Mr. Sorkin goes to The Newsroom

For the season two premier of “The Newsroom,” I couldn’t stand it. Even though the show was recording, I had to turn from the tied Cubs vs. Cardinals game (ultimately debacle) to watch live so that I could Tweet along. Aaron Sorkin may be the only living writer for whom I would do so, but the prospect of reveling in Sorkinisms with fellow fans was too tempting to pass up.

Having watched the first season pre-Twitter, I was saddened to see that the #Newsroom tweets were largely the snark of “hate watchers,” who had tuned in merely to spew. I love a good snark as much as the next guy, but, for me, Sorkin is sacred ground.

Sure, he can let fly with the anvils. Sure, the preachy gets… preachy, but then, there’s a scene with a guy about a thing that gives me chills, makes me tear up, and emboldens me to leap tall buildings in a single bound, and boom, I’m hooked again.

Thinking about the criticisms, the left leaning political pulpit from which he chooses to pontificate, the cries that he can’t write strong female characters, even the bleating that he plagiarizes (himself) too much, it seems that there’s a different bar he’s expected to clear. He calls himself a playwright. His language is often that of a poet. Given my proclivity for quoting him and dotting my own conversation with Sorkinisms, I have no doubt that if I wrote like that, I’d plagiarize myself, too.

He’s a modern day Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote of Gatsby’s smile, “It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.” Sorkin affords something of that to the characters he loves, and it seems what the writer himself most covets from his audience. Forget the missed deadlines, the drug busts, remember this, he whispers, gesturing to his finished product. It is everything.

Even more than Fitzgerald, who longed for an idolized America even as it receded day by day before him, Sorkin is a modern day Frank Capra. Although one directed and the other writes, both tout a flag-waving, earnest, pure view of American democracy. Sorkin’s “The American President” explicitly embraces the “Capraesque” quality of a first visit to the White House. Both artists drink the red, white, and blue Kool-Aid.

Like Capra, the first Hollywood director to garner billing “above the title,” Sorkin is a writer of such note that it is Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom,” despite credits that bill the show after the title as “Created by….” That stature is such stuff as targets are made on. Clearly, the temptation of the target is too much for the haters to withstand.

As for “The Newsroom,” there’s an adrenaline rush when news happens, and you work in news, that he captures. When big things happen in the world, there’s a part of me that still wants to be there, doing that again. For me, the quality, the passion, the craft of his writing, the music of his dialogue all outweigh the occasional wince-inducing diatribe. The man can write. And as long as he continues to put words to paper, I’ll be there to listen.