I wrote earlier this year that The Hour, the BBC’s period drama about the producers, reporters, and anchor on a show of the same title trying to break through the BBC’s strictures and the stifling social environment of the late 1950s, was the show that Aaron Sorkin wanted his HBO drama The Newsroom to be. It was attuned to the actual rhythms and difficulties of reporting, the stories are legitimately revealing rather than pontificating, and the characters face genuine obstacles to getting those stories on the air. And in the second season of the show, which began its run on BBC America last night, I think that’s become even more true, particularly in the way that The Hour is handling the rise of a phenomenon that The Newsroom tried to critique decades later: the rise of commercial television programming aimed at women.

I talked to Abi Morgan, The Hour‘s creator, about the show’s approach to gender in general, and about the kind of programming aimed at women like Marnie (Oona Chaplin), the upper-class wife of The Hour anchor Hector (Dominic West), who begins exploring a career as the host of a cooking show. She explained:

I think if you look at the women, the on-screen talent at that time, on the whole they were either singing along to a puppet, or they were presenting the kind of soft magazine programs that were just starting to come up through the ’50s. I liked the idea of Marnie almost becoming quite literally this professional housewife. She’s this Fanny Cradock-esque character. It also felt like a kind of brilliant, brittle metaphor for this kind of life Marnie finds herself encased in. You’ll see that marriage really is tested through the course of the series….

The mainstay of commercials of that time was the great British housewife. Marnie is very much the consumer of her time. On the wider level, the show is about the birth of capitalism in the ’50s and into the ’60s. The warmongers were finding a way of making money out of nuclear paranoia, [and there was a] global desire to be part of the arms and space race. This parallels what’s going on with Marnie. She’s someone who aspires to a bigger life. When you write a drama set in this era, you have a whole period where if your characters have any gumption or charisma, they have to break away from this suppressive ’50s world.

Where The Newsroom could be viciously dismissive of mass culture aimed at women—Will McAvoy ran himself into trouble in part by insulting a gossip columnist for covering the Real Housewives, and declaring that he’d fix another woman whose primary flaw included consuming that kind of show—The Hour doesn’t try to make judgements about whether it’s bad or not that programming aimed by women exists. Instead, it tries to reckon with what it means that this kind of programming speaks powerfully to the ennui of post-war women like Marnie, who aren’t working, and how their power as consumers affects the entire media landscape. When Bel debates whether or not to run a segment about Christian Dior, she’s also trying to figure out where fashion fits in the hierarchy of news and human interest.

And the show never presents Marnie as stupid for being entranced by a commercial, or seeking out a career using the skills that she has, even if they’re feminine ones. Of course she’s bored! She was bred for a specific role, to be a good wife to a man like Hector, who was expected to play a corresponding part, but instead cheats on her, pursues entertainment in nightclubs where she is not invited, and treats her as if she couldn’t possibly be interested in his career. Marnie is an intelligent, capable woman, but no one asks anything of her, not even that she be available for sex and housekeeping. Even if she’s only valuable to television as a consumer, at least it’s a form of being valued.

The thing that Will McAvoy, and that by extension The Newsroom, never seemed to get, is that consuming frivolous things doesn’t make you a frivolous person. Everyone I know who watches Real Housewives does so because they recognize the show as a social critique folded into a trainwreck like a pill into applesauce. It’s possible to even consume things that you know are bad for you, or that have no redeeming social value whatsoever, to recognize them as such, and to enjoy them anyway. The question is not whether or not someone is a good person for watching certain things. It’s what need they speak to, what itch they scratch.

In The Campaign, out this weekend, Will Ferrell plays an incumbent Congressman who’s running what’s supposed to be an uncontested race, when a pair of wealth brothers by the name of Motch put up a genial dummy, played by Zach Galifianakis, to run against him. Unsurprisingly, Galifianakis confirmed that the brothers, played in the movie by Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow, are meant to be a stand-in for the real-life industrialists and right-wing political funders Charles and David Koch, and mentioned in a recent interview that he found the pair “creepy.”

