--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Rick Archer" <rick@...> wrote: > > I've only watched the first two episodes so far. My only > criticisms were that the dialog seemed so frenetic, and so > cute and witty and off-the-cuff articulate, that it seemed > unrealistic. Aaron Sorkin's "The West Wing" sucked me in > and made me feel I was really in the White House.
Pretty much the same here, Rick. But even the super-snappy dialogue in "West Wing" began to get to me after a while. A couple years ago I was doing something in the kitchen with the TV on. I hadn't been listening, but the audio of a clip from some dramatic show that was being played caught my attention. I hadn't heard it before--it wasn't from "West Wing"--but I knew instantly it was a Sorkin show because just the rhythms of the dialog were so recognizable. Seems to me that has to be a flaw of some sort. > The Newsroom > hasn't sucked me in yet. I felt I was watching something > unrealistic. I've seen only the first episode and a clip from the final episode of the first season, and it wasn't just the dialog that was unrealistic. I wonder what folks who have actually worked in the White House thought about "West Wing" in terms of realism. I know nuttin' about working in the White House, but I do know something about TV news operations, and there was stuff in the first episode and the later clip from "Newsroom" that was seriously inauthentic. Just for one thing, the station's reporting on the Gulf disaster was portrayed wildly inaccurately: they supposedly dug up the details of what had happened very shortly afterward that *nobody had actually known for days and even weeks*. And the script used that faux knowledge to beat up on other news outlets for going with the "drama" of the missing crew members instead of focusing on the environmental disaster (which, in reality, wasn't yet evident to anybody at that point, but which the "Newsroom" folks had purportedly uncovered within a matter of hours). Not that the news media totally covered itself with glory in its reporting on the Gulf spill, but this portrayal was just below the belt, IMHO. Nobody who watched this episode who hadn't followed the Gulf story pretty closely would have any reason to suspect that the news media had not, in fact, disgraced itself in the early days of the catastrophe by not doing the necessary investigation. Still pisses me off. If you're going to re-create a very recent major event for a mass audience, you need to take significant pains to do it accurately rather than distorting it for the sake of the drama. Otherwise your grossly mangled version is likely to become the common wisdom.
