There were a lot of problems with the most recent episode of The Newsroom, not least among them a rape storyline that Aaron Sorkin only made worse by discussing the next day. One of the least terrible plot points in an episode full of terrible plot points, however, was a pointed exchange between Olivia Munn’s Sloan Sabbith and the creator of a Stalker app within the cable network that The Newsroom is set. Sloan Sabbith ripped the creator of the app, and while it certainly was satisfying, it felt incredibly stale.
Turns out, there’s a reason for that. Not only was the Stalker App storyline based on the Gawker Stalker feature that Gawker created many years ago (and wisely removed from their site), but the exchange between Sloan and the creator of the app not only echoed a similar conversation that Jimmy Kimmel had with Gawker writer Emily Gould on Larry King Live in 2007, it actually lifted some of the same lines.
Here’s one of several similar exchanges, via Mediatite:
Trying to get his mind around the Gawker map, Kimmel told Gould, “So people are out, and they have their cellphones and they can send a little message to you and say, ‘I just saw Gwyneth Paltrow at the movies,’ and that way when Gwyneth Paltrow comes out of the movies, there could be at least a dozen psychopaths waiting for her.”
In Sorkin’s version, Sabbith shares this scenario with Dorrit, “So people are out there, and they can post a message to us and say, ‘Kristen Bell and her kid at the 4 p.m. showing of How to Train Your Dragon at the Arclight… so that when Kristen Bell and her kid come out of the movies, there are a dozen sociopaths waiting for them.”
There are several other words and phrases that echo each other, and of course, Sorkin would concede that he used the Kimmel exchange as inspiration (Sloan even name drops Kimmel in the scene), but it just proves again that Sorkin — when he’s not lifting from himself — clearly has issues with coming up with his own material. At least this time he’s recycling someone else’s material.
Here’s the scene in question on The Newsroom.
Compare that to this exchange between Kimmel and Emily Gould on Larry King Live seven years ago.
Emily Gould, by the way, managed to survive Kimmel’s dressing down. After a few years of therapy, she became a successful author.
Source: Mediatite
