Back in April, Aaron Sorkin told reporters he was only learning how to do The Newsroom right in the show’s final season. This week, he says, his efforts hit a creative peak with a campus-rape episode that everybody else hated. “This episode was different, in every regard,†Sorkin told a Writers Guild panel Monday night, according to Nerdist. “It was the first episode of The Newsroom I thought was really good. It was the first time I didn’t find myself banging my head against a wall feeling like, ‘I just cannot get the hang of this.’†Sorkin said he felt great about the episode until he saw the reaction to it online: “It lasted six hours.â€
Sorkin told the crowd that what bothered him most about the reaction to Sunday’s episode was the assumption that he automatically shared his characters’ opinions, which he said led to “terrible inferences†being drawn about him. He also called hate-watching “a disorder,†which sounds like the complete opposite of a thing a character on The Newsroom would say.