House of Eratosthenes

I see that new teevee show prominently featuring the snotty smug muppet-looking English lady is being mentioned again, also that the series premier took place Sunday. I suppose this means we’ll be hearing a lot about it in the days & weeks ahead. Not sure how to react to such a thought. I suppose the thing to do is sit back and enjoy the comedy value.

The last time Aaron Sorkin had a high-profile political television show, liberals used it to cope with the decline and fall of the Clinton Presidency and the long winter of the Bush Years. The West Wing was a coping mechanism for the death of a liberal dream, and so is The Newsroom. Both are an escape into fantasy to avoid dealing with the harsh reality.

On an episode of Seinfeld, George is stung by an insult but is unable to think of a retort, so he spends days trying to come up with the perfect comeback, until he finally thinks of it and travels around the country to get the chance to deliver it. The Newsroom, set in the past, and jumping in right before the political balance tilted toward the Republicans in the mid-term elections, is the same thing.

The Newsroom is Sorkin’s sad attempt to win an argument by rewriting history and coming up with all the comebacks that his side couldn’t think of two years ago. It’s the sad and pathetic spectacle of an ideology creating its own fantasy version of its reality in which it won the argument.

Unlike The West Wing, The Newsroom isn’t set in an alternate world in which the universe innately favors liberals. Instead it’s set in an alternate version of the past, in which liberals were smarter and won all the arguments that they ended up losing here. And the existence of The Newsroom is the greatest possible concession that the argument was lost.

As I’ve noted previously about the left-wing mindset, coping with the simple human-experience concept of scarcity vs. abundance:

I see them constantly trapped in the thought-whirlpool that the goal must be to make something more highly regarded and highly valued, and the surest way to get there is to make that thing more plentiful, ideally, so that it becomes impossible to ever get away from it. This is a guaranteed fail because no person or thing has ever become more highly prized or cherished as a result of being more frequently seen. Natural laws of economics and human nature dictate that the opposite must be true.

Media messages, however, must be a special case; the above comments do not entirely apply to them, because as a sales pitch proliferates and it becomes harder and harder to get away from it, it can become more effective. However, it does seem they eventually reach a saturation point, a jump-the-shark threshold of “Head on! Apply directly to the forehead!”

That diminishing-returns event seems to happen later with peppy, witty, talk-at-a-jackrabbit-pace metrosexual-and-proud cable teevee shows. From what I saw of The West Wing, and David E. Kelly’s Boston Legal, this was reached. There’s a reason they’re not on the air anymore.

We actually got hooked on BL over at my place for a little while. But eventually it got achingly tiresome, and it wasn’t just because the political opinions expressed were outside of my sympathies. It got predictable and boring. Not a Sorkin creation, but the same principle has to apply. The whole point of the show is to 1) state and re-state the same salient points about the same characters, insofar as what distinguishes them from other characters; 2) express lefty opinions to make lefties feel good about themselves, and 3) to be extremely witty. Coming in at a distant last-place, is to advance some kind of a story…after awhile, it becomes unmistakable that the story no longer arouses the passions of the writers and you’re left with just a bunch of “wit” which has diminished to nothing more than sarcasm. And you’re left tuning in, sacrificing your sacred teevee-viewing time, to learn: Alan Shore is very passionate and witty, and Denny Crane is eccentric and strange. Okay, got it.

What’s on the other channel?

The whole point of the show is to 1) state and re-state the same salient points about the same characters, insofar as what distinguishes them from other characters; 2) express lefty opinions to make lefties feel good about themselves

So…. you’re saying that the whole point of the exercise was to distill down into half-hour blocks the way all liberals act about everything, all the time?

This is yet more proof, if any is still required, that America is a center-right country. As liberals never, ever tire of patting themselves on the back — it’s the entire point of the exercise — Boston Legal would still be on the air if national Democratic majorities were anything but statistical aberrations.

[Which, incidentally, is why I love the concept of shows like Boston Legal and the West Wing — the sooner our precious little snowflake twentysomethings learn that 99 times out of 100, “passionate, witty” banter is just whistling past the graveyard of the speaker’s mental, emotional, and spiritual vacuity, the better off we’ll be as a society. In that sense…. godspeed, Mr. Sorkin].
- Severian | 06/26/2012 @ 08:47
We actually got hooked on BL over at my place for a little while.

Me, too. I continued to watch because I love me some William Shatner, even though his character visibly morphed from kooky to batshit crazy guy in a wrap around jacket. I’m sure that the writers for BL wrote what they imagined conservatives must be like because they’ve never actually met one in their little cocoon. Unlike me, though, as I cannot get away from the fucking leftist trope for more than the 6-1/2 hours of sleep that I get a day.

I will admit to said situation being useful when I argue with a liberal because I completely understand their point of view (and dismiss it as the idiocy that it is), while they have no idea of how I think. At all. Which means that they are continually dumbfounded by my ability to shred their arguments so easily. I guess it’s because I’m a raaaaacist or something.
- Physics Geek | 06/26/2012 @ 10:37
And when Aaron Sorkin has a new show, can Rod Lurie be far behind? I’m looking at that guy’s Wikipedia profile and trying to figure out why he ever got out of entertainment reporting. He called Danny DeVito a testicle with arms? That’s rude. It’s also awesome. It’s also funnier, smarter and more true to life than pretty much any of the chunks of crap he’s put up on the big or small screens since. We’ve got the new “West Wing”. Now we need the new “Commander In Chief” for even more craptasticness.
- Rich Fader | 06/26/2012 @ 13:29

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“The Newsroom”Tuesday, June 26th, 2012

“The Newsroom”
Tuesday, June 26th, 2012