It started, as all great things do these days, with a streaming binge. Somewhere between insomnia, jet lag, nostalgia, and a desperate need for a bit of idealism in a very unideal world, I found myself rewatching The West Wing, and then The Newsroom. And then bits of A Few Good Men, The Social Network, even that short-lived, overambitious love letter to television, Studio 60, having watch a taping of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in New York.
Before I knew it, I was deep in the Sorkinverse — half-preaching the Bartlet doctrine to Bruno the Spaniel, and half-wondering why no one in real life ever has an epiphany at 90 miles an hour over a White House staircase.
And it hit me — the reason these monologues still rattle in my skull, the reason I rewind them like old C90’s, is the same reason I return, time and time again, to Shakespeare.
Because in their own utterly different, perfectly precise ways, both Aaron Sorkin and William Shakespeare do the same thing: they put the human soul on a stage, hand it a mic, and let it speak until the walls shake.
That’s why I’m writing this. Not as a TV critic or a frustrated playwright, but as someone who genuinely believes Sorkin is the Bard of our times — swapping swords for subpoenas, and soliloquies for Senate smacks.
Now, I can already hear the English professors howling into their quills. “Sorkin? That caffeinated chatterbox with a West Wing fetish?” Yes. Him. The king of walk-and-talk. The maestro of monologue. The man who gave us Jack Nicholson’s “You can’t handle the truth!” and Jeff Daniels’ brutal verbal exorcism of American exceptionalism in The Newsroom. Say what you like, but the man writes.
And crucially, like Shakespeare, Sorkin has given us characters that don’t just talk — they testify.
Shakespeare had Hamlet’s “To be or not to be,” Macbeth’s “Is this a dagger?” and Lear’s primal wails on the heath. Sorkin has Colonel Jessup, finger jabbing at the bench, roaring, “You want me on that wall!” He has President Bartlet standing alone in the National Cathedral, soaked to the skin, screaming in Latin at God. He has Zuckerberg, stone-faced across a conference table, delivering one of the iciest put-downs in legal history: “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook.”
I mean, come on.
If Shakespeare was the master of poetic introspection, Sorkin is the laureate of caffeinated conviction. His soliloquies aren’t whispered into the void. They’re blasted across courtrooms, newsrooms, and corridors of power. They don’t just ponder mortality or fate — they punch bureaucracy in the face, then drop the mic and stride off with perfect posture and a billowing trench coat.
Take The Newsroom. The pilot opens with what can only be described as an intellectual ambush. Jeff Daniels, wearing the haggard face of a man who’s read too many poll results and seen too many idiots on Twitter, lets rip with a monologue so sharp it practically perforates the American flag.
“We stood up for what was right… we reached for the stars… we aspired to intelligence…”
It’s Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar crossed with The Economist. And it’s bloody brilliant.
Then there’s President Bartlet in The West Wing, grieving the death of his secretary Mrs Landingham — a woman who had, let’s be honest, more moral compass than half his Cabinet — and taking on God Himself in a deserted cathedral. The lighting is gothic, the rain torrential, and the president is pissed.
“You’re a son of a bitch, you know that?”
You don’t get that in Love’s Labour’s Lost.
And that’s the thing. Sorkin, like Shakespeare, understands that the most important theatre isn’t always in palaces or parliaments — it’s in the hearts of flawed, furious people trying to do the right thing while the world insists otherwise.
He gives us characters who burn with purpose. Sam Seaborn, the quixotic speechwriter, practically combusts with idealism every time he opens his mouth. In one episode, he blurts out:
“Education is the silver bullet. We don’t need little changes, we need monumental ones.”
He’s like Henry V, if Henry had access to a Princeton debate team and a MacBook Pro.
Of course, Shakespeare had his flaws. Longwindedness, for one. (Seriously, Bill, just get to the stabbing.) And Sorkin? Well, he has his. The verbal pyrotechnics can occasionally tip into theatrical gymnastics. The characters all sound a bit… Sorkiny. Like they’ve all gone to the same Ivy League dinner party and decided never to leave.
But even that sameness has its purpose. Sorkin doesn’t write people so much as he writes ideas wrapped in hair and tailored suits. And just like the Bard, he’s unashamedly didactic. He’s not here to reflect life as it is. He’s here to pitch life as it should be — rational, decent, and marginally better educated.
And yes, there’s ego. Mountains of it. But find me a playwright who doesn’t believe they’ve got something important to say, and I’ll show you someone who ends up writing for Emmerdale or Corrie…
Sorkin is at his best when he’s angry — but it’s a hopeful anger. A righteous indignation that still clings to the belief that a well-constructed argument, delivered at 90 miles an hour, might actually change something. And in this glacial, bureaucratic circus we call modern democracy, that’s no small miracle.
So yes, Sorkin is our Shakespeare. Not because he writes in iambic pentameter, but because he gives language weight. Because he understands that sometimes, one man talking into the abyss can still shift the ground beneath your feet.
And look, I get it. Sorkin’s not perfect. He’s not subtle. He’s not modern in the minimalist sense. But he is — indisputably — ours. Our generation’s bard. Less codpiece, more cable news. Less Tempest, more West Wing. But every bit as necessary.
And if you still don’t believe me, just watch the final scene in A Few Good Men again.
“You can’t handle the truth!”
It’s not just a line. It’s a challenge. A gauntlet. A tragedy in twelve syllables.
And like all great writers, Sorkin dares you to handle it — with both hands, and maybe a side of fries.
Read more:
Sorkin is the new Shakespeare — only with better suits and fewer dead kings