Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom has a character, news executive Charlie Skinner, who says nice things about ThinkProgress in the third episode of the show. I wish I could return the complement to my employer, but The Newsroom, which debuts at 10 PM on Sunday on HBO is a show full of deeply unpleasant characters. That might be excusable if the show had something genuinely new to say about how to report and present the news, and about the temperament it takes to do great reporting in the present environment. But it’s a bizarre combination of naive and condescending. I wrote, in a review for The Atlantic that’s was based only on the pilot (HBO got me the other episodes just this morning):

The Newsroom appears to operate on a hierarchy of condescension. At the top is executive Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston), who describes MacKenzie as if she’s a fragile flower rather than an experienced war correspondent. He says, “She’s mentally and physically exhausted…and she’s been to way too many funerals for a girl her age. She wants to come home.” Will, a notch below him, is unpleasant to everyone in sight, starting in the opening sequences, when he tells a college girl, “You are, without a doubt, the member of the worst period generation period ever period.” (The show later validates Will’s nastiness to her by making her seem spoiled and entitled: She sues her college for emotional distress.) Don (Thomas Sadoski), Will’s soon-to-be-former executive producer, can’t risk snarking on MacKenzie, his replacement, “She’s like a sophomore poli-sci major at Sarah Lawrence.” Jim, MacKenzie’s deputy, snaps back: “She’s exactly like that. I guess the only difference are her two Peabodies and the scar on her stomach from covering a Shiite protest in Islamabad.”

Sorkin’s characters are often accused of sounding alike. Here, what they have in common is a sense that they’re superior to someone who hasn’t submitted to their needs, wishes, and worldview.

At the bottom of this miserable totem pole is Maggie Jordan (Alison Pill), formerly an intern, promoted only recently to be Will’s assistant, who is condescended to by everyone. “He didn’t promote you, honey. He thought you were his assistant,” Don, her negging nebbish of a boyfriend tells her at the beginning of the episode. Will, trying to prove he’s attentive to his staff, insists that her name is Ellen. MacKenzie declares that Maggie is “me, before I grew into myself and got hotter with age!” And when Maggie volunteers for a reporting task, both Don and Jim treat Maggie like an idiot. “Can you do this? You can’t just look it up on Wikipedia,” Don tells her. “It’s true, Maggie,” warns Jim.

The subsequent episodes didn’t improve things. Sorkin’s given us perhaps the worst new female character to debut in 2012 in MacKenzie, who gives tendentious speeches, pretentious lectures on news reporting, and whose behavior is so unprofessional it gave me a physical twitch. When it isn’t condescending to women, The Newsroom makes a fetish of nastiness. Will’s aggression is what’s presented as admirable, his ability to fillet someone dumb, rather than his ability to elicit new information. And that’s a huge problem for the show’s presentation of the news business. There’s not actually anything admirable or interesting about gutting a college student for asking a dumb question at a forum, or lecturing Tea Party adherents about the wealth of the Koch Brothers: instead, it’s an attempt to appeal to the mean, superior, lizard parts of our brains. Sorkin wants Will to be an alternative to the shouty creeps who literally are meant to make Will—and us—feel physically ill in the opening sequence. Will may be an ass of Sorkin’s creation. But that doesn’t mean he’s not an ass.

Listening to Aaron Sorkin talk about The Newsroom, his show about cable news, and Amy Sherman-Palladino respond to Shonda Rhimes’ disappointment that she didn’t make sure Bunheads, her ABC Family ballet show, had a character of color, there are some remarkable similarities. First, Sorkin in New York Magazine:

And this all has to come with the caveat that I don’t really know what I’m talking about…No, I mean it. All of my training and experience and education has been in playwriting. I have no political sophistication or media sophistication, so if I was talking to Howard Kurtz or you, you could easily dismantle whatever argument I’m going to make. It is a layman’s amateur argument. Oftentimes, I write about people who are smarter than I am and know more than I do, and I am able to do that simply by being tutored almost phonetically, sometimes. I’m used to it. I grew up surrounded by people who are smarter than I am, and I like the sound of intelligence. I can imitate that sound, but it’s not organic. It’s not intelligence. It’s my phonetic ability to imitate the sound of intelligence.

And Sherman-Palladino, as Vulture transcribes her on Media Mayhem:

Sherman-Palladino never addressed the race issue point blank, but she did defend the casting choices in the context of a rushed schedule. “I had to find four girls who could dance on point, and also act, and they give you, like, a week and a half to do it. That’s how pilots go.” Then she added: “I don’t do message shows. I don’t give a shit who you learn your life from.” And she doesn’t give a “flying fuck” about eating disorders.

