`I can’t imagine Americans actually watching this thing,” Ken Finkleman says of “The Newsroom,” his brilliant, genre-defying satirical sitcom tracking the ids and egos at work backstage in a Toronto TV news operation.
His pessimism, sparked by PBS picking up the Canadian hit for airing in the continent’s midsection, comes from the 52-year-old creator and star’s less-than-neighborly notions of American culture, news and television product.
It is not surprising, though, to find Finkleman’s publicity efforts working contrary to conventional wisdom about entertainment-industry marketing, which insists that you grin and speak of high hopes for your absolutely fantastic movie/book/sitcom, and here’s a clip.
The whole show — in which he plays the central character, the amoral, self-infatuated, bran muffin-obsessive news producer George Findlay — stands convention giddily on its head.
There is no laugh track to “The Newsroom” and few jokes per se. The humor is of the type that draws laughs out of you almost inadvertently, like crackling lightning bolts, and it comes from characters behaving out of craven self-interest or moral weakness or at the behest of a stultifying corporate will.
In last Sunday’s first episode, George was on the phone, peeved that his BMW dealer wouldn’t send someone over to pick up the car for repairs. “You had no trouble sending people to Poland,” he says, then apologizes insincerely.
“He’s a survivor,” Finkleman says of the character he considers himself minus a moral code. “And he’s amoral. He is a very serious liar. And he’s very good at using language to manipulate people and justify his mistakes. And a lot of what he does comes back to hunt him — which doesn’t put him completely on the dark side. My girlfriend says he’s not completely despicable.”
The other main characters are the anchor, interested in his image and his automobiles, a pair of reflexively skeptical producers, and a narrow-eyed newsroom intern.
The 13 episodes — which air here Sundays at 10 p.m. on WTTW-Ch. 11 — were all written by Finkleman, rather than a gaggle of failed or moonlighting standups. “It all comes out of one point of view, and viewers can see it’s not a point of view that comes out of a committee meeting: `What would the audience like?’ ” says Finkleman, best known here for making the short series “Married Life,” which aired on Comedy Central.
The episodes do not end with the characters having learned and mouthed back at the audience lessons about why it is wrong to, for instance, hook your airhead anchorman on prescription drugs in order to keep him calm after he learns of a testosterone problem and a new, deathly ambitious female co-anchor (for more on that, see Sunday’s second episode).
“I’m not at all interested in anybody seeing the light,” Finkleman says.
And rather than keep the series going until he had enough episodes made to try to sell it into syndication, Finkleman actually stopped making “The Newsroom” after 13 episodes. The apocalyptic finale aired in March in Canada, where the show earned such hosannas as the Toronto Star’s “the best thing Canadian series TV has offered. Ever.”
“You end up writing the same jokes after” 13 episodes, says Finkleman.
“The Newsroom’s” most obvious subject matter is television news and its distortions of reality, and the show’s interpretation of the behind-the-scenes decision-making ought to delight every Chicagoan who got his dander up over the recent goings-on at WMAQ-Ch. 5.
But Finkleman says he believes the series is primarily about “the corruption of language.” He cites a devastating scene from Sunday’s second episode, in which Findlay and his cohorts are trying to pick a female co-anchor to pair with their male lead.
The talent scout talks of one candidate, black, having a “subtle ethnicity”: Market research showed that some three-fourths of viewers in her viewing area thought she was white.
They end up hiring a blond woman and use statistics and blandishments about audience preference to affirm their safe choice.
“The scene is filled with a lot of language that is interestingly corrupt,” Finkleman says. “The reason I like that scene so much is it was liberals trying to justify the racial decision they were making.”
“The Newsroom” is, in short, exactly unlike most of American television comedy and all of American prime-time network television comedy.
But he needn’t be so skeptical of the chances here for his show, produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “The Larry Sanders Show,” the backstage-at-a-talk-show comedy that is its closest analog in the U.S., has a devoted cult audience whose size is limited primarily by it appearing on the pay-cable service HBO. “The Newsroom” should draw the same media-savvy, irony-drenched subset of the population.
Finkleman, at the end of a rant about corporate entertainment plowing over cultures from Little Rock to Ottawa, threatens to reconsider his opinion of how his show will do south of the border.
“Perhaps it might not play badly if people are exhausted by it all and want to turn on something that might be a little different,” he says. “But I don’t know.”
