The original post: /r/television by /u/visiny on 2025-03-12 13:23:08.
The show itself isn’t very good, the romantic leads with their negative chemistry they have is off-putting, the side characters are annoying except for the slumdog millionaire actor, and as someone who unironically likes Sorkinisms, this show seems to present the worst of his writing traits.
The writing is just so bad with how smug, congratulatory and self-satisfying the dialogue is. And the actual actors play super annoying characters, be it intentionally or unintentionally. The character Mac is one of the most laughably self-righteous characters on the show and I really don’t understand why they give her such an unlikable backstory because if the aim is to have the character win us over, they are failing miserably at it. I don’t know how Aaron Sorkin writes women but he should have gotten better at it, not worse. It makes me dislike Alison Pill immensely and I’m glad I saw her in other things first or I would permanently find her unlikable as an actress. Having a will-they-won’t-they with the secondary characters who we also dislike, neither the dude pining for her nor her on-again off-again boyfriend who apparently cheated on her but they kind of brush it under the rug? They do a lot of brushing under the rug when the show focuses on relationship drama and it really shouldn’t. The show’s attempts to be farcical aren’t very amusing either and come of hacky 90% of the time but not in a good way, like a character about to chase after someone in the street a la 90s romcoms but then a bus swerves and splashes them with puddle water. Ha… ha? Very hokey.
But the actual crux of the show, being a newsroom, is not that great either. The worst part is even though the show predicted just how bad the you-know-who party would be (yet also simultaneously having no idea how bad it really is now) and is somewhat prescient, it just presents itself in such an off-putting way that no one is gonna respond to it.
The HBO-caliber acting mixed in with the lame writing and dialogue doesn’t mesh well, it either should have gone full silly and over-the-top, or be more nuanced in its presentation.