Articles by Matthew Grimm

The Newsroom‘s news meeting has, like it does, devolved into a cacophony of references, marginalia and gossip, notably about why producer Jim has gone off to New Hampshire to cover the Romney campaign. Don, snarky, semi-cynical guy who produces the 10 o’clock hour, intercedes: “The clock’s run out on this conversation. If I’m going to sit in on your rundown meetings, I can’t get mired in these kinds of detours. It’s like playing golf behind a foursome of blind people.” Thank you, Don (Thomas Sadowski). Thank you because it is a good thing Jim has departed to wallow in post-stupid-moony-non-relationship […]

Terence Winter wound the spring tight in Season 3 of Boardwalk Empire, each violent twist seeing a piece of Nucky Thompson’s East Coast criminal syndicate fall away and leaving the Atlantic City boss seemingly alone, friendless and on the lam from his enemies. It took all of his residual wheeling and dealing, and a conspicuously rainbow-esque coalition, not just to save his life, but, in Sunday night’s finale, to turn the tables on ever-ticking-timebomb-psychotic New York hood Gyp Rosetti in a dizzying, elegiac menagerie of graphic violence on par with HBO’s equally awesome Band of Brothers. Which, to hammer the point, […]

In spite of its tendency to be rendered down to facile, generally wrong cartoons to protect children’s and patriots’ delicate sensibilities, history poses a filthy canvas. Those who choose to paint on it can hew to its boring conventions, as Hollywood largely did for the first 45 years of its existence, or they can do what David Milch did with HBO’s elegiac and violent Western series Deadwood and Terrence Winter does with Boardwalk Empire, whose third season kicked off tonight on the same network: paint with the filth on the canvas and let the stark snapshot of time speak for […]

What have we learned from Season 1 of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom? What we were supposed to learn was that some things matter and some things don’t. We know from the Real Life The Newsroom mirrors that America has been ushered off the rails by information gatekeepers who have undertaken a slow-creep away from measuring the truth of cartoonish official stories and toward prioritization of superfluous wank. This yields an apostasy from reason wherein society loses the capacity to solve problems because it actively prevents too many people from understanding what the problem, in fact, is. An important thing, for […]