Lots of good ink on The Newsroom‘s rape episode, but it’s not like West Wing didn’t already prove this megalomaniac’s zeal for self-aggrandizement… Remember when he stopped production to compose his very own post-9/11 special episode, Isaac and Ishamel (Season 3, Ep. 3)? (Reminds me of Dylan saying “I want to be buried in an unmarked grave.”) This entry inspired by the best response, Time magazine’s James Poniewozik, who immortalizes a new Sorkinism for Charlie Skinner’s fatal heart attack:
The most baldly offensive thing in “Oh Shenandoah” was watching Don mansplain rape to a woman. But to focus only on that would be to diminish the sheer, monumental, top-to-bottom -splaininess of this episode. Will McAvoy is so good a mansplainer he can even mansplain to another man. Then Sloan Sloansplained privacy and the rights of celebrities. And Charlie, in the climax of the Newsroom’s worst episode ever, finally and unanswerably deathsplained the demise of journalism.
More kudos: Salon’s Sonia Saraiya, New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum, Grantland’s Eric Thurm, and Previously.tv’s Tara Ariano. (Nice touch how that female writer got kicked out of the writer’s during this episode.)
JOURNALISM’S ESSENTIAL BYLINE:
TA-NEHISI COATES ON NEW REPUBLIC
That means you, Sorkin.