Other public figures might consider the movie, and Galifianakis’ uneasiness about their influence to be a tribute to their effectiveness. But the Kochs don’t seem to be taking it that way. Phillip Ellender, Koch Industries’ president for government affairs, issued a statement on the brothers’ behalf, saying:

Last we checked, the movie is a comedy. Maybe more to the point is that it’s laughable to take political guidance or moral instruction from a guy who makes obscene gestures with a monkey on a bus in Bangkok…We disagree with his uninformed characterization of Koch and our beliefs. His comments, which appear to be based on false attacks made by our political opponents, demonstrate a lack of understanding of our longstanding support of individual freedom, freedom of expression, and constitutional rights.

While the Koch brothers have become a staple of political coverage, it’s taken longer for them to become fixtures in popular culture, and Ellender’s response suggests they’re not enjoying the attention. This summer, they’ve made an appearance by name in Aaron Sorkin’s HBO drama The Newsroom, when anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) attacked guests on his show who were members of Tea Party groups for not being aware of who their funders were. His coverage earned a rebuke from network owner Leona Lansing (a scenery-munching Jane Fonda), who cautioned Will’s producer against further coverage of the Kochs lest they pull their brands’ advertisements from the company. declared “I got where I am by knowing who to fear,” she said. “They drop Brinks trucks on people they disagree with.” It was a weirdly sinister portrayal, in contrast to the lighter satire The Campaign is expected to offer up.

But as long as the Koch brothers are making heavy investments in political campaigns and grass-roots organizing, they’re probably going to keep popping up in movies and television, at least until someone gets the idea of painting casino magnate Sheldon Adelson as a malevolent power behind the throne, which will probably take Adelson deciding to support someone more credible than Newt Gingrich. Until then, Charles and David Koch might as well enjoy the spectacle of liberals fearing them, and the debate over which one of them Aykroyd and Lithgow are each meant to be.

“One of the lucky things one of the nice, sort of, unintended consequences of working for HBO is that the entire season is written, shot, and locked in the can before the first episode airs,” Aaron Sorkin said at the panel for his show The Newsroom at the Television Critics Association press tour on Wednesday. “So even if you are tempted to try to write a little bit differently to please the people or change someone’s mind, you can’t do it. The season is done.” In other words, he’s happy with his show even if critics dislike it, saying that he “a hundred percent disagree[s]” with viewers who have been perturbed by his portrayals of women. If there was one theme to the exchange, it was that there’s a gap between what Sorkin sees in his own show, and what critics are seeing on screen.

And that division was even more striking because of a presentation earlier in the day of a show that is exactly what Sorkin seems to want The Newsroom to be, only it’s not airing on HBO and Sorkin didn’t create it: The Hour, a period piece about British news broadcasting in the fifties, that aired its first season on BBC America last summer.

Where The Newsroom began with vague arguments about will (and Will) and has moved into the nebulous motivations of his cranky corporate overlords, The Hour has clearly-delineated obstacles to the excellent reporting of the news. In the first season of The Hour (as was also the case with the miniseries State of Play), the show’s public broadcasters struggled to get a story out despite significant reporting hurdles thrown up by the government and pressure applied by the agents of state. In the second season, star Romola Garai, who plays producer Bel Rowley, explains that “There’s a new character that comes in at ITV, which is the big rival to the BBC. It’s launched at the beginning of the series. And they have their own show, which is very much a competitor to ‘The Hour.’ And their Head of News is a very dashing and attractive man who Bel hates and then grows to find curiously attractive.” That’s a specific and important story to tell, and one that requires more specific contrasts between styles and ethics of reporting (as well as more new characters), one that Will hints at in his monologue about providing advertising-free space for news broadcasting, that The Hour will spend part of six full episodes on.

And where The Newsroom has Neal as its blogger caricature, Don as the producer who wants to do right but is failing at it, and Maggie as, apparently, the person designated for Sorkin to establish and then “have them slip on as many banana peels as you want,” as he put it on Wednesday, The Hour’s characters are more clearly connected to larger positions and larger pressure points. This season on The Hour, Hector (Dominic West), the aristocratic anchor who found his nerve in the previous season, will find himself disgruntled when he’s forced to share the position with Freddie (Ben Whishaw), the young, radical reporter who backed him up previously. And The Hour’s creator Abi Morgan explained that they’re part of a larger alignment within the galaxy of the show.

