The Newsroom.\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0As it is, Aaron Sorkin\u2019s unwieldy hybrid of screwball workplace comedy and tag-team poly-sci seminar will wind up its second season this week so distant from the zeitgeist that even people who like the show don\u2019t talk about it much. And when they have lately, it\u2019s to express some degree of disappointment with it, e.g. it\u2019s gotten too slow, too solemn or too much like regular TV, only with more profanity, sex and drugs (and far less of the last two than in Season One). The haters, though yielding a tad more slack to Season Two, say pretty much what they said a year ago \u2013 and they keep finding new ways to hate what they see, even though they keep watching anyway.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s too bad the crowd has receded. Because after an erratic, even disquieting start, The\u00a0<\/em>Newsroom<\/em>\u2019s second season has brought forth some of the finest work released under Sorkin\u2019s name since The Social Network.<\/em> And I\u2019m thisclose to declaring this year\u2019s seventh episode, \u201cRed Team III\u201d, better than most of The West Wing<\/em> during Sorkin\u2019s four-year tenure as executive producer. Directed by Anthony Hemingway (Red Tails, The Wire<\/em>), \u201cRed Team III\u201d climaxed the season\u2019s running story in which producers, staff and anchors for the mythical Atlantis Cable Network are being deposed by the network\u2019s attorney (Marcia Gay Harden) to prep for what\u2019s been hyped as a potentially devastating lawsuit against ACN; all having to do with an American military operation code-named \u201cGenoa\u201d, which the network reported had deployed chemical weapons against Pakistani civilians. Though second- and third-guessing elements of the report assembled by an ambitious producer (Hamish Linklater), the ACN\u2019s Big Three of anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), news director Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston) and producer Mackenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer) sign off on the story, which nets them their biggest ratings haul in years \u2013 and turns out to be completely untrue.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s only in this episode that the plaintiff in the lawsuit is disclosed as the report\u2019s justly-fired-and-discredited producer, who claims he\u2019s being scapegoated for what\u2019s labeled \u201cinstitutional failure.\u201d Apparently, this also encompasses all the mostly embarrassing stuff that\u2019s taken place throughout the year, much of it courtesy of whatever\u2019s meant by \u201cnew media\u201d: the on-line nude photos of ACN\u2019s resident brainiac Sloan Stevens (Olivia Munn); the ongoing fallout from the YouTube-d video of a tour bus meltdown by staffer Maggie Jordan (Allison Pill) and other events whose deus ex machina v<\/em>alue for Sorkin fit snugly with his show\u2019s not-so-subtle disdain for all things digital, especially the Twitter-verse.<\/p>\nAnd yes, I know that it\u2019s probably redundant in many minds to place \u201cnot-so-subtle\u201d and Aaron Sorkin\u2019s name in the same sentence. In the words of Anthony Lane, Sorkin \u201craises hectoring to the level of an art.\u201d (One adds with due haste that Lane\u2019s words weren\u2019t applied to Sorkin, but to Jimmy McGovern, a British playwright, who, as with Sorkin, found his greatest notoriety in television while also establishing a reputation in theatrical film.) You have to be in the mood for hectoring and I guess I was in the mood for it last summer when The Newsroom\u2019<\/em>s first season tore through the TV set like a squall — accompanied, as squalls are, by intervals of humidity. Sorkin\u2019s alternate media history of 2010 was pissed off in general about the same things I was pissed off about during the presidential election summer; which was why, despite the contrary opinions of critics I respect, I bought the whole grandiloquent package. If Sorkin wanted to rant about the decline of civility in public discourse, the cheapening of what used to be considered \u201cnews value\u201d and the manner in which presenting facts in a reasonable, even balanced manner could be construed by right-wing fanatics as \u201cslanted,\u201d I was OK with it \u2013 up to a point.<\/p>\nThat point converged primarily upon women. With the possible<\/em> exception of Munn\u2019s Sloan (who makes wonky social awkwardness a variable of imperturbable hotness), just about all the principal women characters in The Newsroom\u2019<\/em>s first season were hyperbolic, dysfunctional, manipulative or some annoying compound of the three. The exceptions were the near-anonymous support staff members with names like Tess (Margaret Watson), Tamara (Wynn Everett) and Kendra (Adina Porter), all of whom seemed composed, competent and fretless. We were kept in the dark about their private lives and I wish the same were true with everybody else in the cast, especially Maggie, her ex-boyfriend Don Keefer (Thomas Sadoski) and her would-be boyfriend Jim Harper (John Gallagher Jr.), who now has a thing for on-line political reporter Hallie Shea (Grace \u00a0Gummer). Do I like these people? Mostly, I guess. Do I care whether any of them hook up? I do not. I prefer they all put their heads down and get to work the way Tess, Tamara and the others do. And while I understand Will and Mac\u2019s relationship to be the series\u2019 linchpin, I\u2019m so indifferent to their will-they-or-wont-they-reconcile-after-their-bitter-breakup subplot that I\u2019d now rather they never ever get back together\u2026which for all I know may well be how this second season pans out.