HYDERABAD: There are admittedly a lot of reasons to hate The Newsroom, a TV show that seeks to tell its audience what ideal television news should look/sound like. Helmed and written by Aaron Sorkin, the man behind movies like A Few Good Men, The Social Network and Moneyball, the television show in its first season (2012) opened to widely polarised reviews. Sorkin’s fans got what they wanted – unparalleled wit, sophistication and a political urgency that’s feverishly communicable. But the folks who didn’t appreciate what Sorkin was trying to do went to town with allegations that the show had “sanctimonious show-off soliloquies,” and portrayed women as “ego-deprived, attention-seeking, brainless twits.” Characters were derided for “talking faster than New Yorkers on Red Bull.” None of the accusations were unfounded.
I’m a fan, however. Sorkin fascinated the budding journalist in me, because what kid fresh after graduation doesn’t look at the world through idealism-tinted glasses? Truth must win over money, independence of thought over prejudice, free will over power, and so on and so forth. However, as yours truly soon discovered, life doesn’t exist in ideal conditions. Even the pursuit of the ideal is a lost cause, because life is a series of disjointed events that will soon demonstrate to everyone involved; that compromises have to be made at every juncture; that to beat a person at his own game, one must get dirty in the first place; that there is no black or white, just a thick gob of grey, etc.
What I’m trying to say here is that although Sorkin thought he was trying to help, he was in fact only making things worse. By showing the ideal, the rest of us only felt the morbid feeling of defeatism.
Not that television journalism or journalism in general is beyond redemption; it just can’t be done with a sharp click of the fingers like Sorkin tells us we can. Obviously Sorkin sees it too because this is what he had to say at the Tribeca Film Festival recently: “I’m going to let you all stand in for everyone in the world, if you don’t mind. I think you and I got off on the wrong foot with The Newsroom, and I apologise and I’d like to start over. ... I feel like I’m just now starting to learn how to write it.”
This is good news because the third and final season of The Newsroom is around the corner and I can’t wait to find out how he wraps it all up. There’s been news going around that the final season will only clock in six episodes this time, so we can expect some slick, fast-paced writing, just like the previous two seasons.
If he can manage to hold his emotions in check, The Newsroom could be a celebration of all things journalism, as and how it is, rather than just how he would like it to be.