At his The Loom blog get a kick out of uber-science journo Carl Zimmer's opinion of TV uber-producer and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's new HBO series The Newsroom. He aims at its first episode, devoted to an outbreak of serious journalism at a previously schlocky TV news operation. I suppose I ought to watch the program too. As he says, it's easy even for cheapskates like me (no HBO around here) via YouTube. But I'll take his word for it that these camera-toting newshounds figure out what went wrong during the gulf oil spill in, maybe, 15 minutes while channeling memories of a high school science fair entry. The show is awful, he concludes, "managing to be exquisitely sanctimonious and clueless at the same time." Lots of serious and civil comments run with it. They offer both tributes to and denunciations of what Sorkin imagines of journalism and in this case science journalism on the screen.
For a moment I harrumphed and got fussy about the show too, even without seeing it. Carl is a thoughtful man. His opinions are to be respected. But I'd be hypocritical to join for long the chorus of snorters looking down-nostril in Sorkin's direction. It's television. Around here, we for years watched CSI shows till they got to seem formulaic, but never much minded the weird velocity of its forensic science and tools. Now we get similar diversion from the preposterous show Bones, set in a mythical forensic anthropology lab at the Jeffersonian (read Smithsonian) with an autistic woman its hero. Ditto NCIS. Is anybody else in this readership a bit drawn to Person of Interest on CBS (which we watch entirely via DVR skimming through ads, forgive me oh trembling business model of network entertainment)? It is so wonderfully dark, so noir, so ambiguous, so paranoid. Never mind that no imaginable software could pick up signals from the nation's growing infestation of video camera sentinels to sense the congealing signs of upcoming murder or other awful crime and to finger a specific likely victim or perpetrator. Never mind that the fugitive special forces character Reese is impossibly intuitive while also absurdly able to beat up any bad guy in his way in, like, one second. Who cares if nobody could build all by himself this CIA-NSA-whatever machine that ropes together a cloud of video and other data to spot terrorist plots but in which character and computer genius Finch, Reese's boss, left a little backdoor tap so he can use it to fight civilian crime? Fact is, there is a creeping suffusion of modern civilization by a cyber-neural multinet of ever-increasing sensory interconnection. It is watching us. It will change us. This show just ramps up reality by a few notches.
None of this is new to TV of course. Most viewers, one hopes, don't mistake it for documentary or even fictionalized slice-of-life. 25 years ago the original Kolchak: The Night Stalker that turned me on to Darren McGavin's skills provided a wonderful caricature of a big newspaper's late-shift crime beat. Wonderful, even if the criminals tended to be supernatural. Anybody else watch the BBC's Foyle's War? A neighbor loaned us the collected DVDs. Wow. It presents a rich if stereotyped depiction of the UK during the Luftwaffe's Blitz. It's just fine that the murders solved - while bombs drop - by uncanny, deeply-damaged detective Foyle are so baroque in both motive and execution as to make the ghost of Agatha Christie blush. Not actually having read Agatha Christie I can only hope that works. I have seen a movie of Murder on the Orient Express.
- Charlie Petit
Comments
Sorkin has said publicly that he has no intent other than to make an entertaining TV series.
Asking Sorkin to abandon "speeches–lectures/sermons," which worked so well for the early seasons of The West Wing, is like asking journalists to abandon Jane Doe ledes.
Carl - Fine ripostes both. I might mention, to respond to one of your points about the show's chatter, that those of us in journalism DO moan and groan over the character of much of what passes for journalism these days. But you're absolutely correct, I believe without ever having seen it, that this show does not represent how good journalism occurs
I'm unsure what Sorkin thinks or whether he believes he characterizes the working day of reporters correctly. If he does think he has it right, that's pathetic and deserves scorn. My bet is that he knows it's mostly imaginary and does not care.
The point I make is that the gulf between standard commercial television portrayals of almost anything in real life is so vast that nobody should be surprised that this show flubbed the world of journalism too. There may be shows that do pretty well. Much of popular TV, including and maybe especially those shows whose plots are orthogonal to life as we know it, remains entertaining. That's show biz. Lots of PhDs, so I hear, love Numb3rs and The Big Bang Theory. Each is unhinged from the real academy.
Oh, and if anyone thinks that you can't combine a moral consideration of journalism with great workplace detail, I've got four words: The Wire, Season Five: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wire_(season_5)
There's a big difference between The Newsroom and CSI. Nobody on CSI bemoans the decline of forensic science and then proceeds to show how it's supposed to be done. If Sorkin wants to blast us with unbearable speeches--lectures/sermons, really--about the sorry state of journalism, he can't then demonstrate real journalism with a ridiculous magic show.