 |
| Jeff Daniels preaches to the choir in "The Newsroom" |
Another week
and yet more evidence that The Newsroom
is slowly finding its way around to becoming a halfway decent show. Unfortunately, the characters are all working
in different circles and on different projects right now so the latest episode
felt a bit scatter-brained. It probably
would have been better if it was twenty minutes shorter and dropped the C, D,
and E plots. Still, it’s an improvement
over last year if not an improvement overall.
Back again
to drive the A-plot is gossip columnist Nina Howard with the scoop that Will didn’t actually have the flu
during the 9/11 broadcast. While the
conclusion to this storyline is pretty anticlimactic (Nina agrees to bury the
story after Will tells her the truth), we do get the always pleasurable “Will
acting like a maniac” scenes as he runs around ACN, threatening to do terrible,
terrible things to the person who leaked the story. It’s a look we’ve seen on Will before, but Jeff
Daniels plays frantic and angry so well that it’s fun to just sit back and
watch, especially when Will isn’t even the focus of the scene, we just see him
running around the bullpen in the background, yelling at people. Ultimately, Reese Lansing is discovered as
the leak, which serves only to allow Sorkin to make another “old people don’t
get technology” joke as Charlie’s recording of Reese’s confession (regarding
the phone-tapping) has been erased. This
seems like it should matter, but Reese had already made it clear that he has no
intention of letting Charlie and Will hold anything over him. I’ve been somewhat surprised by Chris Messina’s
presence this season, given his regular role on The Mindy Project, but it is nice to have a consistent, competent
adversary for Will, even if he is stereotypically evil.
There are a
couple of stories jockeying for B-plot position, but the far more interesting
of the two is Mackenzie and Jerry trying to track down leads in the Genoa
investigation. Again, this show is
always at its best when it is showing journalists gathering and producing the
news and, in this case, we get Jerry and Mackenzie interviewing “Eric Sweeney,”
who confirms not only that the military used sarin gas in the operation, but
that they also used white phosphorous rounds during the extraction. This leads the team to try to track down any
civilians who might have seen the incursion.
For some reason, this involves Twitter, an Urdu translator, and a fax
machine (a Carnac the Magnificent setup if I’ve ever heard one). And if you think waiting for translated
Tweets to come through a fax machine should look boring, well you’re right, but
Sorkin and phenomenal director Lesli Linka Glatter make it work. The result is a series of Tweets outlining
the real time use of white phosphorous (the eponymous “Willie Pete”). We know this story is going to blow up in
their faces sometime soon (and I’m glad we do, otherwise this plot would be
incredibly confusing), but I’m stumped as to how that’s going to happen. Jerry and Mackenzie seem to be covering all
their bases and, if this story does turn out to be wrong, that means somebody
has gone to a lot of trouble setting up a very elaborate ruse.
In other,
less important news, Jim is still on the campaign trail, trying to Spartacus
the other campaign reporters into writing “the real news.” He succeeds only in getting himself and a
couple followers tossed off the bus in rural New Hampshire. Well done, Jim. I really don’t get the point of this
story. It’s not like anybody really
believes that the news coming from the campaign trail is that important. It feels like Sorkin just preaching to the
choir again.
And speaking
of preaching to the choir, or perhaps just spiking the football, Will’s weekly
rant is on the booing of a gay American serviceman during a Republican
debate. Again, it’s not like he’s wrong,
but the whole bit feels like Sorkin just beating a dead horse. I get that he wants to make a point of how
terrible Republicans can be when they’re trying to appeal to the religious conservative
base, but I don’t think this is as strong of an argument as he thinks it is.
So this week’s
episode wasn’t as good as the previous two, and it exhibited a fair amount of
narrative confusion. But I still feel as
though The Newsroom is moving away
from the more troublesome aspects of the show while accenting what it does
well. If we can just get everybody back
together and eliminate some of the extraneous plot threads, I think we’ll
really have something here.
A couple of
stray thoughts:
The OWS
story is still a bore as Sorkin feels content to spend ten minutes telling us
what they’re doing wrong rather than actually showing us what’s going wrong. I feel like there’s a common storytelling
cliché in there, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
Lots of good
physical comedy this week as Don falls off his broken chair…twice and Maggie
completely loses it after discovering the potential side effects of her malaria
medication. The latter bit would have
been dreadful were it not for Allison Pill’s exceptional comedic chops. In fact, Pill’s performance was the only
thing keeping the scene from winning our award for Most Ridiculous Female
Stereotype of the Week, which instead goes to…
Mackenzie’s
$1400 shoes.
So thoughts? Comments? Just want to tell me my blog sucks? Let me know in the comments or on Twitter @TyTalksTV.
No comments:
Post a Comment