The first bookstore encounter combines flirtation with the shoplifter, Rufus autograph and Anna’s abrasive comic manner. — Amanda Dobbins
The Horse and Hound press junket is nominated. — Amanda Dobbins
Honey’s birthday dinner and the contest over who most deserves the brownie are nominated. — Amanda Dobbins
Dinner-party matchmaking without Anna, including Emily Mortimer, culminates in a touching, supportive conversation among friends. — Amanda Dobbins
The couple’s day running lines and eating ice cream includes the Mel Gibson body-double joke; its isolation also foreshadows the press intrusion.
The famous Just a Girl speech is acknowledged, although the earlier bookstore encounter is preferred. — Juliet Litman
The final press conference is nominated alongside the dinner party and earlier junket. — Juliet Litman
The junket’s pace, restraint and shifts between public and private Anna reveal the character; its media mechanics feel accurate and Mischa Barton appears. — Juliet Litman
One initial choice is the junket, but the final exchange agrees on the first bookstore encounter for its tone, coarseness and one-liners. — Amanda Dobbins
Asked whether it could be a ten-episode Netflix series, the answer is that it has already been made as The Newsroom, a Sorkin show about what if the news were the most important thing in the world; it was heavy-handed, though Broadcast News is heavy-handed too, and Olivia Munn's high-strung producer was hilarious.
The Newsroom is called one of the funniest shows of the last ten years, unintentionally, every episode funnier than the last until it got good at the end, which made it worse; Sorkin, on one host's podcast, said he had a pebble in his shoe writing it and never got an episode right, a line his own characters would say; the reason it should not be a show is that Broadcast News is three people in a room while Newsroom had ten with ABC plots, checking in on Alison Pill and Sam Watterson (as transcribed).
Death Patel (as transcribed) and Chris Messina get laughs just by being named in a wild cast; one host would still watch it every Sunday for twenty years without claiming it taught him anything about being human, the distinction between enjoying and good; it crammed Holly Hunter's character into nine or eleven minutes of Emily Mortimer, and the mistake was making Jeff Daniels, the William Hurt figure, the star rather than the Hunter figure.
The hosts wish more shows were that polarizing, recalling that two of them died on Vinyl Island; Sports Night is the show closest to Broadcast News, more modest with more space; Goodnight Beantown, a Boston show with Bill Bixby and the woman from The Incredible Hulk, did not work.
