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| Leona lets everybody off the hook on "The Newsroom" |
The Genoa Investigation wraps up in an episode that is
ninety percent awesome, five percent troublesome, and five percent
infuriating. As I wrote in my season one review (and have probably written several times since), The Newsroom is an amazing show when I can shut my brain off, and “Red
Team III” is no different. The episode
moves along at a fantastic clip and has this constant sense of dread as we watch
the Genoa broadcast play out while waiting for the other shoe to drop. Everything in the first half of the episode was
great and even the Benghazi stuff (which helps to explain why Genoa isn’t going
to be a story for much longer) works well, with one glaring exception I’ll get
to later.
If The Newsroom
had this ratio of great:iffy:bad every week, I’d have no problem loving
it. But the fact that there are usually
so many issues always makes me want to focus on the show’s problems, and
this episode had two big ones. The
biggest issue is that the episode spends so much time explaining how this wasn’t
just Jerry’s fault, but was instead an institutional failure and yet, in the
end, Jerry is the only one who gets fired. This is the crux of Jerry’s wrongful
termination lawsuit against ACN and it’s easy to see his point. Jerry alone didn’t miss the fact that Eric
Sweeney lied about his second Purple Heart and covered up his Traumatic Brain
Injury. Jerry didn’t feed leading
questions to the third witness, Herman Valenzuela, Mac did. It wasn’t Jerry’s source who forged the
mission manifest, it was Charlie’s (and also Will’s, though nobody knew they
shared a source). Sorkin spends so much
time walking back the idea that Jerry was the villain of this whole fiasco that
Leona’s ultimate decision not to fire anybody is just ludicrous.
I can buy that, in the year or so since last season’s
finale, Leona has come around on Will, Mac, and Charlie and can embrace the
program they’re doing, especially since his ratings seem to be up (and
skyrocketed for the Genoa program). And
her closing line of “Get it back!” in response to Will’s cry that “We don’t have
the trust of the public anymore” makes for a phenomenal smash cut to
black. The scene, as a scene, worked,
not least because Jane Fonda does amazing work with Sorkin’s dialogue. But seriously, if you’re going to spend 55
minutes explaining how this all fell apart and how it wasn’t all Jerry’s fault,
then somebody else has to get fired.
Whether it’s all three or just Will or just Mac ultimately doesn’t
matter. But if you’re not going to have
any consequences to the drama, then what’s the point? Actions require consequences and if the show and
characters end up in the same place at the end of this season as they were at
the beginning then there’s been a pretty massive failure.
My other issue with this episode is less a problem than a
missed opportunity. Will ultimately
explains the litany of things that went wrong and what actually happened on the
Genoa mission (with the exception of Stomotonvich’s “it happened”). This was a mistake. I would have found it much more interesting (and Leona’s response much more believable) if they hadn’t so effectively torn apart
the story but had, instead, left the ultimate answer hanging. Sure, Sweeney suffered a TBI. Sure, Jerry manufactured the Stomtonovich
recording. Sure, Mac led Valenzuela
during questioning. These problems are
clearly enough to force a retraction of the story. But to have Charlie’s source turn out to be
crazy and vindictive was unnecessary and even a bit overkill. And given that the incident that he believes ultimately
resulted in his son’s death (being fired from ACN) happened during the timeline
of this series, that’s something that might have been nice to have seen
before. As it is, we have no context for
this betrayal and it all just comes completely out of left field. Had Sorkin not gone so far with the source’s
villainy and had he not given a 10-second explanation of what really happened
on the Genoa mission, he could have forced the “News Night” team to retract the
story, but still kept its veracity in question, making the fallout seem more
understandable.
All in all, this was still a pretty fantastic episode. That it seems like only Jerry is going to
take the fall for this colossal snafu is infuriating, but the whole story’s
execution and its epic collapse made for great television.
A couple of spare thoughts –
I’m not going to rehash my comments on Maggie’s hair from last week, but we’re now a year out from her trip to Uganda and she just now
has cut it, after the Genoa fallout.
Presumably we’re not going to get any explanation on what exactly is
going on there, but that whole storyline just feels like a misfire.
I figured it would be the basketball game that proved that Jerry
edited the Stomtonovich tape, but I didn’t think it would be the shot clock. It seems like that was a little too obvious
and that somebody should have caught it prior to airing. They also don’t give any indication that
Stomtonovich wanted the game on specifically to prevent the raw footage from
being edited. Given his level of
paranoia, it seems like something he would have thought of and done, but it’s
left unsaid in an episode where no detail is left unexplained.
Benghazi gets rushed through, but we have yet another
anonymous “source at State” telling our intrepid reporters that Benghazi was a
planned terrorist attack. I like the
fact that they ran with the standard story because they didn’t trust their
sources now, but it leaves a gaping hole in the story. If, in fact, there was an email circulating
in the government that Benghazi had nothing to do with Terry Jones’s
anti-Muslim film, then why did Susan Rice go on Meet the Press five days later and say “What happened in Benghazi
was in fact initially a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired hours
before in Cairo, almost a copycat of the demonstrations against our facility in
Cairo, prompted by the video”? This seems like Sorkin wanting his cake and
eating it too. He needs his characters
to be the smartest people in the room, but he ends up essentially implying that
the US ambassador to the UN blatantly lied on national television.
“McMac”
No episode next week because of the holiday weekend, which
is good since I’ll be at the lake anyway.
See you in two weeks.
So thoughts?
Comments? Just want to tell me my
blog sucks? Let me know in the comments
or on Twitter @TyTalksTV
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