Jeff Daniels, Thomas Sadoski and Sam Waterston in HBO's The Newsroom
When looking at the breadth of programming currently available on television, the vast majority of it is mediocre. Some stuff is really good. Some is awful. But most of it is just alright and forgettable. It's okay to have it playing in the background while doing something else and you probably wouldn't miss it if the TV was off. But sometimes the opinions about a program are so strong, both positive and negative, that it compels people to watch, if just to argue about it.
Created and written by Aaron Sorkin, The Newsroom uses a fictional news network to confront and analyze social issues of the recent past, and the news media's often pitiful coverage of those issues. The series has been hit with constant criticism since its premiere, and has been a source of discussion even among those that hate the show. That criticism has ranged from creative laziness, bad writing and accusations of sexism against Sorkin. On the other hand, this is still a series written by Sorkin with his brand of dialogue, many of the issues that irritated people the most were worked through in the second season, and Jeff Daniels has an Emmy for best actor in a drama series based on his work in this series.
Sunday night, The Newsroom returned for its final six episodes and has put almost everyone and everything in jeopardy within the series. Follow beneath the fold for more.
From an objective standpoint, The Newsroom is a good series with flaws. I have a rule that says if I watch something multiple times I must like it on some level. Because there must be something I love about Xanadu if I stop and watch it every time I see it. And that's true with The Newsroom. I've re-watched the first two seasons on HBO Go and enjoy it overall.
If honest criticism has been tough on the series, I think it's because Sorkin is such a good writer, and the show is aspiring to be social commentary and it could have been better. Sorkin is one of the best screenwriters in demand at the moment, and this series was supposed to be a triumphant return to a format where he's considered the man behind some of the best TV series of the last two decades. And at its best, The Newsroom illuminates the toxic state of both politics and cable news with drama and humor through the perspective of journalism in the same way The West Wing did it through political process. But at its worst, the series is a smug and preachy mess, with convoluted interpersonal relationships and idealism stretched beyond credulity.
Jeff Daniels as Will McAvoy and Olivia Munn as Sloan Sabbith
The biggest mistake made by Sorkin was setting the series in the real world and having it and the characters move through real news stories of the recent past, instead of creating his own world to play in and explore the issues without the baggage. Flip the situations and then realize how preachy it would have come off if
The West Wing was set two years in our past, and just inserted the Bartlet administration into our world and had the characters reacting to the real events encountered by the Clinton and Bush White Houses. The purpose of a TV show can be to entertain, to get a message across, or both. If anything, the Orwellian nature of a TV series trying to rewrite an idealized history of how a "noble" news media would confront serious issues gets in the way of the entertainment. And even if you can get beyond that, it still feels like something Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert probably covered and dissected just as well years ago. Conversely, doing it so directly gets in the way of the message. I always come back to
The Twilight Zone with something like this. A lot of the parables from the series work and get across to the audience because they're not overtly about communism, McCarthyism, racism, nuclear war, etc., even though they're just thinly veiled metaphors for those subjects.
So what you ended up with in the first season and a half was a main character that was an unlikable, but saintly, asshole.
From Libby Hill at the A.V. Club:
The problem with Will McAvoy is that through the first two seasons of The Newsroom he’s been a character that’s impossible to feel empathy for. Part of the blame goes to Aaron Sorkin and the writing staff for crafting such an impossibly pompous, bloated blowhard to deliver high-minded monologues on the state of America with all the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, even as the events unfold in real time but the rest of the blame goes to the actual state of America. For as much as Don Draper serves as a perfect representative of white male culture in the ‘60s, Will McAvoy serves as a perfect representative of the aging baby boomer. The problem with such a representation is that aged white male baby boomers aren’t some historical heavy, they’re the current heavy. When Will McAvoy harrumphs and bloviates, we aren’t picturing a relic from an era we didn’t experience, we’re seeing a gross replication of the men who still maintain a stranglehold on the Congress, the generation who still has a monopoly on the overarching trajectory of the country. When McAvoy cuts down a woman for watching reality TV or mansplains journalism to her, it’s not a stretch to picture him going on to explain what rape really is and how cat-calling is a compliment. So the reason The Newsroom hasn’t worked to this point is that, well, Will McAvoy is a monster.
Season 2 of the series corrected much of this by jettisoning the love triangles that didn't work, most notably the wretched attempt at a love story between Maggie (Alison Pill) and Jim (John Gallagher, Jr.), while fixing the one that sort of did between McAvoy and MacKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer). And Sorkin introduced the
Genoa story arc (based on CNN's coverage of
Operation Tailwind). It allowed the series to move beyond just a recounting/remaking of history, and gave the show a running element of fictional drama where the outcome was uncertain. But moreover, in season 2 the series seemed to find its voice and
ended in a way that could have been a series finale.
