Just published a short piece on Season 2 of HBO’s “The Newsroom” over on Medium.com –“’Newsroom’ Season 2 Delivers: The problems of S1 turn into triumphs in S2.”
Here are the first few paragraphs:
I was crankily devoted to the first season on HBO of Aaron Sorkin’s latest intense one-hour drama featuring geniuses who have memorized entire statistical manuals, are unstoppably right at work and terminally dysfunctional in their personal lives.
“Crankily” because, as I’ve written elsewhere, the smug knowitallness of the characters rendered them irksome, and the two-year head start that Sorkin gave them by setting the show in the recent, memorable past amplified the smugness because of course they always got everything right— they were talking about things that just happened.
My friend Gary Saul Morson in his magnificent 1996 book “Narrative and Freedom: the Shadows of Time” calls this sort of thing “backshadowing,” which “turns the past into a well-plotted story” and removes from the past the hazy contingency, moment-to-moment panic and uncertainty and sheer improvisation of how we tactically moved in and out of the what we chose to focus on and the decisions we made at the time.
Leave a Reply