When I grow up I want to be Aaron Sorkin

MANILA, Philippines - I’m a huge fan of Aaron Sorkin, writer of The Social Network and Moneyball. Though I’ve never seen The West Wing, I’ve heard nothing but high praise for the show, which he also executive produced.

When I grow up, I want to write just like him.

Now, he brings us another series that’s intense, relentless, and extremely verbose: HBO’s The Newsroom. This is right-smack in the middle of Sorkin territory. A quick peek at the Internet and you find trivia like how director David Fincher of The Social Network was asked by his producers to make sure to bring the film in at 120 minutes maximum. Fincher didn’t want to cut any of Sorkin’s script, so he had the cast deliver their dialogue faster. This made The Social Network a dazzling display of rhetoric that gave Sorkin an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

The Newsroom is no different. Set in a world of a fictional cable news network, the characters are newsmen and women — articulate, passionate, and under a lot of stress. They think quickly on their feet and put together the news in a matter of seconds. It wouldn’t be an engaging drama if their personal lives didn’t merge with their professional lives and in the flurry of activity in a live news television studio, Sorkin creates a believable space where people end up dealing with private conflicts while gathering and presenting current events and issues. At every step, you are on the edge of your seat, figuring out which of the two grab you more — the news and how they deliver it or their personal challenges that get caught in the whirlwind.

It’s chaotic but it’s a whole lot of fun.

What makes Sorkin a genius is that his dialogue-heavy script is filled with information that reveals his characters and their lives in a matter of a few minutes. They talk like real people, referencing things in their past that the audience isn’t privy to. The show is relentless in its delivery of information that you just have to take it for granted that you can keep up and you find that you do. Sorkin’s script always manages to highlight what you need to keep up with the plot and realize that the rest is just there to complete the picture.

The Newsroom is grounded by an amazing ensemble cast led by Jeff Daniels (The Squid and the Whale), Emily Mortimer (Hugo, Shutter Island), Alison Pill (Midnight in Paris, Milk), Olivia Munn (Magic Mike), and theater veterans John Gallagher Jr. and Thomas Sadoski.

Critics have given it mixed reviews saying that the show acts merely as a pedestal from which Sorkin gets to preach and act all self-righteous. Maybe I believe in the idealism that the show projects, as the show challenges the current state of news reporting and eloquently raises its middle finger to mediocre news reportage. The first eight minutes of the pilot episode contains probably one of the most thought-provoking and honest statements of the decline of human nature in memory. It raises questions and makes you think.

Maybe the detractors are right; that The Newsroom is “sanctimonious” and “intellectually self-serving.” But in the first eight minutes of the pilot, Jeff Daniels’ news anchor character, Will McAvoy, says as part of a hair-raising speech, “We aspired to intelligence. We didn’t belittle it – it didn’t make us feel inferior.” I look around me and I find that statement to be honest and going straight for the jugular. Isn’t that what we want our shows to be?

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The Newsroom premiered on Wednesday, Aug. 1 at 9 p.m. on HBO.