“You have that internal triangle going on as well with Bel as the kind of mediator of those two,” she explained. “And then the bigger one is the birth of other channels, in particular ITV, and it’s about the commercial success of a commercial channel like ITV versus a public service broadcaster like the BBC. So we have that, and then, on a wider level, it’s about Britain aligning itself with America, trying to compete with America, but also the friend of America. So it has a bigger issue about the nuclear arms race and their relationship with America and really the kind of duck and cover terror of the late ’50s where life felt very short and very prescient.”

Morgan promised other issues as well: race, in the form of booming immigration to Britain and the far-right response to it, as well as a love triangle between a black secretary, a black doctor, and a second-generation British Jew; the rise of glamor and celebrity culture imported from the U.S., which Morgan said would go to Hector’s head; and the launch of Sputnik. The Newsroom‘s response to these issues has been to treat anti-immigrant bigots like fools rather than powerful forces and to provide an opportunity for Will’s saintliness even as he makes a range of equal-opportunity offensive comments, and to egregiously insult women who work in and consume celebrity culture.

On a character level, there’s a dramatic gap between Bel’s hypercompetence when it’s juxtaposed against Maggie’s perpetual mistakes and the vast gaps in supposedly-genius MacKenzie’s knowledge about basic world facts. Sorkin seems to believe that he’s firmly established MacKenzie as brilliant even though we rarely see her doing substantive work on the show. He insisted that “she’s got the whole meeting with the staff in which she’s extremely deft and a great leader, and then once you nail that down, it’s, for me, permissible to have her hit ‘send all’ instead of just ‘send’,” even as he ignored the wildly hysterical reaction and technical ignorance he wrote for her in the aftermath of that error. Morgan, by contrast, shows Bel doing much more of her job in the first season of The Hour, giving her working life and her affair with Hector balance, and having her excellence in the former be a part of the attraction that leads to the latter. And she outlined plans to expand the relationship between Bel and foreign correspondent Lix, and to contrast them with the women they meet in London’s burgeoning club scene.

Finally, The Newsroom seems plagued by a problem that I don’t think I would have identified before Sorkin and Jeff Daniels’ presentation on Wednesday. Given Sorkin’s history, I think it was reasonable to assume that Will was meant to be a straightforward hero, which is why is deeply unpleasant behavior, particularly towards women comes across as obsessive-repulsive. Now, I think Sorkin believes he’s writing and Daniels believes he’s portraying a nuanced anti-hero, when in reality, Sorkin is struggling to write an anti-hero in a realm where he’s previously written straightforward champions. “We present this Will’s mission to civilize as something, first of all, that people roll their eyes at, and second, that always blows up in his face,” Sorkin said in response to a question from me. “Hubris on this show is always punished.” Except it’s not. When Will’s mission to civilize meets with derision, the women who are offended by him are portrayed as bitches, and in one case, as actually unhinged. When Will reflects with his therapist on his bullying of a Santorum supporter on his show, he feels bad later, but in the broadcast, he ends with the last, tough word, and faces no drop in ratings or professional consequences. Sorkin hasn’t found a transgressive thing for Will to do that makes the audience excited that’s the equivalent of Walt’s cooking meth or Omar robbing drug dealers. Instead, he’s made us feel bad and cranky about his case for values that many of the viewers who dislike the show actually share.

The Hour, on the other hand, has absolutely straightforward flawed heroes, and I think it benefits from that clarity, and its willingness to visit down real consequences. Hector may start the season riding a wave of celebrity at the dramatic expense of his job performance, but from the promo we saw at press tour, he swiftly ends up in the clink for an as-yet-unidentified transgression. That, not a drink in the face, is a true consequences to face for hubris.

I thought last night’s episode of The Newsroom was an improvement in its portrayal of the actual process of reporting and the kind of mistakes writers can make in both sourcing and tone when they’re in the heat of a broadcast, if not in Ladies Knowing How to Do Things, or Having a Modern Understanding of The Internet. But there was one thing I thought was disconcerting about the episode: the divide between the way the show talked about Will McAvoy’s father’s drinking and abusive behavior, and the way The Newsroom has consistently portrayed Charlie Skinner.

