Welcome back, Newsroomies!
(Yep, that’s what I’m calling us now…)
In tonight’s top story, your man on the street Victor is recapping the truncated third and final season of HBO’s The Newsroom!
In the spirit of moving at the same frantic pace that Newsroom creator/”Great Man” Theorist Aaron Sorkin sets, we’ll breeze through the history of the show in super broad strokes, and you can go to Wikipedia for the rest. Sorkin himself might not approve, but unlike him, I don’t get paid by the word. So fuck that guy.
In Season One, The Newsroom was the story of Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels, Dumb and Dumber To) rewriting recent history in order to save the news media from its own incompetence and women from themselves…
In Season Two, The Newsroom was the story of how even competent, dedicated professionals can make mistakes, especially when a straw man outsider is there to ameliorate most of their culpability…
In Season Three, I only have the vaguest idea what’s happening, and it feels so, so right.
We open on Will and his producer/fiancee Mac (Emily Mortimer, Formula 51) arguing over wedding plans. And roughly two minutes after this all starts to feel a bit too cutesy (which is to say, approximately two minutes into the episode), the finish line to the Boston Marathon explodes, and we’re off to the races.
One of the main pleasures of The Newsroom, and Araon Sorkin in general is the sheer joy he takes in watching professionals act like professionals. As television has become inundated with shows where one lone, specially gifted man is the only person capable of doing what needs to be done, it’s a refreshing change of pace to see a team working their asses off to do a job right. Whatever faults the show has as a whole, that is the one thing they almost always got right.
The minute the first explosion happens, everyone scrambles into action, racing to collect sources, confirm the damage, and give the public the actual facts instead of rampant, dangerous speculation. And as per usual, all of this moves with the speed of a rocket, and the wit of… a really witty guy who writes things in a witty manner.
(Full Disclosure: I do not write for The Newsroom).
All of this plays like a pulse pounding thriller, given deeper stakes than usual on account of their sense of weakness: their botched coverage of the Genoa non-story last season has compromised their much vaunted sense of righteousness and left them struggling to regain the trust they had built. And by doing a good job on the Boston Marathon story, they seek redemption. This is made pretty clear by a runner revolving around a Euripides quote on the three act structure. Mac thinks they’re in their triumphant third act, where they climb down from a tree.
(It makes more sense in its proper context…)
And as long as we’re talking about plays, now is as good a time as any to check in on our dramatis personæ. Also, it’s freakin’ hard to track everything that happens without breaking it down in one way or another so what the hell? We’re trying doing this shit character by character:
SLOAN (Olivia Munn, National Lampoons Strip Poker): the most intriguing/incomprehensible thread of the evening, Sloan Sabbath investigates a potential business deal where… uh, Merill and Goldman… ACN… something something 24-year-old assistant who went to Circus College… and you know, like, a buyout and stuff.
Munn continues to be the secret weapon of The Newsroom cast, somehow spinning her lines full of insanely dense econo-speak into something charming and funny. She even makes her adoration of a 24,000 Bloomberg Terminal believable despite the fact it looks like some shit they copped from the props department of Swordfish.
So no, I was never really sure what the hell anyone was talking about in her scenes, but it sure as shit sounded thrilling to me. Plus, there was some stuff indicating that even after all these years, Sorkin still holds a grudge against the New York Times Crossword Puzzle…
MAGGIE (Alison Pill, Confessions Of A Teenage Drama Queen): The problem character of the first two seasons begins her road to redemption as she actually does more than one thing without screwing up for the first time in twenty hours of aired television, going on the air live to replace the on-location talent when an almond allergy takes him out of the game AND getting a lead on potential false leads being leaked by the Boston police. She also does a shitload of stomach crunches, which apparently is a thing I’m into now and I’m not sure how to feel about that.
(Sorkin being Sorkin, he can’t resist the overly broad gag here and there, hence the allergy. But someone trying to talk with a swelled tongue will never not make me laugh, so make of that what you will…)
NEAL (Dev Patel, The Last Airbender (Video Game)): With Maggie proving her mettle on the big stage, the idiot ball has been handed to Neal. Though to be fair, he and Maggie have been sharing custody pretty much since the pilot. Our resident internet guy/conspiracy theorist/bigfoot enthusiast finds himself in possession of leaked classified documents and facing a potential charge of espionage.
Again, and as with almost all of his storylines over the course of the show, Neal is made to look like an idiot, but at least Will buys him an air gapped computer. And man, if I did a shot every time they used the phrase “Air gapped computer,” I would have taken… four shots. Because they said it that many times.
CHARLIE (Sam “Fuck ‘Em!” Waterston): Everything Charlie does continues to be awesome, because he is Sam “Fuck ‘Em!” Waterston. His big moment this week is him chewing out the team for taking joy in the failure of CNN reporter to property vet his exclusive. Nobody yells at people better than Sam “Fuck ‘Em” Waterston, and I will be forever grateful to Aaron Sorkin for getting him to say “fuck” so much…
REESE: Now that we know that Chris Messina is a funny, charming, funk dancing sex god thanks to The Mindy Project, he gets to be one of the good guys, championing the News Night team when the bad news rolls in and finding some enemies of his own to fight as Sloan tips him off to a potential hostile takeover by his own half siblings.
Also, let’s not even pretend that I wasn’t going to link to this:
WILL (Jeff Daniels): And in the biggest, most welcome surprise of the episode, Will totally mangles his inspirational speech, faltering in a flurry of passionately delivered mixed metaphors and aimless motivational doublespeak. He also stops himself from going on a rant about the Greek Yogurt industry which I actually kind of wanted to hear. (Take that, Big Yoplait!)
They all work hard, and work well, but when the ratings come in it’s all for naught, which leads to the big twist and the fulcrum on which this season appears to rest.
The biggest problem in the first season of the show was Sorkins’ deeply naive belief that doing a professional job with integrity would automatically result in vindication and ratings success. And while the fallout from season two damaged their integrity, this season looks to explore the idea of doing legitimate news in the era of instant information and immediate access.
At the end of the day, News Night does everything right, waiting to get confirmed sources and not just report speculation. But their fastidiousness results in a drop in ratings, as they’re basically upstaged by the un-vetted but mostly accurate reporting done by way of the internet.
Here is the key change, then: instead of his usual fogeyist stance on technology, Sorkin appears to be actually taking a more nuance look at the matter.
The Reddit detectives that “solved” the case before the cops and the Twitter reports from ground zero are two sides of the same coin. Credible information was diffused to the public through social media as well as the usual bullshit, In their zeal to establish their legitimacy and make up for last season Genoa debacle, the News Night team fell behind the curve, and their rating suffered, leaving them even more vulnerable than ever before.
So this is where we find ourselves at the beginning of the end: the News Team in peril, the company in peril, and Will McAvoy ready to throw in the towel before realizing that they’ve been getting that Euripides runner wrong this whole time: they’re not in the third act, they’re in the first. Their fight is just beginning.
Which… I’m sorry Aaron Sorkin, but if you’ve spent twenty hours on the first act, leaving only five for the second and third… that is poor planning on both a literal and a metaphorical level.
Don’t worry, though, I forgive you Aaron Sorkin; I’m dying to see how you get us down from that tree…
NEXT WEEK: Holy shit, is that one of the Broke Girls???
