Aaron Sorkin, poet for the enlightened masses and penman of rhetorical derring-do, has had just about enough of writing for television. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, he set a record for Sorkin-speak by summing up his feelings in only three sentences:
“I’ve loved every minute I’ve spent in television. And I’ve had much more failure, as traditionally measured, than success in television. I’ve done four shows, and only one of them was The West Wing.”
Sorkin spoke of bowing out while preparing the final three episodes of The Newsroom, which is signing off after three seasons. The HBO series has been criticized for smugly lecturing journalists on how to do a better job by relying on the benefit of hindsight to examine real-life news events. The show also has been roasted for portraying its female characters as irrational and incompetent in the workplace. Sorkin has apologized for the first thing, but the second issue is merely an extension of all those times Allison Janney slipped and fell in The West Wing—which was always just a gas.
Sorkin’s exeunt from TV might be a gradual one, as NBC wants him to take all the F-words out of A Few Good Men so the network can broadcast a live staging of his breakout play. Also on the horizon is Sorkin’s Steve Jobs movie, which will be directed by Danny Boyle and might star Michael Fassbender. Sorkin has found great success in film writing as of late, boasting screenplay credits for the critically acclaimed The Social Network and Moneyball, so a more permanent move to that format makes sense. Besides, not writing for TV anymore doesn’t mean you can’t write about TV anymore—and a Sports Night movie isn’t going to walk and talk by itself.
[via The Hollywood Reporter]