Articles by Matthew Grimm

In case you haven’t been following Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom, here’s some backstory: America put itself in the hands of corporate charlatans who lied a lot about everything to justify sociopathic behavior, and enough people thought that was OK because institutions they count on to be watchdogs of bad intentions, lying and horrible outcomes stopped watchdogging after being consolidated into media conglomerates who prioritize the will of advertisers who much prefer a citizenry stupid enough to be advertised to. That established, Olivia Munn, who plays Sloan on The Newsroom, needs to be better at what people supposedly do on HBO […]

Ep. 7: Preview Some disclosure before I recap Episode 7 of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom: I had lived in Brooklyn, NY, for 12 years as of Sept. 11, 2001, lived under the plume, share with most New Yorkers a disinclination to gab overly about it and, entitled to or not, tend to look sideways at anyone who waxes glib or maudlin about it. So when I look sideways at the The Newsroom’s glib- and maudlin-impregnated coverage of the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, it should be understood that I damn well get the gravitas of the event. The borrowed […]

OK, I was wrong last week. Not wrong about the creeping patriarchal self-image Aaron Sorkin is constructing in HBO’s The Newsroom, so patriarchal that last week’s homage to the movie Rudy suggests a Sorkin remake would better be titled The Awesome Coach Who Let Rudy Play. But wrong about Olivia Munn going back to the bench with the other guys who are not as important as the show’s Four Very White People Who Might Have Sex At Some Point. Munn’s Sloan, a hot brainiac economist for some reason working at a cable news channel, moved to this week’s A-story, but […]

Kathryn Hahn popped up on Episode 4 of The Newsroom, playing a rambunctious, randy, pistol-packing date of curmudgeonly hero Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels). McAvoy, you’ll recall, is a conservative TV anchorman who, in midlife pique, has decided to tell the truth, working in tandem with MacKenzie (Emily Mortimer) his former girlfriend-who-blew-up-the-relationship-by-schtupping-her-ex, and their unabashed truthtelling putting both on a hot-seat. As important, Kathryn Hahn was on-screen for two minutes. I point this out because Kathryn Hahn rules your face, whether you know it or not. But there was too much going on in this week’s episode to give Kathryn Hahn anything […]