Aaron Sorkin Wants To Pretend The Good Guys Won

In 2000, midway through the first season of The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin started posting on a discussion forum on the site Television Without Pity as “Benjamin,” his middle name. Specifically, he posted on the forum dedicated to discussing The West Wing. “Benjamin” was met with some initial skepticism, but after proving to their satisfaction that he really was the show’s creator, his interactions with fans were warm. They fawned over him, and he thanked them for watching. Things took a turn in 2001 when posters commented on Sorkin’s unseemly hogging of the mic in an acceptance speech for an Emmy he won with a co-writer, Rick Cleveland. The incident snowballed into full-fledged forum drama, with Sorkin and Cleveland trading lengthy, bitter replies; Sorkin eventually admitted he was wrong, apologized, and stopped posting. Later, when the site’s West Wing recaps took a more critical turn, he reappeared, angry and defensive, asking why the recapper was even bothering to watch the show and write about it if she didn’t like it. The site’s founder responded that the recapper was doing this because it was her job and they paid her. This was Sorkin’s first dance with the internet, and it seems to have left a mark. An entire storyline in a third-season West Wing episode is dedicated to White House deputy chief of staff Josh Lyman discovering a Josh Lyman fan forum and accidentally running afoul of its hostile, pajama-clad users. The forum’s moderator, who polices infractions like posting in the wrong thread or writing in all caps, is described by Josh as “a dictatorial leader who I’m sure wears a muumuu and chain-smokes Parliaments.” Sorkin’s next TV show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, careened between goofy comedy and somber drama as it struggled and ultimately failed to find its footing, but a consistent thread was the corrosive influence of the internet, manifested in everything from unscrupulous gossip bloggers to foreign terrorists posting hostage videos on YouTube. The Newsroom was similarly erratic in tone while even more laser-focused on the harm that the likes of Gawker and Twitter were causing to journalism, politics, and our very souls. In its unapologetically pro-elite credentialism, its score-settling attitude toward women, and its often deranged determination to offer Frank Capra-style uplift no matter the circumstances, the show remains the purest distillation of Sorkin’s fixations. In 2010, when The Social Network was released, the general public largely still trusted the tech industry. The iPhone felt futuristic. Facebook was still kind of cool. Today, depicting Silicon Valley as a malign force is cliché; 16 years ago, it was subversive. The alchemy of Sorkin’s collaboration with David Fincher—a non-obvious director for a quippy, dense script—resulted in a perfectly calibrated dark comedy warning us about the future of human interaction and the people bringing it into being. In the decade that followed, reality caught up to the film’s bleak outlook. The preoccupations that had once marked Sorkin as an aggrieved and out-of-touch Luddite now made him look improbably prescient. It makes sense that he would feel the urge to take a victory lap.

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