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Best Coverage Anywhere
Jul. 3rd, 2012 04:49 pmAt the moment, I'm trying to make lemonade out of a thus-far lemon of a day- a morning run that ended too soon; an out-of-town morning appointment with, supposedly, a prepared and paying client which resulted in no client, nothing prepared, and of course no payment; and a late-afternoon appointment back at my main office which got last-minute canceled. Go me.
So instead I'll gush over my latest obsession- HBO's The Newsroom.
The comparisons to the dialog and formula of West Wing and such are lost on me; I've never Sorkined. (Just the thought of Charlie Sheen ever being an heir to the throne was scary enough to put me off that particular series.) But about half an hour into this one's premiere, I recognized another formula that worked for me for a long time, which I think has potential to be present and working here.
Before that moment, you got Lines. Will (Jeff Daniels, who we'd just seen in a wonderful film the previous weekend called Paper Man), Mac (the beauteous Emily Mortimer) and a supporting cast of fellow news junkies, setting up their backstories and tossing script at each other, until the moment it all revved up into high gear:
Attention! All personnel! Incoming story!
And that's the shift that kept all of Larry Gelbart's witty repartee from becoming just too damn precious through all the early years of M*A*S*H. When these guys kicked into the to-be-chased story, which immediately defined the time of the pilot as well as the place, all the conflicts disappeared. Not instantly- egos do take time to dissolve, especially at network-anchor and network-EP levels- but within moments, this room full of people, who either had never worked together before or else had, badly, Put On A Show in real time with real talent. And The Lines continued- Will's 60-Minute-ish takedown of a corporate shill is golden- but you suddenly cared a lot more about who they all were once you saw what they all could do.
Now they can't do this with a four-alarm news story every week, without it turning into total trope. Maybe they could pull off something resembling Six Feet Under's opening-scene Death of the Week to at least make fun of it, if they're going to try. But I'm anxious to see how Episode 2 does relative to the promise of the first- and, now that I've been Rickrolled into acquiring a copy of "2 Broke Girls" dubbed into Nigerian which had billed itself as Newsroom E02, only to find the real thing several hours later, I hope to tell you tonight whether they've pulled it off or not.
So instead I'll gush over my latest obsession- HBO's The Newsroom.
The comparisons to the dialog and formula of West Wing and such are lost on me; I've never Sorkined. (Just the thought of Charlie Sheen ever being an heir to the throne was scary enough to put me off that particular series.) But about half an hour into this one's premiere, I recognized another formula that worked for me for a long time, which I think has potential to be present and working here.
Before that moment, you got Lines. Will (Jeff Daniels, who we'd just seen in a wonderful film the previous weekend called Paper Man), Mac (the beauteous Emily Mortimer) and a supporting cast of fellow news junkies, setting up their backstories and tossing script at each other, until the moment it all revved up into high gear:
Attention! All personnel! Incoming story!
And that's the shift that kept all of Larry Gelbart's witty repartee from becoming just too damn precious through all the early years of M*A*S*H. When these guys kicked into the to-be-chased story, which immediately defined the time of the pilot as well as the place, all the conflicts disappeared. Not instantly- egos do take time to dissolve, especially at network-anchor and network-EP levels- but within moments, this room full of people, who either had never worked together before or else had, badly, Put On A Show in real time with real talent. And The Lines continued- Will's 60-Minute-ish takedown of a corporate shill is golden- but you suddenly cared a lot more about who they all were once you saw what they all could do.
Now they can't do this with a four-alarm news story every week, without it turning into total trope. Maybe they could pull off something resembling Six Feet Under's opening-scene Death of the Week to at least make fun of it, if they're going to try. But I'm anxious to see how Episode 2 does relative to the promise of the first- and, now that I've been Rickrolled into acquiring a copy of "2 Broke Girls" dubbed into Nigerian which had billed itself as Newsroom E02, only to find the real thing several hours later, I hope to tell you tonight whether they've pulled it off or not.