Why am I watching this?

I sometimes find myself doing the same thing repetitively, hoping, praying for a different outcome every time.  Like "please don't hit your brother."  (Not gonna happen.)  Or, "yah, coconut seems like it should taste good"  (Still, no.)  Or, maybe the news will not be a laundry list of crime and thunderstorms (hasn't happened yet.)  Or, maybe the Hits1 Sirius station won't be playing Macklemore and Ryan (maybe next month.)  Or, most recently, perhaps this Aaron Sorkin thing won't suck. (It does.) M keeps going back for more.  Despite my eye-rolling (I make a good sound effect to go with the eye roll just to pester him while he watches,) he feels that there is something redeemable in all of this.  That Sorkin's pat answers are going to change politics?  The world?  Does he like the verbal masturbation of an alleged Republican bitching about every elected Republican in government?  What, exactly, is M expecting to happen?  One episode won't involve a grown woman acting like a hormone-riddled teen?  That one episode won't show some failed government practice DEEPLY AFFECTING one of our characters?  That Sorkin isn't a one trick pony? 

More importantly, how do I keep getting sucked into this?  I HATE summer TV.  It's a vast wasteland of repeats and sports-less tundras.  Baseball, America's pastime is really just a white-noise generator to facilitate my nap.  There are no movies made for grown women on cable.  EVER.  And now, on Sunday nights, there is this Newsroom show. This frantic, frenetic, didactic tirade that I am subject to once a week.  WHY DON'T I GET UP and do something else?  It's like a tractor beam.  I'm sucked in, if only to ridicule.  It's like picking at a skin blemish.  Picking will not make it go away, but it's something to do while the blemish is there.  The satisfaction comes from the pain it causes.

Usually, I reserve my critical interpretations of TV shows for artistic heavies like Jack's Big Music Show or Yo!  Gabba Gabba!  But, today (well, actually last night, but I couldn't get my google password to work and I have the tech savvy of a Triceratops) I think The Newsroom has earned some of my insightful analysis.

First of all, I have to say that I'm moderately surprised that HBO even gave me a second chance at The Newsroom.  I thought for sure that it was going to be a one season blunder.  But no...it's back!  And quippier and fast-talky as ever.

Some obvious complaints about Sorkin:  who keeps talking, louder and louder, OVER the boss's monologue?  No one.  Ever.  And yet, here we are watching Dumb and Dumber yell over poor Law and Order Prosecutor.  Louder and LOUDER.  And British Girl screaming over Dumb and Dumber guy? Second, what kind of savants have, at their fingertips, arcane statistics about the mortgage collapse in this country? Or violence in Rwanda? Or the DNP of Sweden?  Third, who runs everywhere at work?  Fourth, why, oh why are these people PISSED OFF ALL THE TIME?  AND YELLING ABOUT IT? 

Another issue, what is with the casting?  Why do the Don character and the Other Guy (Jim?) look so much alike?

Seriously, generically attractive guys who mumble?  When they are on their cell phones, lit by random downlighting in a bar, mumbling at The Forehead (whom they are both? dating?), it is impossible to tell them apart from one another.  Last week, they introduced some other guy, Washington, to further confuse me:

This guy came up from Washington, D.C. on the last episode to help produce the news while one of the other Hardy Boys ran away from his true love, The Forehead.

The Forehead, who I do not object to as an actress (she may be very good at reading non-self pitying, trying to be an Important Woman script) but in this, she reminds me of a Cabbage Patch Kid who is (essentially) whining about boys despite trying to be taken seriously as a journalist (how 1990s):

See?  There she is all yarn-haired and Cabbage Patchy.  Her internship has become fraught with sexual tension, much like this scraggly-haired blonde:

Sadly, though, for all his modern take on the world, Sorkin's women tend to be of this type. These women who constantly interrupt Very Important Business with their trivial love problems.  "Should I tell him I love him?  Will the workplace be weird if I don't?  Do I deserve happiness?  Does he think of me as anything but his secretary? I guess I'm stereotyping: sometimes, they aren't blonde:

But they definitely have a look, right?  These women who aren't in charge, but through their personal assistant/intern position steer their morally-driven men into the right decisions and spectacular soap boxing.  They venture into Sorkin's verbal fray only to wind up in their bosses'/mentors arms by the end of the series.

There are women in charge (ish) though, in Sorkin Situations:

 But while these are competent women, they are sexual failures, governed by break-ups and broken hearts.  They have no time for relationships, for they are married to their careers and what must be GIANT closets filled with silk blouses.
They talk fast, eat up men and spit them out even faster.They bust balls and pump iron.  They carry big stacks of paper and walk around their offices (Importantly) in stilettos. They say things like, "Yes, I am here and I am working hard and I have filed this news report on the 4.9 starving children in the Sudan and the economic and social repercussions, of term limits to Republican senators but, dammit, Will, I still love you.  I have always loved you."
That's not an actual quote, it's like the Cliff Note version, because that actual monologue takes seven minutes when written in Sorkin-ese.
So, these horny women who drink men's scotch, propel slightly damaged men (Will McAvoy, I'm looking at you) into the stratosphere of success.  Talking, the whole time.  Non stop.
This photo (above) also brings me to another casting gripe.  Why Sam Waterston?  I love the guy and his work for TD Waterhouse (or whatever retirement fund he's encouraging me to use) and of course, Law and Order.  But I'm pretty sure the guy has limited lung capacity.  He is frequently winded from running up and down Sorkin's workplace halls (keeping up with those pissed off women) and then can't spit out a Sorkin-logue in one breath.  He fades out there, in the middle, and I am often rewinding to pick up the last half of whatever it was that he was saying.  (Which is, I should know by now:  I care/do not care about the ratings of our show today, dammit, Will McAvoy.  Get your shit together and do/do not do the news tonight.  We can/cannot make it as a network with/without you.  That wig-wearing bitch, Jane Fonda, is all over my ass about you.  She's in charge, but kinda scary in her silk blouse, so I mostly do either what she tells me to, or the direct opposite.  My role is confusing.)

HOLY SHIT!  She is scary.  Do you think she can blink anymore?  That skin looks tight.  Although if Felicity Huffman's character from Sports Night were to get a LOT of work done, she might look a little like this, so maybe in one of Sorkin's benders, he thought he was hiring Huffman.

Look, Sorkin is a talented man.  The Social Network was really good.  A Few Good Men was pretty good.  The West Wing redefined network drama.  But what I'm saying, I think, is that the whole Sorkin experience is exhausting.  I just can't immerse myself in a world where every one knows everything about the world, but nothing about human nature.  The same characters resurface from old shows, and while their wardrobe is updated, their situations aren't.  This is a show about cable news.  The stakes are made to feel urgent, meaningful, NECESSARY.  But the thing is--news is none of these things.  Are they going to not get the essential statistics on the royal baby dubbed in on time?  No.  And if they don't Wolf Blizter is just going to eat some gravel and usher us into a commercial break.  I just don't care about any of it.  I don't care about self righteous liberals trying to point out the error of their conservative coworker's ways.  I don't care about these slightly relevant, but fictionalized news events.  I can barely find it in me to care about these things in the real world news, but I am definitely not buying into the high stakes of these events on a fake news show.  I don't need to hear Sorkin's thinly veiled diatribe spat at me by some one who talks as though he's taken speed.

So, this Sunday night, who's up for either A) Sorkin-themed drinking games (everyone drinks while characters are running) or B) turning off the TV and going out?

Because something's gotta give.  Seriously.