer set to maximum or a terrier on speed. Characters talk at each other, they constantly preach to their colleagues, and McAvoy frequently fulminates at his viewers at length. These soliloquies, even allowing for the familiar tics and tricks of Sorkinese, become deadening over time.
Wow, life is sooo unfair. Somebody should create a TV series about that…
