Plasma Pool

Kris sheepishly admits that she's given up on "learning the computer"

Having sex with as many attractive women as possible is the primary goal of George Findlay, the central character in Ken Finkleman’s stellar CBC comedy The Newsroom (1996-2005). In the series pilot, “The Walking Shoe Incident,”¹ Kris the research assistant (Lisa Ryder) reluctantly confesses to George (the news director, played by Finkleman) that she’s had so much difficulty “learning the computer” that she’s given up trying. “Learning the computer” was important even in 1996—especially in a wired environment like a news station. But George hired Kris to run his personal errands, accompany him skiing, and fuck him. None of these require digital expertise, so he replies, “Oh, well forget that! You know, the whole thing with computers and the internet, you know, who cares! I don’t care. Really. You’re doing great!” George doesn’t have anything against the internet. He would surely prefer that Kris become facile with it. But he’s far more concerned about her facility with fellatio, so he dismisses the internet as irrelevant for his purposes. It is not useful to him.

Near the middle of “Physical Graffiti,” a late second-season episode of NBC’s sporadically spectacular sitcom NewsRadio (1995-1999), we see a similarly decisive and abrupt dismissal of the internet on sex-related grounds. Matthew Brock (Andy Dick), news producer and WNYX 585 AM’s resident office weird guy,² flags down Beth (Vicki Lewis) to join him at his computer monitor as she passes his desk:

Beth exits with haste, and who can blame her? Whatever Matthew is looking at, surely it belongs to the province of what their coworker, WNYX’s on-air personality Bill McNeil (Phil Hartman), delightfully stereotypically, reduces to the “Star Trek geek and internet goon.” Beth doesn’t ignore Matthew because she believes he’s looking at smut—Beth is perfectly fine with smut—but rather because he’s looking at the internet, which is, to Beth, unequivocally, unspeakably lame, whatever its content. But Bill takes Beth’s lameness logic farther, purporting that “Star Trek geek and internet goons” (i.e., lame internet users) are necessarily sexual deviants of one sort or another. After all, it was common knowledge among cultural conservatives like Bill in those days that if you actively used the internet without a professional reason to do so, you were surely either a porn-addict, pornographer, or pedophile. Yes, even as late as the late nineties, there were some who spoke of the the alien “World Wide Web” as a relationship-eroding nuisance at best and the steady, stealthy coming of the Antichrist at worst.³

Internet? InterNOT.

The content displayed on Matthew’s computer screen would seem to confirm conservative culture warriors’ worst suspicions. What has Matthew so excited is an email, “Catherine Duke of WNYSEX,” within which is an image of a porn actress whose head has been replaced by that of Bill’s fellow broadcaster, Catherine Duke (Khandi Alexander). But NewsRadio excels at mocking precisely the sort of reactionary ludditism and conservatism that would rush to condemn Matthew for his unexpected workday titillation. To appreciate this complex criticism in the context of “Physical Graffiti” specifically, we must trace this nude photo to its source, a process that casts the internet as a powerful and subversive tool, even for the clumsiest of operators, WNYX’s electrician, Joe Garrelli (Joe Rogan). It remains, however, precisely a tool, carrying no moral charge of its own.

Joe uses the internet when and how it is useful. “Don’t blame me!” Matthew implores Catherine as she stares over his shoulder in rage; “If you want to blame anybody, blame freakzilla@scopenet.com!” Matthew tells us only that the image was emailed to him, but we viewers know that the culprit in this deed is Bill, with whom Catherine is carrying on a trivial, interminable feud—a feud that Joe has engineered and is masterminding, having stealthily manipulated Catherine and Bill into begging him to use his tech know-how to embarrass the other by circulating altered nude photos on the internet. Joe’s motive? Revenge. “Five months, two weeks, and three days” earlier, Joe tells us, the pair stole his tuna sandwich from the breakroom refrigerator and split it between themselves.⁴ Revenge—and Joe’s ceaseless desire to get Catherine into bed by impressing her with his tech wizardry.

Joe’s revenge scheme is unnecessarily elaborate, but this is a conceit of Joe’s character; each of his plans is a Rube Goldberg machine of a sort. Joe is, in this sense, an ironic and self-mocking patron-saint of the nineties DIY movement. He makes his own heavy-duty tape, dismissing mass-manufactured duct tape as an imposition of The Man; he repairs telephones by removing parts from functioning clocks; he builds a long-range walkie-talkie system that’s so abnormally large (about the size of a mid-nineties PC tower harddrive) that it’s too cumbersome for use; he fixes computers, air conditioners, and space station computer cores alike by hitting them with wrenches and pliers; he sincerely prides himself on never having graduated from college (a distinction he shares with WNYX’s nutjob self-made billionaire owner, Jimmy James [Stephen Root]). Libertarian-populist Joe is at once idiot, idiot-savant, and bricoleur. Like any bricoleur, he sees the internet instrumentally; like duct tape, it’s just the latest contrivance of The Man to keep us in our place. That doesn’t mean that it is morally evil, but it is not morally good, either. It is a tool that can be usurped from The Man and used to get what one wants.

Joe gleefully reveals his plot to Catherine and Bill

Or at least some of what one wants. Joe’s plan succeeds in its principal goal—revenge—but, like all his previous efforts, it fails to get him into Catherine’s pants. The internet here is filled with smut, but none of this smut furthers anyone’s tangible sexual aims, least of all Joe’s; and all of it could have been produced and distributed without the internet’s benefit. The internet might be home to superficial sexual silliness, but it is manifestly not useful for getting Joe laid—and that, without question, is his perennial primary goal. Like The Newsroom’s George, Joe had this goal long before he recognized the potential of the internet to help him attain it. Neither man, irrespective of the internet, realizes his libidinal ambitions.

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1. The premiere episode of The Newsroom is perhaps the richest and most promising comedy pilot of the decade. The first two minutes should be sufficient to hook you:

2. This scene from season three’s “Awards Show,” in which Matthew asks coworkers Catherine and Beth to examine the itchy red welts on his buttocks, is representative. (Bob Costas later confirms Matthew’s suspicions—then has Matthew arrested for exposing himself to Costas in a public restroom.)

3. Like those pesky homosexuals—against whom the same charges were repeatedly levied in different permutations—the internet was here to stay.

4. Joe—who at one point coerces WNYX’s news director Dave Nelson (Dave Foley) into conducting an impromptu inquisition into the repeated dissappearance of his special gelatto—does not take food theft lightly.