Newsroom

[gonzai]

As my regulars know, I am a West Wing-nut. And I liked Sports Night, The American President, and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (although apparently I'm the only one who did.) So I figured I had to watch Newsroom, at least once, even though I can no longer stand Sam Waterston (I hated Jack McCoy) and the reviews have been universally awful. Maybe the awful reviews did the trick. I watched the pilot and sat there thinking, 'it's not West Wing - nothing is - but this is not bad. Not bad at all.' Every complaint I heard about the show was there, but none of them were a fraction as glaring as the reviews would have you think.

Obviously, it's just the pilot, but I'll watch again.

Comments

[elvenforever.livejournal.com]

Good for you for giving a show a chance despite bad reviews. :)

One of my favorite shows, "Eureka," is coming to an end in three episodes. So OMG, I can't believe this awesome show is about to be over for good.

[fox-bard.livejournal.com]

I dug it, but I did get annoyed with the same old American song and dance of "Once we were teh awesomes! OMG! We rocked it out loud with our Victorian blinders on and then came Vietnam and we realized we sucked! Waaaah!" bollocks.

For a small percentage of the population, post WWII was pivotal. It lasted a handful of years, and by the early fifties things were already going sideways for us. There was no great Golden Age. It's a myth perpetuated by the forces of conservatism to try to hide back in a time that we've conveniently forgotten was filled with extreme inequality and a supreme lack of justice for anyone who wasn't a straight, white male who fit the ideal stereotype of the day (which is what conservative forces always do in all times and in every culture - which is to say they serve their own demographic as soldiers of right while appearing like victims at the hands of mongrel dissidents - aka those lower in the pecking order - at the same time). The truth is they have to, or they will slip down in the pecking order, and after being on top, no one wants to scrape along the bottom. Animals who form social groups do this. It's not new and we haven't really evolved all that much from our days in the trees.

We also conveniently forget that we never 'reached for the stars' in an age of epic humanism glory. We merely tried to get there before our Soviet rivals did. They sent a woman and some animals into orbit - so we had to get one better and send a group of white dudes to the moon. We just happened to learn how to use flags to mark our spots instead of urine. /cynical rant

But when Newsroom dropped the popular sermon and just stated the bald, ugly truths, like "Liberals are losers and Conservatives are idiots"? There were shades of brilliance. And I have to say, good on them for reminding America just how bad the BP oil spill was. Unless one lives or works in Louisiana, nobody seems to remember or care about Deepwater Horizon's disaster of epic proportions.

So for now, the show has my attention and I'll keep watching.

[gonzai55.livejournal.com]

If you haven't already seen it, I recommend the recut version of 'God Willing and The Creek Don't Rise'. It was originally about Katrina, but they added in a lot of material about the BP spill. Scary and enlightening.