I’ve been bothered for a while by the way The Newsroom treats Charlie. He’s ostensibly on the side of the angels, and we do see him protecting News Night’s editorial independence. But the show also treats his heavy daytime drinking as if it’s an amusing character quirk, rather than a problem, something that leads him to get so angry at his colleagues at lunch that he’s spitting in their faces as he rants. And we often see him in full-throttle holler mode, going after his employees with an indignation that seems less passionate than abusive, and after executives in a way that seems less strategic than unhinged (speaking of which, where is Leona with the scheming?). Sloan’s screw-up tonight was obviously significant, if motivated by concerns about both the truth and the safety of Japanese people who live near Fukishima. But Charlie’s response, calling her “girl” rather than treating her as if she’s a professional who make a serious error, was bullying rather than a demonstration of commitment to high standards of journalism.

And it came in an episode where we learn that Will’s father was a physically abusive alcoholic. It was an interesting kernel of a revelation, meant to tie together Will’s response to the sorority girl questioner from the pilot and Will’s treatment of a black, gay aide to Rick Santorum, a callback to Chris Matthews’ on-air showdown with Robert Traynham. But instead of showing this and letting the revelation really sink in, The Newsroom chose to tell us in a therapy session Will finally attends after flubbing a show sign-off because he isn’t sleeping. It’s interesting to know that Will has a protective instinct, but given that he’s never demonstrated it to anyone other than MacKenzie before last night, there was something awfully tidy about suddenly making Will Sloan’s Kindly Brother in the story where we had this revelation. And just as The Newsroom’s told us that MacKenzie is a brilliant producer and thinks that means it never has to show her booking a guest or editing a story, the show seemed content to tell us that things had been bad and use that admission to drive plot rather than to make plot clear and to develop characters further.

A show with a stronger sense of drama might let us build to this conclusion and do work to set up Will’s journalistic relationship with Sloan rather than shoehorning it in when necessary to tell a story. A more searching one might even have questioned both Will’s instincts to bully and to protect as insufficient, given that saving women, especially by encouraging them to lie about their intelligence, is not the same as supporting them. And a more consistent one would recognize that certain behaviors are damaging whether exhibited by off-screen abusive fathers or shouty, grandfatherly news executives.

“For the first time in my life, when confronted with a horrible, insensitive person, I knew exactly what I wanted to say and I said it,” bookstore owner Kathleen Kelly exults in You’ve Got Mail, when she finally delivers the perfect zinger to Joe Fox, the chain store mogul who is putting her out of business. In Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Evelyn, the unhappy housewife who’s kept silent her entire life, finally finds her words after an obnoxious teenager steals her parking space and tells her “Let’s face it, lady, I’m younger and faster than you are,” totaling the younger woman’s car, and declaring “Let’s face it, honey, I’m older than you are and have more insurance than you do.” It’s a very specifically female dream, I think, to be able to deliver an cutting line, to express yourself and your anger perfectly, without censoring yourself in the name of politeness, or fear. And it’s a dream that Political Animals, the USA Network’s new miniseries, which started last night running against Breaking Bad, expresses perfectly.

As I explained in The Atlantic, Elaine Barrish, the show’s stand-in for Hillary Clinton as a former First Lady turned Secretary of State:

Is brilliant and competent, and one of the pleasures of the show comes from seeing her as a version of Hillary Clinton who is tougher on her Bill (here called Bud, and played with a thick coat of oil by Ciaran Hinds) than in real life. “I know, given your epic levels of narcissism, that it’s impossible for you to fathom this loss has nothing to do with you, but imagine for a moment that it doesn’t,” Elaine tells the husband she’s about to kick to the curb in the pilot episode, after she concedes her run for the presidency. “The country loves you, Bud. They will always love you. It’s me they have mixed feelings about.”

