I’ll confess to having mixed feelings about Aaron Sorkin. As a screenwriter, he has a gift for crafting compelling TV shows and movies, with a list of credits ranging from A Few Good Men (1992) to The West Wing (1999-2006), The Social Network (2010) and Being the Ricardos (currently streaming on Amazon Prime). He’s skilled at snappy dialogue that draws you in and doesn’t let you go till the end. But his undeniable storytelling prowess is marred by a propensity for over-earnest ideological pontification, often on behalf of an unreflective nationalism.
The infamously cringe-rich scene in the series The Newsroom from 2012, where the killing of Bin Laden is announced on an airplane, is a perhaps the best example of Sorkin at his worst:
Being the Ricardos, which tells the story of comedian Lucille Ball (played by Nicole Kidman) in 1953 as she grapples of political and personal crises while working on her sitcom I Love Lucy, has all the strengths and faults of Sorkin’s work. To sort it out, I talked to frequent podcast guest Doug Bell. We take up Sorkin’s larger oeuvre, his gift for words, but also the political and cultural blinkers that bedevil the filmmaker’s work.
(Post edited by Emily M. Keeler)
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Podcast: Sorkin, King of Cringe