The Newsroom Review: "Election Night, pt. 1" - Prelude

Will fires Mac (sort of) on "The Newsroom"

It’s impossible to talk about “Election Night, pt. 1” as anything other than the first half of a two-part finale.  Because of that, I’m finding it difficult to find anything interesting to say.  There’s no attempt whatsoever to bring any kind of closure to any of the storylines introduced here and, by the end, the whole episode comes off as just ramping up to what should be a much more thrilling conclusion. 

I don’t mean to say that this episode wasn’t bad.  It was fun (and funny), but there was very little depth to it.  And every single storyline was either an extension from the last episode or setup for next.  I appreciate what Leona is doing in keeping everybody on board and, while I think it’s the wrong decision, I understand why she’s making it and it seems in character.  That she would funnel all of her anger at Jerry and refuse to give in to even the sanest of decisions out of spite makes sense.  It’s also nice getting the other side of things from Reese, who would scrap the whole lot, if he wasn’t so terrified of his mother. 

But all of that is still in “to be continued” mode at episode’s end.  Even Will’s promise to fire Mac after Election night doesn’t feel like it’s going to take.  It’d be really nice for the Genoa storyline, which was such a colossal screwup, to have consequences beyond this season.  But it really feels like we’re going to largely get a reset by next year’s premiere.

Structural problems aside, this was an enjoyable hour of television.  I always enjoy The Newsroom the most when it’s producing the news and here we get some great stuff.  The bickering between Eliot and Sloan over who "called" a story (and Sloan’s subsequent botching of the story) was great, though Sloan’s on-air ineptitude combined with her book signing incident and Mac’s freak out at having Oxford on her Wikipedia page instead of Cambridge make this not such a great episode for the women.  The mocking of “the bullpen” and Eliot’s pained attempts to extract usable footage from a stats nerd was fantastic lampooning of the over-the-top efforts of the actual news networks.  All they needed was a holographic Will McAvoy and a giant touchscreen television and it would have been perfect.

The one story that consistently frustrated me and largely drew me out of the drama was the setup for the General Petraeus story.  You see, there is no Californian Congressman named Brody.  Nor was there a congressional candidate from California named Brody.  I understand that part of the story involved this fake person making incredibly insensitive statements twenty years ago and you don’t want to attribute fake statements to a real person.  And apparently Sorkin couldn’t find real, inflammatory statements from a real person to use for this story, but The Newsroom is a show that tenuously straddles the line between real and fiction.  Up to this point, everything we’ve been shown has been portrayed as happening in our world.  Even the Genoa story, though it turned out to be fake, is portrayed as something that could really happen.  Introducing a fake person (meant to be taken as real), muddies that line even more and, frankly, took me out of the narrative of the show for a good half hour because I was desperately trying to figure out who this person was they were talking about.  If The Newsroom wants to be fiction, that’s fine.  If it wants to be set in the real world, that’s fine to.  But it can’t just start making up Congressmen.  In that direction there be dragons.

A few spare thoughts –

I’m glad they found a way to bring back Constance Zimmer even if she is a bit over-the-top in her Romney rooting.  It’s a good character and she’s a good actress and I’ll be interested to see what sort of ammunition Sorkin gives her that she can use to “take apart” Will in the finale.

I’m also curious how the Michigan 1^st story is going to pan out.  The numbers woman thinks Benishek will win 51-49 but it’s actually going to come down to less than 2,000 votes at 48.1%-47.6%.

Funny, funny episode tonight with lots of great lines

“True story.  Which is more than we can say about the story.”

“People have been fired for making mistakes less small than this.”  “People have been incarcerated for making mistakes less small than this.”

“You’re screaming names of smart people in my ear.  They teach you that at Oxford?”