<\/p>\nWhat did pan out for certain this season \u2013 eventually \u2013 is that people on the show were concentrating much more on their work. Operation Genoa may have ruined ACN\u2019s credibility. But it released The Newsroom<\/em> from its frantic obligation to reboot recent history; just as well, too, judging from the peculiarly ambivalent way the show approached the Occupy Wall Street movement earlier this season. In the process, the women were generally smarter and stronger than last season. Harden\u2019s droll, satiny portrayal of the company attorney provided one of Season Two\u2019s recurring pleasures. Gummer\u2019s character confuses me a little, but I thought her poker-faced autonomy was exactly what Jim had coming to him. I also wanted more of Constance Zimmer\u2019s spiky communications director for the Romney campaign, thinking that if Sorkin insists on finding romance for McAvoy (a.k.a. Hamlet the News Lug), she\u2019d be what government jargon would insist on labeling a \u201cviable option.\u201d<\/p>\nBut the most gratifying change from last year has come from Mortimer. Her Mac McHale blossomed this season from a welter of mannerisms and nervous tics into a woman who, when she slows her roll long enough to stare at, or down, a situation, lets you see the rueful wisdom earned with her wounds. Sorkin\u2019s scripts still make her steer cars into curbside garbage containers and induce gibbering noises from her whenever she thinks about the used-to-be that was Will-and-her. But even before she sussed out the fatal flaw in the Genoa story, Mac was showing more self-possession under stress.<\/p>\n
I think both she and the show reached a turning point in this season\u2019s fifth episode when she scolds a gay Rutgers student about to come out to his parents on the air during a segment of Will\u2019s show about the Tyler Clementi suicide. One senses that it\u2019s Sorkin\u2019s voice one hears when she\u2019s chiding the student for \u201cbathing in the reflected tragedy\u201d of someone who killed himself because his privacy was violated.<\/p>\n
(Sorkin did a lot of this mouthpiece stuff throughout the first season and for much of this one. I admit it. It got old for me, too.)<\/p>\n
\u201cI just wanted a way of coming out to my parents without being in the same room,\u201d the student then tells Mac.
\n\u201cWell, good luck with that,\u201d she says, then, trying to reassure him. \u201cIt gets better.\u201d
\n\u201cHow would you know?\u201d he replies.
\n\u201cI guess I wouldn\u2019t,\u201d she concedes.
\nWhich says to me that, at last, The Newsroom<\/em> is thinking through things before, and maybe even instead of, emptying its rounds.\u00a0I wish cable news and new media in general would follow this example.<\/p>\nAnd if The Newsroom<\/em> continues to deepen its inquiry into the post-Millennial news business, I hope it hits harder than it has so far upon the whole notion of a 24-hour news cycle, which to my mind has done far greater damage to journalism than Twitter feeds. Whatever happens, the show still likely wont get more traction and attention than the last few episodes of Breaking Bad<\/em>. I get it. I really do. There hasn\u2019t been a single feature film I\u2019ve seen this year that compares with what I\u2019ve seen so far of Breaking Bad\u2019<\/em>s last mile. But somehow, it\u2019s become so relatively unfashionable to like The Newsroom<\/em> that I can see it becoming relatively fashionable again. Just as long as everybody on the show keeps their minds more focused on the news beyond their room.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Maybe if Jane Fonda had been allowed to channel her third husband when the series started, as opposed to its last couple weeks, more people would say nice things about The Newsroom.\u00a0\u00a0As it is, Aaron Sorkin\u2019s unwieldy hybrid of screwball workplace comedy and tag-team poly-sci seminar will wind up its second season this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[368],"tags":[383,369,376,379,374,55,370,373,372,380,375,371,377,382,381],"class_list":["post-871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tv-reviews","tag-24-hour-news-cycle","tag-aaron-sorkin","tag-anthony-lane","tag-constance-zimmer","tag-emily-mortimer","tag-hbo","tag-jane-fonda","tag-jeff-daniels","tag-olivia-munn","tag-rutgers","tag-sam-waterston","tag-the-newsroom","tag-thomas-sadoski","tag-twitter","tag-tyler-clemnit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=871"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1183,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871\/revisions\/1183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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