THE BENEVOLENT WHITE GUYS IN SUITS THEORY: THE NEWSROOM

Jeff Daniels is not here to eat your brain, he's here to save it.

Since this is the only thing anyone has written about The Newsroom on the entire Internet—wait, really? This is the eleventeenth kajillion zillionth? Ah shit; well, anyway—it is Aaron Sorkin's return to television after a few years writing for the movies (really well, too: the scripts for Charlie Wilson's War, The Social Network, and Moneyball, the last of which he co-wrote, were all fuckin great). And there is serious business at hand. Aaron Sorkin is going to save America.

I'm not being entirely sarcastic. He's smart, a good-bordering-on-legitimately-great writer, he loves America, and he's not afraid to be a giant goddamn cornball. That last might not seem all that impressive, but these days discourse is overrun with posturing and people shitting all over everything so no one sees them liking anything uncool that there's something refreshing about some guy being like “Fuck it, I'm a middle-aged square-ass and I believe in stuff.” While not the entire battle, hey, it's novel, at least. One of the things he believes is that an informed America is a stronger America, and that rather than being a pussy about pissing people off, ONE MAN has to sit behind a desk in a suit, look into a camera, and tell the American people the truth, no matter how uncomfortable that truth may be and no matter who it pisses off.

Others have already pointed out the ways in which The Newsroom is about Aaron Sorkin talking about how Aaron Sorkin has all the answers, and that the entire dramatic architecture of the show is built to shine glorious light on Aaron Sorkin and all the things Aaron Sorkin has to say about the way things oughtta be. And it's true that sizable stretches of the pilot episode of The Newsroom consist of Aaron Sorkin jerking off to himself. The two principal female characters we've had extended time with are ragingly competent yet go all gooey around The Great Man (one gets the feeling if Sork could have gotten away with going the full Lena Dunham/Louis C.K. route and played the Jeff Daniels role himself he totally would have). And yes, it is a little weird that the show is set in 2010 and that the big story they spend the second half of the episode breaking the living fuck out of is the BP oil spill.

On the other hand, being in love with yourself to the point of eroticism is not a condition unique to Aaron Sorkin. We notice it with him because he's totally upfront about it, which makes it a little less lame than it is in people who feign humility for show but behind closed doors turn into Mr. Hyde. The sexism thing is a bit more of a thing—having the male characters talk down to the female characters is practically an authorial trademark—but it's clearly not something he does on purpose (he's written some terrific female characters in the past who wouldn't stand for that kinda shit), not that that makes anyone any less pissed. The 2010 thing is actually kinda brilliant in a counter-intuitive way, as it makes all the “WTF is this shit?” jokes about Twitter and blogs marginally less fuddy-duddy.

While none of those things can quite be entirely papered over, The Newsroom's pilot does a hell of a job trying. Greg Mottola's direction is pretty great, trusting long takes and theatre actors to do the job many would panic and resort to extreme close-ups and hummingbird cutting. Sorkin sometimes leaves the actors with nothing to do but motor through declamatory text, but hey, he's Aaron Sorkin, for every line where you're like “There is literally no human way to play this text” there's a half-page speech where it's impossible to not look like you knock down buildings with your dick. (And yes, that goes for at least Emily Mortimer too in this show, so far.) The main building-knocker-downer guy so far is Sam Waterston. Sam Waterston swaggers through the whole pilot drunk as fuck being like “I'm in fuckin charge, you whippersnapper-ass punks” and at one point when one of the young people acts the fool, he's like “I'm going to kick your ass” and there's this great moment where Jeff Daniels' posture goes all “Haha Sam Waterston kicking this young guy's ass, that's funny . . . wait, shit, he probably can.” Jeff Daniels is rad, too, and it's not his fault that spontaneous ovation after the newscast is bullshit Sorkin onanism. But if the show just randomly decided to shift formats and be just Sam Waterston sitting in his office, fucking with his bow-tie, pounding scotch, and taking meetings, I would be juuuuuust fine with that.

I'm not in the habit of doing immediate react pieces to TV shows, as small sample sizes are no way to assess totality. Especially when the reaction that inspired the piece is “it's a mixed bag.” I'm on roughly the same side of the fence as Sorkin politically, but with enough differences that his speeches don't give me Saul/Damascus boners (part of the reason that even though I vote for them more often than not I can't ever really be a card-carrying Democrat). From all I can tell, reading, watching, and the (very) occasional first-hand anecdote, Sork's kind of an asshole. But fuckin' hell when his tuning fork is in key Aaron fuckin Sorkin can write the dead back to life. That's why even though the pilot of The Newsroom is far from perfect, and indeed has large stretches that kinda fucking suck, it has me up at one in the morning talking about it. Foibles (and ho boy are there foibles) aside, Aaron Sorkin does words real good. And that means something. If there's one thing all the cornball misty-eyed Americana and hero worship and shit we're all supposed to be too cool for in this modern age gets right, it's that certain things mean something. Truth, justice, and the American way ain't no joke. Maybe the America everyone's getting all weepy about here never actually existed, but in that one speech of Emily Mortimer's, she gets at what the real American way is: the belief that even if we never got it exactly right, we still can one day. So even if Sorkin's walking a crooked path toward that ideal and he keeps falling down because he's trying to suck his own dick, he's at least pointed in the right direction. That means something.