The Newsroom Review: "Red Team III" - Sorkin Stumbles Hitting His Stride

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

The Newsroom Review: "One Step too Many" - The Beginning of the End

Jerry does a bad, bad thing on "The Newsroom"

Let’s get one thing out of the way to start.  This week’s episode more than any before showed exactly why it was a terrible idea to have the new guy Jerry be responsible for the story that will bring down (?) “News Night.”  And the biggest problem isn’t that Jerry is the culprit, it’s that there was a perfectly good member of the main cast in a situation to do the same.  Maggie is clearly messed up from Africa, she deceptively edited a recording last week (whether intentionally or inadvertently was left up in the air), and they could have easily given her a reason to be upset with the military (who abandoned her at the school).  She was also, as was mentioned in the episode, involved in the Genoa investigation pretty much from the beginning.  There was absolutely no reason to bring in an outside interloper to muck up this investigation (which I’m still not entirely sure is bogus, despite Charlie’s pronouncement in the closing deposition) when there was a perfectly valid reason for an existing character to do it except that Sorkin loves his characters too much to let them make mistakes.  Todd VanDerWerff, riffing off a statement made by Andy Greenwald, points out that Sorkin is a writer who actually doesn’t like conflict among his characters, which is why he so often brings in outside characters (Jerry, Reese, Leona) to introduce the conflict he can’t let his main characters create.

I’m zeroing in on this one, seemingly small issue because it is a non-minor flaw in what has otherwise been a pretty terrific storyline, culminating this week with Jerry’s unforgivable act of manipulating the recording of his interview with General Stomtonovich.  As played, it’s not a bad piece of writing, but it lacks the gravitas that would come from a trusted character making the same decisions.  I don’t know if we’re supposed to sympathize with Jerry’s argument that the media is ignoring the Obama administration’s treatment of human rights (drone strikes, etc.) in situations when they would have excoriated the Bush administration, but it just rings hollow when he’s faking recordings, even though his case seems strong.  Put Maggie in the same situation and make it a story about the soldiers who left her at that school and you have a much more visceral story, one that gives its characters complex motivations rather than just rendering them dupes of the interloper.

The frustrating part is that, one massive misstep aside, the Genoa portions of “One Step too Many” made for a pretty fantastic hour of television.  Mac and Charlie track down an absent-minded general who confirms that Genoa happened (including the “it happened” line from two weeks ago).  Unfortunately, he won’t say so on the record, leading to Jerry’s aforementioned editing.  I’m really skeptical that Sorkin’s going to find a plausible way to walk this story back, given that we’ve still got a half dozen sources all saying the same thing.  Unless this turns into another “very strong tear gas” situation like the real Operation Tailwind, he’s going to have a lot of explaining to do.

I could talk about the rest of the episode but, honestly, it wasn’t that great.  I’m more convinced than ever that this show would work better as a 40-45 minute series with commercial breaks.  That way, we’d trim all the fat (like anything involving Jim and Hallie and the extended anti-Republican rant that had no thematic purpose in the episode) and keep the tonal dissonance (like the transition from the Red Team meeting to Jim and Hallie Skyping)  to a minimum.  The opening and closing scenes of this episode were incredible and, limited to the Genoa investigation, it would have been nearly perfect (Jerry issues aside).  But with so much extraneous bulge added in, it just wasn’t quite what it could have been.

A few spare thoughts –

The decision to show Maggie cutting her hair in “Unintended Consequences” but then have it normal in subsequent episodes was a mistake, not because the timeline is confusing, but because we’re far enough removed from her Ugandan excursion (more than five months now) that I’m beginning to think the haircut is unrelated to Africa and something even worse is going to happen to her in the future.  I don’t mind some shows giving me a constant sense of dread, but this is not one of them.

So who lit the bajillion candles in Jim’s room while he and Hallie were at dinner?

“Why does a politician take polls?”  “To find out what people want him to say the next day.  Are you comfortable with that analogy?”

“It couldn’t matter less but Santa has nine reindeer.”  “Rudolph!”

So thoughts?  Comments?  Just want to tell me my blog sucks?  Let me know in the comments or on Twitter @TyTalksTV.