Greg Berlanti, who created the series, gives Weaver lots of juicy lines with which to zing the powerful, entitled men who make her life more difficult—it’s a terrific fantasy of having exactly the right words precisely in the moment that you need them. After Victor, the Russian ambassador, cops a feel while she’s giving a speech, Elaine remains composed. But in the hallway afterwards, she confronts him. “Did you enjoy the ass-grab, Victor? Good, because the next time you touch me, I’m going to rip off your tiny shriveled balls and serve them to you in a cold borscht soup,” she tells him, before switching into Russian to inform him “I will fuck your shit up. Do you hear me?”

A lot of the time, fantasies about strong women turn strong into invulnerable. As much as it can be fun to see Angelina Jolie kick ass, her lipstick perfect even as she rappels down a building, that requirement that female heroes have no flaws or weaknesses except those that can provide a few brooding, Bond-like shots per movie or television season, creates problems for how we talk about strong women on television. On The Newsroom, MacKenzie McHale isn’t grating because she has vulnerabilities, but because she seems to lack capabilities: we see only hysteria, not her ability to work through it, to procure a source, to effectively fire Will up. By contrast, Elaine has a deep attachment to the man she was married to for thirty years, but she works through those feelings as opposed to being ruled by them.

The requirement to be perfect, impregnably principled, unswayed by those who’ve done you wrong, is exhausting. And it’s narratively uninteresting. As I wrote in Slate:

In the second episode, there’s a flashback to Elaine and Bud’s time in the White House that acts as the corrollary to the questions Susan asks of Elain. Bud says to his wife, “You should leave me. I’ll cheat again. And I’ll lie again. And I’ll break your heart again. Retain Stacy Phillips. You have to come out of this looking good. You get no flack from me, Elaine.” But she stays until the moment, impossible to explain or justify to anyone, where she’s finally had enough.

As much as I wish I could save myself some heartache, there is no clear answer as to how Hillary and Elaine ended up with Bill and Bud, why Hillary stayed, and why in Political Animals, Elaine left. Hillary and Elaine are reminders that strength and brilliance won’t save us from complexity, confusion, error and pain. Instead, they’re tools to use to work through the most difficult decisions of our lives.

I don’t want to pretend it’s easy or clear to walk away from a man you were married to for thirty years no matter how he hurt you, or that work-life balance is simple. I don’t want my heroines, my strong women, to be without weakness and vulnerabilities. I want to see them possessed of the self-awareness to recognize those points in themselves, and the capacities to grapple with them. If men are allowed to fall into error around power and violence and remain fascinating anti-heroes, women should have room to do the same about love and family as well. It’s not the site of your weakness that makes you a rich and serious character. It’s how you deal with the dark places in your heart.

As much as I’m not enjoying The Newsroom, recapping it for Press Play has actually helped me clarify some things that I care about in progressive television. I don’t just want to see progressives or progressive-coded characters win because they’re factually or morally correct, or because they do the right thing against the odds. I want to see clear explanations of systems, and to see the characters work through them. As I explained in this week’s recap, that’s part of why Don is becoming my favorite character on the show, because he’s all muddled up in the gears:

After Will’s epic on-air apology for falling down on the job, Don sits down to have a heart-to-heart with Jim, who has effectively replaced him. “I would have loved to be part of that. I could have done the show you guys want to do. I’m equipped for that,” he confesses. “You’ve got a mandate. Bring viewers to ten o’clock. I don’t . . . I have to cover Natalee Holloway. And you guys set me up to look like an asshole before I even got started.” Don is like Will, to a certain extent, a talented man who succumbed to the pressure to put on a show that was likable rather than substantive. But unlike Will, he’s relatively anonymous. He could be fired and Elliot’s show would keep ticking on without him. If Don is going to live in hopes of being able to make the kind of show that Jim and MacKenzie are making for Will, he has to keep his job. And that means kowtowing to a lot of unattractive people’s unattractive senses of what counts as news…

And I’m not even sure Jim gets the message later when Maggie, in one of the few moments in The Newsroom where a woman gets to explain something to a man, tells Jim that Don’s failure has more complex roots than Jim acknowledges. “Don’s hands are tied,” Maggie says. “He got marching orders to get the ratings up at ten. And he’s driving a different car than McAvoy. Elliot’s smart, but he can’t do what McAvoy does. Plus, his salary’s tied to ratings.” That, not a studied, cowardly commitment to blandness for its own sake, is the reality of cable news—and the actual source of journalism’s problems.

