Tomorrow I turn 47. That sounds really old.
I now weigh far heavier, run far slower, pee slower, tire faster, forget easier, recall harder, recover longer and have a softer heart. Really.
Last night Kiddo got us to watch another couple of episodes of “The Newsroom”. It was compelling stuff. Aaron Sorkin is a genius. I am still feeding off re-runs of The West Wing and now there’s this. We had watched episodes of the current season recently but the one last night was a prequel of sorts for us. We watched the one where the anchor, Will McAvoy, just had his team replaced and his old flame MacKenzie has just been hired to come and work with him again. They were arguing in his office on her first day, when Jim Harper, MacKenzie’s off-sider, picked up a news alert. Jim is a young, switched on and driven tv news producer and could smell breaking news in his sleep. The breaking news was the oil spill off the coast of Louisiana, which in real life was a stench for BP. The way the skeletal remains of a team came together, to broadcast the disaster was breathtaking stuff. I told Kiddo it was a “seminal moment in tv” – I have had a glass of red and was a bit uninhibited in dishing out superlatives but like I said, Aaron Sorkin is a genius.
That high was followed, in the very next episode, by a low which was really staring down the bottom of a barrel. The story was on a new Arizona legislation which was targeted at illegal immigration and much as Aaron’s Sorking political leanings were predictable, the story was very watchable indeed. The broadcast in question was a farce as they – due to a crew cock-up – could not secure anyone from the governor’s office to defend the legislation and in its place, it got a quack context fearing, bible quoting conservative who “wrote 2-3 books” (and probably sold 10 copies all in), a gun lobby bullet head and a bimbo. Mac pressed on – maybe as a true blue newsman whose show must go on or maybe to show his crew what goes wrong when they don’t do their homework and could not provide the basic raw material.
It was a great night at home with Tress, Kiddo and the little black jedi, consuming great television washed down with a very nice red. It made turning 47 with all of its woes in tow, much less painful. It was also a stark reminder that life has its ebbs and flows. One deals with events as they emerge and move on, hopefully with loved ones still around us.
Related articles
- The Newsroom (mbbsmkmedia.wordpress.com)
- Critic’s Notebook: ‘The Newsroom’ Finale and Both Sides of Aaron Sorkin (nytimes.com)
- Critics hate Aaron Sorkin’s Newsroom, but it’s a hit anyway (theweek.co.uk)
- The Newsroom (smkelly8.com)
- Aaron Sorkin versus reality (salon.com)
- Aaron Sorkin – Aaron Sorkin Defends ‘the Newsroom’ To Tv Critics (contactmusic.com)
- Aaron Sorkin Fires Almost All the Writers From ‘The Newsroom’ (theatlanticwire.com)
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