I’m infatuated
with a TV show. It’s been a while. I mean, of course I watched Game of Thrones.
What self-respecting fantasy writer (or aspiring fantasy writer) hasn’t? And
it’s great entertainment, don’t get me wrong, but there’s no infatuation. I
just like it, a lot. But this new show – it’s infatuation, moving towards love.
I doubt very
much that you’ll be surprised when I tell you that the show is Aaron
Sorkin’s The Newsroom. I didn’t watch
much of The West Wing – no cable at the time and the Internet was not yet all
over streaming things like that – but the couple episodes I saw were enjoyable.
From a distance though, it seemed like a bit of a fairytale: centrist,
pragmatically progressive president making the decisions we wish the American
president had been making, and showing the heart we wish he’d been showing,
during the height of the Dubya debacle. In the absence of regular exposure to
the show, I just never developed an attachment. I never had a chance to
properly suspend disbelief.
How things
change.
It’s 2012 now,
and TV programming is readily available via steaming and download. As
interested as I am in how disingenuous the mainstream media is, the premise
intrigued. And then I saw the opening clip from the first episode, when Jeff
Daniel’s anchorman character, Will McAvoy, has a meltdown during a panel
discussion and admits that the ole’ US of A ain’t what she used to be, or perhaps
ain’t what she likes to selectively remember she used to be, all nation states
having this powerful tendency towards revisionist self-perception.
Anyway, as much
as I didn’t necessarily agree with all of McAvoy’s memory of the States from its
relative glory days in the wake of WWII, I did like his take on the current
state of affairs, especially his critical views regarding the MSM’s way of
selling out the truth in favor of ratings. It looked compelling. I bit.
Five episodes in
I’m hooked, and the show, which flashed back in episode one to the explosion of
Deep Water Horizon and has been quickly moving forward towards the present in a
review of McAvoy’s (and his team’s) developmental arc, is getting more and more
compelling. The acting is great, Sorkin’s writing is typically erudite, sharp,
and warp-paced, and the drama is compelling.
But I love it
for what it’s trying to do – shape and participate in a discussion on integrity
and truth in a way that the MSM infotainment industry is no longer very
interested in participating in. If West Wing was a fairytale about what we wish
the White House could be, then The Newsroom is a fairytale about what we can
only dream of our news sources being.
And it is a
fairytale, make no mistake. This many idealistic people in the same room only
happens in rarefied circumstances, and I sadly doubt that an MSM newsroom is
one of them. That said, Keith Olberman (who is rather unlike Will McAvoy in
ideological terms) did take most of his staff with him when he was fired, so I
guess there still is some idealism and loyalty. Exceptions that prove the rule?
But I digress…
The fairytale
world the characters of The Newsroom live in is one in which Democrats and Republicans
actually represent different ends of a notably wide spectrum of political and
ideological thought. That just isn’t the case anymore than it’s accurate to say
that there’s much of a difference between the policies of Liberals and
Conservatives in Canada
So I have this
weird conflict inside me as I fall in love with this show: I think that it
raises important questions about how the infotainment industry is shaping our
thought by means of untruth and innuendo, and that’s a discussion worth having.
But it also reinforces the idea that all we need to do is find a center-right
equilibrium full of civil discourse again to be happy and safe, with no real
need to actually discuss ideas outside of that narrow ideological pie slice as
we move forward.
That’s just
silly. Our culture is obviously broken in profound ways, wearing out as we near
the end of an age. The empires are crumbling and, I think, we’d be better off
just admitting it and moving in a new direction with an urgency that is
currently, and profoundly, lacking. My greatest fear is that future generations,
if there are any that far forward, will look back at this time and place and
wonder how we could have been so stupid, so selfish, so myopic and
intentionally vapid. I don’t want that to be our legacy. Who would?
Anyway, if you
haven’t watched it yet, here’s McAvoy’s opening salvo from episode one. And
here’s a toast to debate and discussion and discourse, and the place that art –
even TV art – can play in that debate..
p.s. I'm still struggling to rearrange my world so that I have appropriate time to write again. I believe it will happen, but it's not happening fast enough. For me. But I'm trying. And that's part of the journey, so I guess I'll be okay with it. Final revisions on The Novel are still crawling forward. I will finish at some point, my promise to both of us.
