Does anyone like newsroom

One wonders how long Archie Bunker would have survived in the age of the Internet and Twitter. Those were the days. As James Poniezowik of Time wrote that first summer, " The Newsroom needs to be reviewed two ways: as a drama and as an editorial.

Its chief problem as a drama is that, well, it's an editorial. And its chief problem as an editorial is that, well, Sorkin's characters' politics fail to dovetail with those of many reviewers.

And so, because many reviewers happen not to see eye to eye with the characters and, hence, Sorkin, they refer to the show as "smug" or "self-serving. Why do television critics loathe this show so much yet tune in so religiously? Why do they hate-watch it? First, because it takes place in their sphere and thus they are more attuned to, and hypersensitive about, how these roles are portrayed. This is solely anecdotal testimony from someone who has spent a quarter-century in journalism, but journalists are some of the more thin-skinned folks you will ever meet.

Second, and related to the above factor, they are far more attuned to fanciful leaps in a plot at the expense of realism. Just as nobody hate-watched House despite the liberties it took with the practice of medicine. The difference is that most physicians have neither the time nor the inclination to write 2, words on the bad medicine being practiced at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital.

As critics, we are far more attuned to a drama erring in our own field of expertise. This year's Emmy Award winner for Best Drama Series was Breaking Bad , a series whose protagonist was far more callous to the deleterious effects of crystal meth abuse than Don Keefer was to rape last Sunday. But, perhaps because more TV critics have direct familiarity with the horrors of sexual assault than they do with the epidemic of drug abuse in a flyover state, Vince Gilligan was never excoriated for this.

Through six seasons of Breaking Bad , which I also loved, we the audience are asked to suspend disbelief that Mr. White's brother-in-law, one of the top-ranking DEA agents in New Mexico, is too thick to discern that Walter is Heisenberg, the mythic meth kingpin of I It's almost more believable that Wilbur was the only one who ever heard Mr.

This is akin to me, a man who has never turned on the oven in his apartment, telling my grandmother how she should make her pies even better by adding an extra helping of love. What exactly was wrong with the way that the Boston bombings were covered? Well, people were tweeting about it and some news stations used those tweets as evidence of a bombing. In Sorkinland, tweets cannot be trusted because eyewitness testimony is always the most shaky. Come on. Reddit and Perez Hilton are the easiest of targets.

And while all this is going on, we need to pretend McAvoy is crusading for the side of justice. The problem is, no one at home cares about the integrity of cable news. The Newsroom worked best when it had multiple balls in the air, and that could be seen in many episodes of the first season. The assassination on Osama Bin Laden, the merging of tabloid culture with news, the NSA track were some of the key storylines of the season and delivered some of the best episodes of the series. The Newsroom started losing its charm during the second season when they took up the story arc of a government project that implied that the US government had committed war crimes on foreign soil.

Since the result of the story did not affect anyone, it made the complete arc quite futile by the end. The show had such messy love stories that it appeared they were written as an afterthought. The comparisons were so obvious after a while that if any The West Wing viewer saw this show, it felt like a tired version of the White House drama.

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