Six Things I Won’t Miss About Aaron Sorkin’s Shows

This week Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing and The Newsroom, announced that for the foreseeable future he was quitting television. This is fairly significant news, but you get the feeling that Sorkin was perhaps looking for more of an outpouring of grief than he received.

Although he has created some of the most compelling drama on television (don’t pretend you already knew what a filibuster was), Sorkin is also the bespectacled cliché of a prestige television showrunner – defensive, arrogant (in his ‘I QUIT!’ interview with The Los Angeles Times he remarked of his successful tenure, “I’ve done four shows, and only one of them was The West Wing“) and a raging coke head.

In terms of TV auteurship, Sports Night, The West Wing, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and The Newsroom all reek of the same Sorkinisms — -isms which look like the Star Spangled banner, smell like the Constitution and taste like the sweat of patriots.

The thing about Aaron Sorkin was that you always had the feeling that he was talking down to you. He is that guy at the party who answers your question in a bored drawel, eyes only half open, and makes you wish you hadn’t been polite enough to engage with him in the first place. Of course he was always pushing a staunchly Democratic agenda – no piece of culture is without bias – but it never felt like he was engaging with your ideas, but more telling you what they should be. “This is integrity… idiot.”

These are the things I will not miss about Aaron Sorkin’s TV shows:

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#1: The Woman Problem, or “Donna, let me explain democracy to you…”

Aaron Sorkin’s apparent inability to create three dimensional female characters has been written about extensively. Every Sorkin show features tough talking broads who are ultimately looking for the guidance of the good men around them.

Sorry, just did a lil’ vomit. Okay, I’m back.

Sorkin’s women are ditzy troublemakers who make the men around them grab their rapidly receeding hair and scream in frustration. They are Donna, the subservient symbol of sexual tension, Mackenzie looking at Will with misty admiration, Dana constantly being patronised by the jocks around her and Ainsley Hayes! Oh god, she is the worst. After being asked by another woman if she feels demeaned by the sexual comments of her male collagues, Ainsley says, “I like it when the guys tease me. It’s an inadvertent show of respect that I’m on the team and I don’t mind it when it gets sexual. And you know why? I like sex.”

Oh… wait, what?

Thanks for teaching us about misogyny, Sam!

Sorkin has often refuted claims that his writing is peppered with casual misogony by pointing to the fact that these women have jobs that are just as important as men. Cool defence Sorky, except for the fact that even his most rounded out female character C.J. Cregg is presented as the emotional (read: frivolous and fickle) member of staff, who acts on sentimental impulses that constantly put the administration at risk. The number of times that tall glass of water has to apologise to the likes of Josh, Sam and Toby is ASTOUNDING.

Sure it’s nice to see roles for women on TV that aren’t just mother, girlfriend or wife. But it’s also nice to see women playing these roles without their judgement being constantly crowded by feelings and the apparent insanity that only comes with the heavy burden of owning a vagina. Or perhaps I’m just, as Josh Lyman puts it, a “paranoid Berkeley shiksa feminista”! Good call, Josh.

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#2: The Cornball Problem, or “America’s darkest days have always been followed by its finest hours!”

I’m not a monster. I like a little cheese atop of my TV cracker, just like anyone else. But there is sentimentality, and then there is Sorkin.

His shows are about the triumph of the American Dream and the institutions that uphold this awesome intergrity, expressed in the most saccharine manner imaginable. So saccharine, that it comes off as super phony.

The West Wing is famously obsessed with Good Men doing Good Things and then tearfully smiling at each other when they save humanity at the end of the episode. Post 9/11 The Newsroom is a little darker (The West Wing aired during the Bush era, but its optimisim was a comfort and a ‘You could have it so much better!’ shout out to American voters), however it’s still saturated with Good Men pontificating on what a swell country America was/can/will be. Even when Will hates America, he loves America!

Sorkin’s writing is unforgivably cheesy, unforgivable because the cheesiness comes not from a love of people but a love of America. Whatever, patriotism is swell, but if it results in a scene where a journalist  – eager to get back to work to report on breaking news – looks at a pilot’s badge and then emotionally informs him “Our armed forces killed Osama Bin Laden for you tonight”? Like he personally went out with a rocket launcher and brought that terrorist fucker down himself in the name of the U.S of A?  And everyone cries and hugs? And they happen to be on a goddamn plane at the time?

Yeah, as if that would ever happen on television.

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#3: The Monologue Problem or “Did you know that two thousand years ago a Roman citizen, bla, bla, bla…”

You know how in real life when people have a conversation they tend to take turns speaking and respond to what the other has said? In Sorkin world, that exchange happens for a short time before the father figure of the piece, the moral center and intellectual superior to all, steps up and gives a complicated speech to explain a concept that should take less than ten seconds.

Want to discuss the threat of war? Let’s talk about space travel and the face of God! Need an answer to that human rights problem? First tell me about your favourite dead Irish writer! Call me narrow minded, but I just find it really hard to believe that two sports anchors know quite that amount of Latin.

For television shows concerned with pretty fast paced industries, Sorkin’s characters sure spend a lot of time pontificating on the capabilities of the human spirirt and not a lot of time solving dilemmas in a timely fashion — so much so that Vulture published a Sorkin Monologue Generator overnight. We get it, analogies!

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#4: The Walking Problem, or “Hey, where are we?”

OK, so people who work on television and in politics are busy. They probably DO have to do a lot of walking and talking. But all the damn time!? Down so many corridors!? What is the point of having an office!? Banter, segue, banter, let’s go in this door!

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#5: The Self Righteousness Problem, or “We’ll be the champion of facts and the mortal enemy of innuendo, speculation, hyperbole, and nonsense. We’re not waiters in a restaurant serving you the stories you asked for just the way you like them prepared…”

URGH. Just, URGH.

If you have watched five minutes of any of Sorkin’s TV shows you will know that they are filled to the brim with the most sanctimonious, self righteous humans you will ever have the displeasure of viewing.

They are IMPORTANT men doing IMPORTANT things to a soundtrack of a thousand heralding trumpets. They’re arrogant and they are rarely challenged because they are working for the GREATER GOOD™, except when they are challenged by other arrogant sanctimonious men/women who are soon taught to know better. Sometimes they’re so important, they don’t remember anyone’s names.

They are so steadfast in their ideals that they are willing to betray their friends, put people in danger, lie, go to jail and get people fired. There is rarely a negative consequence for them, because in this black and white world there is only right or wrong. They are continuously faced with crisis situations that are worsened by the ‘wrong’ people trying to lead them astray.

Particularly in The West Wing and The Newsroom, Teacher Sorkin is preaching to his audience the standard that he expects of us. Mac tells Will that her desire is, “Reclaiming journalism as an honourable profession… Civility, respect, and a return to what’s important; the death of bitchiness; the death of gossip and voyeurism; speaking truth to stupid. No demographic sweet spot; a place where we all come together”. If he were ever to read this article, he would probably whisper in my ear, “You’re not a real journalist” and then throw me in a volcano. If I ever go missing, this is probably why.

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#6: The Jacket Problem, or *arm* *arm* *flip*

No one puts on a jacket that way. They never will.

[UPDATE: Apparently Martin Sheen’s jacket flip is actually less to do with Aaron Sorkin, and more to do with one of Sheen’s arms being shorter than the other. Thanks to the comment section for pointing this out!]