The Newsroom Review: "News Night with Will McAvoy" - Baba-Booey Motherf***er

Will spends an entire episode behind the desk on "The Newsroom"

This is the show I’ve been waiting to see.  15 episodes into the series and they’ve finally put together a show that abandons all the worst parts of The Newsroom and focuses on what they do best: making the news.  Gone are the love triangles and speechifying.  Instead we get an hour told subtly in real time, from the open of Will’s show to its close.  We don’t spend the entire show watching the production, as several other stories play out, but watching everybody at work, doing their jobs well (with one notable exception) makes for fascinating television that Sorkin could write well in his sleep. 

The framing of the show splits the cast off into four different groups for the most part.  Will and Mackenzie are together producing “News Night,” Jim and Maggie are stuck at a computer waiting for the George Zimmerman 911 call to download, Charlie gets a visit from a Navy spy, and Don talks Sloan off the edge following the release of nude photos her ex-boyfriend took.  The last plot point was slightly cringe-inducing, especially given two of the cast members’ experience with similar situations, but Munn and Sadoski play things marvelously.  I much more enjoy the dynamic of Don and Sloan as friends as opposed to Sloan as the smitten kitten.  And the finale in which Sloan takes her vengeance (pic of her ex-boyfriend’s bloody face and all) was probably a bit contrived, but it kept well within Sloan’s character.

Watching Will and Mac make the news is a pretty impressive feat.  Their conversations during the commercial breaks are just sparkling and, while the progression of Will’s dad from ambulance phone call to death is perhaps a bit predictable, there’s no doubting the sincerity and emotion from both Will and Mac.  We also get more of Will’s frustration with being insulted on Twitter.  Will is a prideful, prideful man with more than a little Walter White in him, though I doubt he’s going to be blowing up any nursing homes anytime soon. 

Jerry is absent this week, but we still get a good bit of movement in the Genoa story.  Charlie is visited by an old Navy source who is still a spy and is trying to wring information out of Charlie about why Jerry’s poking into Genoa.  While never explicitly saying it, he certainly implies that Genoa was not a standard operation.  I’m becoming more and more convinced that the “News Night” crew actually gets this story right, but they have to disavow it (and fire Jerry) for reasons unrelated to the actual truth of the story.  There is just too much smoke for this to turn out to be nothing.  I was skeptical at first, about how this whole story would play out.  It felt like giving us the end at the beginning was going to drain all the drama, but I’m far more invested in this story right now than in any of the personal drama.

Jim and Maggie are stuck this week, so to speak, impatiently waiting for the Zimmerman recording to download.  This gives them plenty of opportunities to talk, but it feels a little wasted as the only real character development we get is the affirmation that Maggie is still screwed up (and has pulled at least one all-night bender).  Their scenes aren’t bad by any means, but it all feels a bit shallow and is mostly setup for Maggie botching the edit of the 911 call.  Mirroring what happened at NBC News, Maggie cuts the 911 operator’s question to Zimmerman regarding Trayvon Martin’s race, making it seem like he was saying “he looks black” without provocation when, in fact, he was responding to the 911 operator’s question.  This is the good side of Monday Morning Quarterbacking the news.  Sorkin clearly lays exactly how this sort of scenario could happen and then leaves it up to the viewer to decide if what Maggie did was accidental or intentional.  Maggie obviously can’t be fired, though, like the NBC producer was in real life, so the mistake is quickly discovered and corrected at episode’s end.  It might have been nice to see her get in serious trouble over the incident, but having two concurrent investigations might be too much.

This is easily the best that The Newsroom has been in its brief history.  It seamlessly blends drama with the news while mostly eschewing Sorkin’s worst tendencies as a writer.  I don’t know that I’m exactly hopeful this will continue, but the fact that The Newsroom is actually capable of this level of storytelling is heartening at the very least.

A couple of spare thoughts –

The Tyler Clementi stuff was probably the weakest aspect of the episode since it didn’t serve any purpose other than to allow Sorkin to speechify about, well, something.

This review’s title comes from the crew’s ferreting out of an attempt to get on the air by two callers purporting to be trapped in the rubble of an explosion in Syria.  It seemed ridiculous that someone in that scenario would call a news station and it eventually becomes clear why.  Mackenzie’s quick takedown of the callers combined with another producer’s witty retort (see above) give the episode an amusing closing number.