The subjects are different, but the dodges of responsibility are ultimately kind of the same. Sorkin insists he’s just an artist, he doesn’t have anything sophisticated to say, even though the animating subject for a huge chunk of his career has been critiques of the media. He can’t have it both ways. Sherman-Palladino’s insistence that only “message” shows can be held responsible for the ideas they send out into the universe is a weird, critique-evading stance: you can mean no harm and do it anyway. And it’s pretty weird that you’d make stories about young girls and their hopes and dreams if you actually “don’t give a shit who you learn your life from.” People tell stories because they want to influence people, or because they have an argument or critique they want to make. You can’t claim credit for doing that when it’s convenient to you and deny responsibility when it gets uncomfortable.

The bridge is yours.

-Is the golden age of male full-frontal nudity past? Passing? Yet to come?

-These awesome kids tried and convicted The Hunger Games‘ President Snow of war crimes.

-Which Avenger are you? Someone better be something cool, because you’re pretty much out of luck if you’re a lady.

-The Winchester Mystery House is, in fact, an awesome subject for a movie.

-Oh dear Lord, The Newsroom is going to be unbearably pretentious, isn’t it?

Of all the times he’s been fired from television jobs, Keith Olbermann literally could have not picked a more fortuitous time than this to get the axe from Current TV, the small liberal network co-founded by Vice President Al Gore, where he fled last year after he was let go from MSNBC. It may not seem immediately clear why that’s the case. Current and Olbermann almost immediately proved to be a bad fit, with the relationship deteriorating over everything from the state of Olbermann’s studio infrastructure to Olbermann’s missed work days and fussiness over the car service. His firing is certain to be the start of a nasty battle. Olbermann has vowed to sue Current, an action unlikely to endear him to his dwindling pool of future employers. And Current has retained a crisis PR company to help it manage the fallout of its largest star’s dramatic defenestration from an already vulnerable structure.

But Olbermann has one thing going for him—the weekend after he was fired, HBO rolled out the first trailers for The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin’s show based on an extremely Olbermann-like commentator (who, in an interesting shift for Sorkin, happens to be a moderate Republican), played by Jeff Daniels:

As crisis PR goes for Olbermann, it’s a dream. He gets painted as a truth teller stifled by the expectations of his network and the people around him, never mind that flinging Blackberries at your camera operators is utterly un-charming behavior. Aaron Sorkin does love him a principled truth-teller, and in an age when the presidency is on tighter verbal lockdown than ever before, it makes a certain amount of sense that he’d give up on the hope of a Commander in Chief telling it like it is in the White House briefing room and downgrade his fantasies to cable television instead.

But there’s something odd about pretending that the prominent cable networks are cracking down on opinionated anchors. MSNBC may not be as aggressive as Fox News, but it’s hardly an opinion-free space, as the elevation of Rachel Maddow (once an Olbermann protege) or Al Sharpton’s passionate coverage of the killing of Trayvon Martin would indicate. And Olbermann’s on-camera personality is the reason he keeps finding work. It’s been the struggle to get him in front of the camera, and to get him to behave collegially off it that’s plagued him. That’s a much less heroic, and much less Sorkin-ite, narrative.

The somewhat surprising news that John Edwards couldn’t work out a plea deal and has been indicted on charges that he violated campaign finance law by using donations to cover up his affair is sort of vexing for Democrats in that it will be public, messy, and oxygen-depriving heading into an election year. It’s also a pretty awful thing for Edwards’ kids to have to deal with, too, at a time when they’re still grieving their mother. But one person it’s probably going to be pretty great for is Aaron Sorkin, who last year optioned Andrew Young’s Edwards tell-all The Politician and chose it as the project he’ll use to make his directorial debut.

It’s been fascinating to watch Sorkin’s love affair with politics and with politicians curdle, particularly given what a Valentine The American President is to the idea that our highest elected officials get to be people, particularly ones with sex lives:

Obviously, cheating on your dying wife and using donors’ money to cover it up is hugely different than a dashing widower Commander in Chief taking up with a kicky lobbyist, though it’s interesting to see how that storyline might play today. But between The Politician and his Keith Olbermann-tastic project for HBO, Sorkin’s clearly repositioned himself as an angry outsider, a spurned lover of the process.