The Newsroom: Critic’s Notebook ⇥ latimes.com

Mary McNamara, for the Los Angeles Times:

What HBO and creator Aaron Sorkin hoped would be a smart, provocative drama has become an unintentional piece of performance art.

That’s the only way to explain the strangely vitriolic response to his new show,”The Newsroom,”which premiered Sunday night to a round of mixed to splutteringly negative reviews. Many critics, including this one, objected to Sorkin’s decision to sacrifice the quality of the narrative in order to hit certain talking points — mostly about the state of journalism, the state of politics and the vicious dumbing down of American culture.

Much of this controversy seems to be a rushed defence out of denial. People in the news don’t like to see their medium get such a damning presentation. People in any profession that has fallen from grace wouldn’t like to see that. For what it’s worth, I found the first episode to be a phenomenal piece of television, and I look forward to the rest of the series.