I was so taken by these by-now famous three minutes of the new HBO drama “The Newsroom” that I plugged the show in this space a few weeks back.
So the first thing to say is: if you haven’t yet seen those three minutes — in which one of the nation’s best-known nightly news anchors (think an exasperated Tom Brokaw, if he still occupied one of the anchor chairs) cracks during a panel discussion (he’s apparently on meds) and does some very serious “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more”-style truth telling — do.
The whole country should see those three minutes, except for the F-word (sorry about that) and even though a lot of us, including me, believe America is still, in fundamentally important respects, the greatest country on Earth. But one of those respects is that we produce three-minute clips like this one, and have — or I hope still have — the capacity to discuss them and, eventually, stumble to the right conclusion and self-correct.
That whole first pilot episode was, I thought, pretty spectacular. The newsroom encounters the BP Deepwater Horizon blow-out. If you liked Aaron Sorkin’s “The West Wing” — I totally loved it — here he is writing “The Newsroom.”
Only . . . when I started watching a subsequent episode, it seemed to me the dialog was just a bit TOO snappy, the interpersonal relations just a bit TOO intense — are all these people on coke? — and the story line just a bit TOO preachy. Which is a shame, because we need this message to get out. Maybe Sorkin has dialed it back a bit, even at the expense of its incandescence. (As one of my friends put it: “Don’t any of these characters ever say anything humdrum and boring? And slowly? Everyday normal-speak things like, ‘I don’t know. Where do YOU want to eat?'”) I do plan to give it another shot.
In the meantime, I have fallen in love with “Political Animals,” in which Sigourney Weaver plays a thinly disguised Hilary Clinton, and the actor who plays her husband delivers a grossly unfair yet vastly entertaining caricature (which is okay, because it’s fiction) and they have handsome twin sons and . . . just watch. You’ll love it. You can see it on-line at that link.
RIDE, SALLY
Russell Bell: “From the New York Times obituary of Sally Ride we learn that ‘Dr. Ride is survived by her partner of 27 years, Tam O’Shaughnessy’ — a woman. My gaydar failed again: Anderson Cooper, Ken Mehlman, Ellen DeGeneres . . . Perhaps it never worked. At least there was progress at the Albuquerque Journal: they didn’t remove mention of Dr O’Shaughnessy from the wire service obit they ran as they removed the mention of you from Mr Nolan’s.”
Sally was a hero (if you ask me), and young people, especially, should know that heroes come in all stripes.
