“Good show, everybody.”
You know, just from a standpoint of pure trollery, I would have raised this motherfucker an entire letter grade if Sorkin went ahead and made that the last line of the series.
Look, I’m not going to lie: I wasn’t really looking forward to this episode all that much. A Newsroom without Charlie Skinner is a Newsroom that I could only give a shit about in the event of a heretofore unprecedented shit surplus. And anyway, there was no way that they’d be able to beat the season 2 finale, which was the perfect conclusion to the story they’d been telling since the pilot. While it wasn’t perfect, the second season more than redeemed the flaws of the first, and if they’d left well enough alone, it would have been a perfectly reasonable capstone to Sorkins’ TV career.
But I guess that in the end, ‘perfectly reasonable’ clearly isn’t the way Sorkin wants to be remembered, so here we are.
The first thing I have to note is how the show begins: with a recap consisting of nothing but scenes from the pilot.
Huh.
…So here’s a pro-tip for all you aspiring showrunners out there: There’s no better way to prime viewers for your series finale than tacitly implying that everything between the first episode and the last was essentially meaningless.
Anyway, the episode opens on the funeral of Charlie Skinner, scenes of which are intermingled with a look at how Charlie went about building the ‘News Night’ team in the first place.
In the flashbacks is where Sorkin gets a bit of his old snap back. He’s always had a knack for these origin stories (some of the best West Wing episodes were the flashback-heavy ones), and while this isn’t in his top tier, it’s kind of fun to see the old, cranky Will and drunk, shitty bowler Mac.
(On the other hand, I’m not sure how I feel about McKenzie basically setting up poor Jenna to set Will off. First of all, because it was bad enough that she was actually at that Town Hall in the first place; and second of all, because it basically turns her into the Emperor Palpatine of Sorkinland.)
The flashbacks give us an excuse to give Sam “Fuck ‘Em” Waterston one more paycheck, and I was definitely glad that this outing wasn’t completely free of new Charlie scenes. But on the downside, we weren’t seeing the drunk, cranky foulmouthed Charlie we had all grown to love; no, we were getting “Charlie Skinner, Angel Without Wings Who Inspires Us All To Be Our Greatest Selves Through His Tireless Pursuit Of Excellence In Journalism”. Which is way less fucking fun.
Speaking of Don and Sloan (which we were until I deleted that paragraph), they are indeed feeling guilty that they killed Charlie Skinner, and their attempts to confess form a weirdly tone-deaf running gag throughout the episode, which nosedives into unbearable mawkishness when Don gets a bowtie in an envelope. Which makes a bit more sense in the context of the episode, but also isn’t nearly as entertaining to watch as it is to read me describe it like that.
And let’s take a moment now to appreciate Thomas Sadowski, who was marked out from the beginning as the office douchebag, and managed to transcend his inauspicious beginnings, mainly by letting Olivia Munn walk all over him.
And I’ve already spent a fair amount of time praising Munn for her performance as Sloan Sabbith. So go back and read those, because she clearly mentally checked out an episode or two ago and it’s better you not remember her like this.
And because I can’t avoid it… yes, Jaggie is officially a thing now. There’s a whole subplot about Jim getting Maggie an interview to be a DC Field Producer and Maggie freaks out because she thinks he’s trying to get rid of her and if you’re hearing easy listening music that’s because I’m on hold on account of I just put my fist through my television and I had to call Toshiba to see if that voids the warranty.
I am literally telling you this for the last time, Sorkin: NO ONE GAVE TWO HOP-SCOTCHING FUCKS WHAT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN TO JIM AND MAGGIE! JIM WAS THE WORST, AND MAGGIE USED TO BE THE WORST, AND THEN YOU MADE HER BETTER, BUT THEN YOU LET HER GET METAPHORICALLY SUCKED BACK INTO THE INESCAPABLE GRAVITY OF JIM’S LITERAL SUCKINESS, MAKING HER TWICE AS WORSE AS BEFORE, WHICH WOULD BE IMPRESSIVE IF IT WASN’T SO TERRIBLE! EVERY MOMENT WE SPENT WITH THEM WAS A MOMENT WE COULD HAVE SPENT NOT WITH THEM, AND BECAUSE YOU DIDN’T REALIZE THAT, WE ALL HAD TO SUFFER! SO SHAME ON YOU, MR. SORKIN… SHAME ON YOU!
…Woof. Feels good to get that off my chest.
Sorry I yelled, everybody.
(And by the way, OF COURSE Jim knows how to play guitar. He’s basically the version of John Mayer that never realized that yes, a body CAN in fact be a Wonderland…)
Meanwhile, Emily Mortimer, Jane Fonda, and BJ Novak ride in a limo, which seems like the setup to a verrrry Hollywood joke, but in fact is a subplot where Mac takes forever to realize she’s being groomed to take Charlie’s place. And her lack of observational skills doesn’t speak particularly highly of her as a reporter, so maybe it’s just as well that they promoted her the hell out of there.
So in the fourth season of The Newsroom which will never be, the contentious Leona-Charlie relationship would have been replaced by heated bickering sessions between Ryan from The Office and the lady what played the worlds most implausible assassin in Formula 51. Which is less a step down than like going from a place where stairs exist to a planet where everybody descends from one floor to another by falling off of things and hoping for the best.
