The Newsroom is a disaster

I usually give a series a few episodes before commenting, posting, or giving up, but for the HBO series The Newsroom I will make an exception because nothing could get me to possibly watch another episode. There's plenty of bad, horrible TV out there - but at least no one expects much from Real Housewives or Jersey Shore or whatever, but what makes The Newsroom so awful is, among many other things, its incredible pretension - the preachings of the characters, the self-righteousness of its politics and of its sense of the mission of a newsroom, and of course all the hype surrounding it - HBO, Aaron Sorkin, wow, that's almost like Shakespeare-Globe theater... but when you compare it to the Sopranos or The Wire or even lesser HBO series like, I don't know, Treme or Deadwood, which I didn't love but at least could accept as worthy of their own ambitions, The Newsroom is a mutant. First of all, there is not a single line of dialogue in the entire movie that was ever said by a human being other than a screenwriter reading his text aloud. This is obvious from the first post-credit sequence of a couple vainly arguing about when he would meet her parents while standing right beside the desk of a fellow employee who comments wryly on their witticisms and quips. This never ever happens. Now I don't mind a comedy that includes lots of quips and quirks and isn't exactly realistic - but a comedy, such as say Modern Family, or even Seinfeld, first succeeds because of its feeling of verisimilitude, also our recognition of the characters as both types and individuals, and third because of a certain uplifting comic sensibility - Newsroom has none of the above, and of course no it's not trying to be a comedy. Yet it's as realistic a vision of a newsroom as Ally McBeal was of a corporate law firm. At least AMcB knew it was an entertainment - but this clunker is larded with Sorkin speeches, such as Jeff Daniels's lengthy harangue about why America is not the greatest country - reeling off a dizzying # of statistics - again, not only is the dialogue idiotic in this show but the monologues are even worse. Some of this I could put aside if Sorkin had even the slightest hint of the culture of a newsroom (BTW, though I never warmed to the West Wing, I did like Sorkin's Social Network - that, he seemed to get right, and if there's anyone who speaks like he writes it may be the high-tech Mensa nerds of programming) - but as to the newsroom in The Newsroom, well, if you can believe, just to cite one of many examples, that two minutes after there's an AP bulletin about an oil rig fire in the Gulf, one of the producers - first day on the new job no less! - gets a call from his college roommate who's in meetings w/ BP and who's telling him they can't cap this fire (plus for good measure another call from his sister! who just happens to explain to him the geology of an underground spill) - just ask yourself for one second why anyone working for BP would make that call in two minutes to a reporter? The idiocies go on throughout the entire broadcast as they put together what would be months of investigative reporting in about 10 minutes during a live broadcast. Well, there may be worse shows on TV - but few worse ones on HBO for sure. For a good example, BTW,  of a fine series about a TV newsroom - which, actually, check out the British series The Hour.