Newsroom Episode Four: How Is Aaron Sorkin Belittling Women Today?

After Gabrielle Giffords (HIIII GABBY! HIIII!) is shot and almost killed in a Tucson strip mall toward the end of this week's Old Man Sorkin Presents: Get Off My Lawn, there is a devastatingly suspenseful sequence when we literally were on the edge of our mattress wondering if fictional news network ACN was going to succumb to peer pressure and Pronounce Congresswoman Giffords Dead. For serious, we were in suspense, not even kidding, but of course Aaron Sorkin (played by Jeff Daniels) and his producer, Avian Bones, do the right thing and wait for actual confirmation beyond that NPR reporter's most horrifying career moment (which we are very sure he or she is super glad to be able to relive). Because they are perfect, and will civilize the rest of us even if it means Carrie Bradshaw will die of thirst because every Cosmo in the world has given its life to be thrown in Sorkin's civilizing face.

And we actually really liked this episode, despite the terribly clunky framing devices of the aforementioned "funny" drink-throwing and also Bigfoot. (We are pretty fucking tired of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster being used as punchlines, since it is your Editrix's firm belief -- and therefore Official Wonket Policy -- that FUCK YEAH, BIGFOOT!) We are (for real) digging going back in time to answer all the Tea Party moronistas, two years too late. It is fun!

The most important question of the episode, of course, wasn't about why all the people in the newsroom were willingly at their office New Year's party, or about the importance of waiting to do the Right Thing, while precious seconds whiz by and Jane Fonda's Hench-Son (she is Grown-Up Faye Dunaway, of course, now bringing her sleazy ethics to the whole of the Network) threatens to murder them all for refusing to be wrong about a matter of life and death. No, the far more important question is: Why won't women let Aaron Sorkin explain to them, "shut up"?

Plotwise, Hope Davis is a disgusting TMZ (TMI, haha) reporter and Aaron Sorkin gets all Condescending Jon Stewart on her and frowns at her that she is hurting America, so she spends the rest of the episode personally mutilating him in the pages of her glossy. Since he is a disgusting slut, she has a lot to work with. But uh oh, then Jack McCoy all of a sudden remembers that THEY own TMI, so if Aaron Sorkin is getting savaged for just being too great a guy, then the CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE!

Also, there is Bigfoot, and the mousy one is torn between two lovers, and Avian Bones is going out with Brenda Johnson's husband, the hot alcoholic from The Closer, but he looks like he has had some Botox? Sad face -- haha, if he could! But Sorkin can't close the deal with any of his brain surgeon dates, because of how he is basically an Insult Comic of a man, and apparently all his dates have self esteem no matter how hard he tries to fix that, the end.