Here are our picks for what you should watch this week.
The Newsroom Season 1 and 2
The Newsroom has plenty of the polish and characteristics you’d expect out of an Aaron Sorkin production. The writer of The West Wing and the criminally underrated Sports Night, as well as films like the Social Network and A Few Good Men, Sorkin has a long pedigree of quality work. With The Newsroom, he takes on the structure of a cable newsroom and goes behind the scenes to show what happens in the office and on screen.
As a whole, The Newsroom doesn’t always work. It has problems in structure and in how it chooses to present its characters, but it still produces some extremely effective scenes and has the trademark back-and-forth dialogue that make Sorkin scripts so addictive. Even when it isn’t firing on all cylinders, it’s an immensely watchable show. Show stars Jeff Daniels and Emily Mortimer turn in great performances, as do the rest of the ensemble cast — especially Olivia Munn, who seems like she was born to be in a Sorkin show.
Teacher of the Year
You likely know Keegan-Michael Key because of the always hilarious Comedy Central sketch show Key and Peele, which he stars in alongside Jordan Peele. Though he’s not reprising his teacher role from the beloved sketch on his show, Key stars along with a cast of other hilarious people playing the eccentric faculty of Truman High School. Using a documentary-style, the film follows the Teacher of the Year award recipient as he wonders if what he’s doing really matters.
The Guest
You may recognize Dan Stevens from his role on Downton Abbey. He’s playing a slightly different character in The Guest. In this roller-coaster ride of a film, full of thrills and unpredictability, you’ll see Stevens as David Collins — a former soldier who decides to help take care of the family of one of his fellow troops who died in Afghanistan. As soon as he turns up, a slew of deaths start to occur to people with ties to the family he’s sent to protect. The film gets plenty violent, but it’s equally engaging and engrossing.
Jim Norton: Contextually Inadequate
Originally available on Epix and now streaming through Amazon Prime, Jim Norton’s latest special Contextually Inadequate is one of the best comedy specials of the year. Norton is a member of a dying breed of comedy — the rough-edged, tell-it-like-it-is crew — but he makes a case for the resurgence of the perverted and unafraid. He touches on every topic that most people would avoid entirely and isn’t afraid to make himself the butt of the joke when necessary, which softens the often devastating blows that he throws.
The Human Experiment
We willingly — or at least unknowingly — put a lot of things in our body without actually knowing what they are or how they may affect us. That’s the premise of the Human Experiment, a documentary narrated by Sean Penn, which poses that humans are walking, talking labs for a wide array of chemicals. The film examines the process that goes into making the products we use, what they’re made of, and how those chemicals and ingredients may affect the people who use them.
