Re: TV: The League Of Anarchy Is A Bunch Of Justified Mad Men
Just watched the last episode of Newsroom. I had not read the comments here prior to seeing it. My take:
I have defended the show in the past, with some reservations (in particular, Sorkin's inability to write female characters as anything more than reverse-magic-pixie-girls -- they are all inane, hyper-emotional manic, superwomen-with-glass-jaws, which is as equally sexist and hideous). That defense ends tonight.
That was one of, if not the, worst episodes of television I've ever seen. Sorkin is always contrived and oblivious to his own pomposity, but this was entirely new territory, several sub-basements below anything he's done before.
Moscow / David and Maddie finally hook up -- This was the the gem of the episode, as it was abject nullity. Typically, major characters deserve better than such paint-by-numbers resolution for important romantic tension, but these two cardboard cutouts never did. The 20-somethings got their fan service and nobody was harmed, so fine, call it a push.
Princeton date rape -- Even though I have generally enjoyed the show, its maddening preachiness while winking-back-at-its-own-preachiness-to-ward-off-criticism has always been a major flaw. But until now it's been difficult to capture just what's so offensive about Newsroom's patented "serious topic delivered with rat-a-tat clever dialog" shtick. We have the ideal descriptor now: just watch this sequence. The attitude underlying the treatment of the character and the vamping of the topic to make the audience feel it is somehow breaking into deep, ambiguous, treacherous waters demonstrates the depravity of the writing staff. It's as if the editorial board from Wired was permitted into my living room. A show that continually points back at itself and embosses its conflicts with its own critical evaluation as spell-binding, disturbing, and above all subtle, rebuts itself with finality. There can be no recovery -- this was Newsroom's "tide goes in, tide goes out."
Daddy cellmate -- So Sorkin literally locks Will (himself) and an implausibly eloquent herpa-derp (his many conservative critics) in a cell and has them both chatter his self-important post-Hawksian drivel at each other, as a result of which Great Antimonies Are Explored. Now presumably this script went through many rewrites and senior editorial reviews before being greenlighted. Do you mean to tell me that not one person in the building (a) observed and (b) reported that this exchange demonstrated every stereotype of concernsplaining, not in Will's lines (though they were grating enough), nor the herpa-derp's (though they were ugly in their Tucker Carlsonesque bone-I-throw-to-you-to-demonstrate-my-superiority), but in the entire exchange and especially its lead-footed obviousness, right down to the twist reveal at the end? The complacency that lies beneath the writing of that sequence is so appalling and so heedless of its own narcissism that it could be played on continuous loop at CPAC as proof of everything they've ever said about the intellectual left. Except of course Sorkin is not even a pseudo-intellectual -- like Malcolm Gladwell or Newt Gingrich, he is simply "a dumb person's idea of what a smart person sounds like," and apparently the Hollywood production chain is populated exclusively by dumb people.
The stalker app -- I'm with B. J. Novak -- fire them all. Sloan's (an entire post could be written about how Sloan is the most sexist portrayal of a woman in television history) ridiculous diatribe was a self-parody of the innumerable Taking A Stand For Integrity soliloquies that make the show what it is for better or ill. The "punishment for celebrity" indictment and supposed social peril could easily have been spewed by a Paul Ryan, just substituting "punishment for success." Again, really, was there nobody in the room during the readings who didn't burst into laughter and break the spell?
Goodbye Charlie -- oh, for fcks sake.
In closing, there is no self-awareness within ten miles of the mindset that churned out that episode, but that's not its worst feature. Art (including rhetoric), when genuine, take the difficult and dress it up to look easy. It can do so because it taps the experience and intellect of the viewer, reader, or listener. All the richness that is in art is already in the observer. The artist, author, or composer just strings together a few apparently simple elements and unleashes the whole cascade. Whatever is paradoxical or sublime or enraged by injustice is in the engine of the observer; the artifact is only an ignition key.
In contrast, the 35 minutes of my life I'll never get back watching this was so grossly offensive because it was the easy dressed up to look hard. Every choice in this episode was cliche, mawkish, and/or third rate, but dressed up as if it was a titanic arm-wrestling of nearly balanced, Profound Truths. Given that Newsroom's only reason to exist was to chart the mechanism and the harm of us losing substance in this toilet of consumerist, lowest denominator, amused-to-death pablum that we've made for ourselves, the episode does at least give us one thing to remember: a glaring example of irony.
