HuffPo Writer Troubled by Sexist 'Newsroom'

HBO’s new series “The Newsroom” got hammered by many left-of-center critics for its smug progressive spirit.

Now, two scribes from liberal sites are calling out show creator Aaron Sorkin for his mean-spirited approach to the female characters in the new series. The Huffington Post’s Maureen Ryan and The Daily Beast’s Jace Lacob have some serious issues with Sorkin’s latest project, and they discuss them in great detail at the former’s web home.

MAUREEN RYAN: One of the bigger problems with “The Newsroom” (and it has a few) is that so many scenes involve men setting women straight, men supervising women, a man teaching a woman how to use email (and the woman getting it spectacularly wrong regardless), a hapless woman seesawing between two different men, etc….That’s what’s so jarring about these women — it wouldn’t take much to make them just a little deeper and just a little more coherent. But Sorkin doesn’t appear to be interested in that.

JACE LACOB: In fact, “The Newsroom” seems to relish putting “loud” women in their place or to render them helpless and histrionic….Even if you are a Sorkin fan, you don’t need to be blind to the pattern that continues to emerge in his television work and in “The Social Network,” in which the female characters are represented either as crazy dragon lady stereotypes (such as Eduardo Saverin’s Asian girlfriend who is so nuts that she sets fire to things), mindless hangers-on, or in sequences such as Mark Zuckerberg berating Rooney Mara’s character.