Yet another reason why YOU should be making the HBO series Newsroom part of your Sunday evening viewing experience. Sarah Palin edition.

Here let me set the stage:

New producer MacKenzie McHale had just laid down the law in a briefing with her staff that they were not going to follow the formula embraced by other cable news stations, which constantly offer controversy for controversies sake, and stage battles between two opposing ideological pundits in order to drive up ratings. Instead they were gong to offer something that was sadly missing from news outlets these days.  The news.

However the main character, and anchor of the show, Will McAvoy begins to panic about the numbers and decides to slip in this (now famous) interview that Bill O'Reilly conducted with the Lunatic from Lake Lucille concerning the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Afterwards, on the advice from his ratings guy, he decides rather than to ridicule Palin like everybody else was doing, HE would try to defend her and demonstrate how fair he is.

As you can imagine he finds himself stumbling to find something even remotely defensible about her stupidity and instead makes himself  look like an idiot, which also threatens to damage the credibility of the show's format.

This irritates his producer to no end, who then confronts him in the hallway to essentially ask what the hell he thinks he is doing:


"Palin, how did Palin get into the rundown? I made it clear that this show was not going to participate in the endless cycle of codependency between Palin...., and insult to injury you twisted yourself into a Windsor knot to save her! (Doing impression of Mcavoy) "I'm sure that what the Governor meant was that the Dutch living in 'Norwegia' have good ideas, and since she has an intimate knowledge of all calls going into and out of the White House she's a credible source on whether the 'Swedishians' have gotten their message returned."

You know it was actually worth listening to that screechy voice again just to hear this brilliant take down of the Grizzled Mama, delivered straight from the pen of the amazing Aaron Sorkin. (This of course is NOT the first time that Sorkin has dealt a blow to Palin's credibility, as he once referred to the hunting episode of her reality show as a "snuff film.")

Like I said the show is great, and it does a very admirable job of revisiting older news stories with the benefit of hindsight, which provides them the enviable opportunity to demonstrate how they feel it should have been reported at the time that it was actually taking place.

For a news junkie this is a hell of a lot of fun. However I bet there is a certain person living by a dead lake in Wasilla who absolutely HATES this show with a white hot passion.