Liberal New Yorker finds Sorkin's 'Newsroom' Insufferable

The lead character in Aaron Sorkin’s new HBO series “The Newsroom” “slices up” right-wingers and the “ensemble beams at him, their eyes glowing as if they were cultists,” according to New Yorker magazine.

Such a formula usually wins plaudits among the culturally elite and out of touch liberals whose favor Sorkin desperately seeks.

But Sorkin beats conservatives over the head with contempt so much on the show that even the television critic for the culturally elite New Yorker actually found herself “rooting” for the main character’s enemies, “all those flyover morons, venal bean-counters, sorority girls, and gun-toting bimbos.”

Yes, you read that right.

“‘The Newsroom’ gets so bad so quickly that I found my jaw dropping,” according to New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum.

Despite Sorkin stuffing his shows with “liberal verities about diversity,” “The Newsroom” only “features three people of color” and one of those characters, an Indian staffer, is lazily portrayed as “the Indian stereotype of an I.T. guy,” referred to as “Punjab,” and is treated with “condescension.”

She adds “Sorkin is often presented as one of the auteurs of modern television, an innovator and an original voice” but “Sorkin’s shows are the type that people who never watch TV are always claiming are better than anything else on TV.” She slams Sorkin’s TV work as having an “air of defiant intellectual superiority is rarely backed up by what’s inside” and they are often like the formulaic cop shows Sorkin “patronizingly” speaks of.

The new show takes place in the recent past, but it seems like “The Newsroom” will misrepresent the Tea Party and Arizona immigration law that dominated news coverage in 2010. Nussbaum reports the HBO series is “telling us how the news should have been delivered.” 

Sorkin recently said in an interview that “The Newsroom’s” main character, Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), most closely resembled Jon Huntsman. He’s the former Ambassador to China under the Obama administration who ran a snotty primary campaign seeking the favor of the mainstream media elite rather than the voters needed to win the Republican nomination.

And it seems like “The Newsroom,” debuting Sunday on HBO, is similarly out of touch.

Sorkin insists he has no political agenda despite portraying the conservative-hating lead character on his show as a “God.” But his show rails against conservatives so tediously that even New York cultural elites found themselves rooting for the show’s conservative enemies. Perhaps Sorkin is a closet conservative with a secret plan to make the cultural elite see conservatives more favorably in a twisted way.

In reality, Sorkin is an over-the-top liberal blowhard like Keith Olbermann. Sorkin insists the main character is not based on the former Current TV peronality, despite the many similarities between the two in mannerisms.

“The Newsroom” seems like a show that combines Olbermann’s outlandish liberalism combined with the phony intellectualism of the Huntsman campaign. And even liberals are realizing “that dog won’t hunt.”