But Sorkin decided to come back for one last go-round. Season 3 begins against the backdrop of the Boston Marathon bombings, with the Newsroom team still trying to dig out from the embarrassment of the Genoa story, the network and corporate parent under attack from outside interests, and Neel (Dev Patel) embarking on a new government leak story arc that might put him (and others) in jail on espionage charges.
- Aaron Sorkin vs. Technology: Sorkin tends to hate the internet, and loves to inject his hate of the internet into his writing. However, in this most recent episode the internet deserved the hate, since the episode recounts how crowd-sourcing led to cyber-mobs on Reddit and Twitter accusing Brown University student Sunil Tripathi, and then harassed his family in the waked of Boston Marathon bombings. Several news outlets then reported the internet rumors, and the situation snowballed. As part of this theme, the relationship between Jim and Hallie (Grace Gummer) seems rather forced and unnatural. I've never bought it as a serious relationship the audience should care about, and Sorkin uses Hallie as a way to bring up new media issues. But it's not done in the most organic way to work as a plot development.
- Maggie becomes a stronger character: Since the beginning of The Newsroom, it's been criticized for sexism in how it depicts its female characters. Those critics argue Sorkin has a pattern of depicting women as one-dimensional and defined by their relationships with men. To that end, Alison Pill's Maggie was a massive misfire in the first season, and the attempt to shift her in the second season with the Africa storyline didn't feel organic at all and was just plain weird. At least in this first episode of the third season, Maggie seems like an entirely different take than those other iterations. She's grounded and competent. And when she nails her first on-camera segment, I'm going to guess that most fans of the series felt great for her instead of rolling their eyes.
- Don and Sloan: Olivia Munn's Sloan Sabbith has arguably always been Sorkin's most well-developed character on the show, either male or female. Putting Sloan together with Don (Thomas Sadoski) has worked in ways that the Maggie-Don relationship never approached or seemed to approach. Sorkin gets humor out of Sloan's dry, intelligent but naive mindset. And the chemistry really works well when paired with Sadoski's portrayal of sarcastic, smart-ass Don.
- The fallout from Genoa: Over at Grantland, Andy Greenwald once wrote an article where he argued Sorkin doesn't like conflict. But I actually think it's more that Sorkin usually doesn't like dealing with the real-world consequences his characters would experience, other than to have Leona Lansing (Jane Fonda) or Rebecca Halliday (Marcia Gay Harden) laugh off the consequences as stupid and unfair. So much of Sorkin's work is full of a sort of fantasy, Capra-esque belief that if someone just stands up and earnestly states their case in an intelligent way, the world will listen and be swayed by the rightness of their position. Maybe life should always work that way, but it doesn't. If the show wants to make a statement about real-world issues, it has to be willing to put the characters in a reality that's true to their situation. That's why it was good to see the consequences from Genoa are still with them. They've sunk from second to fourth in the ratings, they're still second-guessing themselves on whether the team is being gun-shy because of Genoa and their reputation is still soiled by it whenever they talk to someone on the phone.
Will and Charlie are relieved it was John King, and wasn't them.
- The mellower Will and subdued Mac: Whether as a consequence of Genoa or finding some sort of contentment through his engagement to Mac, Will seems different this season too. On multiple occasions, Will attempts to give the big rallying speech, only to lose his train of thought. It's Sorkin being meta about how characters on the show love to monologue. But Mac has been changed totally from the character's initial iteration, and I think they still don't have it right. No more is she the frantic and neurotic woman that was jumping around the newsroom during the first season. Instead, she's become so bland the character is almost inconsequential to the plot.
- Neel and the Espionage Act: Like Genoa, the leaked documents scandal allows the show to spiral into fictional territory and makeup its own history. One interesting side note: The documents indicate the United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM) hired a PR team to foment unrest in a West African republic called Equatorial Kundu, killing 38 people. The same fictional nation was mentioned in The West Wing as being the location of a civil war that was the equivalent of the Rwandan genocide.
- Future guest stars: Kat Dennings will be along next week as half-sister to Chris Messina's Reese, and will battle both him and Leona for control of ACN. Mary McCormack from The West Wing will drop in as an FBI agent friend of Mac’s as the leak investigation heats up. And Marcia Gay Harden will return to offer counsel.