The show just seems to me like it’s giving up an enormous amount of dramatic potential in having characters spend most of the show making speeches, on air or to each other, dealing with their personal lives, and then, throwing us five minutes of people pulling together the guests who will appear on air or Charlie negotiating with Leona and Reese. Sorkin wants us to think his characters are Interesting Hero Journalists but we essentially never see them doing actual journalism, so we don’t get a sense that Maggie is great at weeding out idiots, or that Jim is terrific at developing relationships with sources, or that Neal is unbelievably good at sorting through documents, something that would have been particularly useful in this last week’s episode in documenting the Koch brothers’ funding of Tea Party operations.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: the most important thing in news, cable or otherwise, is not what Will McAvoy says on air. It’s what his staff has the resources to dig up. It’s what kinds of pressures producers like Don are under, and what they can negotiate to broadcast. State of Play did a particularly nice job of this in the scene where Bill Nighy’s editor went to meet with a suit who laid out the specific issues at stake in their negotiations with the government over broadcast licenses, and then capped the budget for a big scandal story the reporters were working on. The miniseries spent serious time negotiating with editors over content, whether they’d proved a story well enough, whether they were at risk of getting sued. By the time something gets to someone like Will McAvoy, or to the front page of the paper, most of the pressure’s already been exerted on the information. We get flashes of that with Don. But The Newsroom can only get better the more it focuses on actual process and on actual journalism, not on telling Will, or anyone in the audience, that we’re good people because we have certain facts at our disposal and hold certain opinions.

I know I went hard on The Newsroom on Friday, but now that y’all have seen it, I want to talk about the way the show treats reporting, something I wrote about at length for the lovely people at Press Play:

The staff of Will’s show figures out earlier than anyone else that Deepwater Horizon will be a major environmental catastrophe because Neal (Dev Patel), whom Will has earlier identified as “the Indian stereotype of an IT guy” proves to have exceedingly useful insights into the workings of offshore drilling rigs. He gained this knowledge, possessed by no one else on any staff of any publication in all the land, because, my hand to God, he “built a volcano in primary school.”…Jim, possessed of the world’s most coincidental personal connections, turns out to have a college schoolmate working at BP (who makes time to give Jim a ring in the midst of a massive disaster) and a sister who works at Halliburton…The Newsroom cuts away as soon as anyone on staff has a source on the phone. The show is supremely uninterested in the actual and lengthy processes of source development and research. Maybe it’s a tactic to keep the focus on Sorkin’s fast-talking, fact-spewing sock puppets, or to make sure the show whips through a story from the near-past each week, but it lends an airless quality to the proceedings. Everything we need to know, apparently, is already here in this glass and chrome box.

The rarity with which pop culture gets reporting right remains a mystery to me, particularly given the extent to which television has cracked procedurals. Reporting a complex story is exactly like cracking a crime: you have either a precipitating traumatic event or a hint of a secret system at work, pursuit of credible leads and dead ends, development of trust, attempts to build an airtight case, and often, revisions before the final presentation. Sometimes the story changes the world, as with Spencer Ackerman’s reporting on the FBI’s use of virulently anti-Islam training materials, which got President Obama to order them scrubbed. Sometimes all a reporter gets is the satisfaction of a job well-done. Whether on an episodic basis, or on a story-as-season-long arc basis as the original British State of Play did, this should be a relatively easy thing for television to just nail.

The thing that I find genuinely disturbing about The Newsroom is its narrow identification of cable news as the problem and Will McAvoy as the solution. Cable news polarization is a problem, but it’s a problem that ultimately affects a fairly small number of Americans day to day and year to year. The larger problems are ones that affect all sorts of news programs and publications: shrinking staffs and budgets that support less-ambitious reporting, government secrecy and control of information, increasingly stultified and PR-controlled interviews that decrease the possibility of honest conversation and homogenize reporting. Tone and presentation are issues that float on top of this sea of larger challenges.

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.

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.