Aaron Sorkin Has Apologised for The Newsroom

"I wish that I could go back to the beginning of The Newsroom and start again."

Meg Watson
April 23, 2014

Everyone has an opinion about Aaron Sorkin. Whether it's a gushing adoration for imagining Josh Lyman and Jed Bartlet, an intense frustration for his silver-tongued yet repetitive Sorkinisms, or a disbelief in the fact he can't write a decent female character to save his life (barring CJ Cregg, of course). We've all had arguments about the 52-year-old screenwriter at some point, and his highly criticised HBO drama The Newsroom only intensified the debate. Now, in a discussion at Tribeca Film Festival, Sorkin finally (if not a little begrudgingly) acknowledged its faults.

"I’m going to let you all stand in for everyone in the world, if you don’t mind," said Sorkin to a live audience. "I think you and I got off on the wrong foot with The Newsroom and I apologise and I’d like to start over."

If only that were possible. The show, soon entering its third and final season, has faced harsh scrutiny since its 2012 premiere for its overt preachiness, malformed relationships between characters, and ultimately for the fact that it's nowhere near as good as The West Wing.

“I feel like I’m just now starting to learn how to write it,” Sorkin said. "I wish that I could go back to the beginning of The Newsroom and start again... but I'm feeling really good about how the third season is going."

The bulk of his 'apology' went out to the journalists offended by the show's seemingly overt criticism of the modern press. “I think that there’s been a terrible misunderstanding," Sorkin said, sounding a little too much like Gob from Arrested Development. "I did not set the show in the recent past in order to show the pros how it should have been done. That was and remains the furthest thing from my mind. I set the show in the recent past because I didn’t want to make up fake news... I wasn’t trying to and I’m not capable of teaching a professional journalist a lesson. That wasn’t my intent and it’s never my intent to teach you a lesson or try to persuade you or anything.”

Every scene from the show ever, would beg to differ. #sorrynotsorry

Via Huffington Post.

Published on April 23, 2014 by Meg Watson
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