(And no one is going to appreciate it, but I deserve credit for making it six episodes into a show starring Emily Mortimer without bringing up Formula 51. Where’s my parade?)
Neal comes back, if anybody cares. With the exception of Will via flashback, he shares no scenes with any of the main cast (which is just as well, I’m pretty sure everybody liked him better when he was in Portugal or wherever…) but he does get a nice moment where he shames Bree into being a better computer guy.
And not for nothing, but when Neal does said shaming, it’s in regards to a list of the most overrated movie classics (and thank you, Newsroom, for finally tackling a subject I can get behind…)
Overall, there’s a blessed lack of politics in this episode. There’s some lip service given to female wage inequality (and if your intent was to balance out last weeks rape subplot, Sorkin, I think you may have played that slightly wrong) but all told there’s way less ideological grandstanding and more just people being people. Even the overarching theme of Old Media versus New remains frustratingly incomplete.
Not that I was expecting closure on such a complicated topic, but the way things just got dropped without any sense of resolution whatsoever made the whole thing seem a bit… pointless.
Which, in the end, is an argument that could be made about this season in general. Having made their definitive statement in “Election Night Part 2” (the second season finale), there wasn’t really anything else the show needed to say. But despite that, they still somehow found an interesting framework on which to stake a third season… and then went off on a number of tangents and dead ends that just distracted from a very strong thematic starting point, and which they couldn’t even manage to tie together without killing their best character. Or, more accurately, how they couldn’t get us to disregard the fact that none of this was coming together without killing their best character.
Let’s put it this way: if you told me at the end of the season premiere that we were going to wind up with Will, Jim, and some dweeb we’ve never heard of playing ‘How I Got To Memphis’, I… well, I would have believed you, because that’s EXACTLY the sort of batshit ending I’ve come to expect from latter day Sorkin.
Seriously: An impromptu jam session? Is that getting down from the fucking tree?
So what is the grand statement at the end of The Newsroom? What have we learned?
I think that the main thing we learned is that of all the people who suffered in the aftermath of 9/11, none were hit quite so hard as Aaron Sorkin.
Because pre-9/11 Aaron Sorkin wrote about a liberal utopia, where wise old white men worked hard to ensure freedom and prosperity for everyone. And even if they failed, they would never lose hope and they would never stop trying.
But the tragedy of that day forever put the lie to the idea that our elders were infallibale, and could do no wrong.
Worse, it shook the previously apathetic youth from their indolence. No longer content to stay on the sidelines, they got involved, and they had their own ideas for the way things should be… ideas that clashed with what had come before.
And just like that, the Great Men of Generations Past were no longer in control.
The world became a far more complicated place than it had been before, and this filled Sorkin with rage. Rage that spilled over into everything he’s done since.
(You don’t make a show like Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip if you’re in your right mind…)
And while Studio 60 was the sort of debacle that legends are made of, it was also an immediate relic, something that only could have been born during the darkest days of the Bush administration.
What would Sorkin do in the era of hope and change, with the freedom of Pay Cable and a setup that allowed him to engage with current events from a more appropriate platform than from the set of a late night sketch comedy series?
This was what we were going to find out.
And whatever else it was, the journey was fascinating.
Watching The Newsroom was a portrait of a man wrestling with his own possible obsolescence. He framed his story from the beginning as the mad quest of a man tilting at windmills. And many critics and viewers took what he was doing at face value, seeing him as some impotent old fool raging against a world with no further use for him and his values. Which Sorkin made it easy to do because he’s identified so clearly with his own particular tics that it becomes very easy to read them into everything he does.
(And also because yes, sometimes he says and does things that an impotent old fool might do or say.)
But give him credit for this much: at least he tried to engage with the modern world. After the rough opening half of the first season, he stopped treating his heroes as White Knights and started treating them like flawed people trying to do the right thing in a world where good intentions don’t always win out.
And this was a theme that carried on into the superior second season and indeed, into this flawed final one, growing ever more complicated as the world itself did.
Sorkin was no longer positive about how to fix the world, or even that it could be fixed. And even if he didn’t always engage with the issues in a constructive way (and holy fuck did he drop that ball sometimes), I’m more inclined to give credit to the guy who swings and misses than the guy who keeps trying to kick the soccer ball into the bleachers.
You know, I’m worried that metaphor might have gotten away from me there…
Anyway, it’s all over now. We don’t have ‘TV Sorkin’ to kick around anymore. We have ‘Movie Sorkin’, who is a whole different dude with a track record that’s way harder to knock. I look forward to whatever he does next, but I’d be lying if I said I’m not bummed that this may be the end of his time on TV.
The Newsroom didn’t work, exactly, but it was interesting and contentious in a way that TV can’t really be anymore. And in its better moments, Sorkin got so close to making it all work that it reignited hope that he has another West Wing in him somewhere.
I mean, he probably doesn’t, but you’ve got to end on an ‘up’ note, you know?
In conclusion, much like Sorkin himself, I don’t have any idea how to end this thing. So here’s an extraneous musical finale:
Thanks for reading, everybody!
