Dated, But Worthwhile: The Newsroom Was Sorkin's Most Original Work In Ages!

The Good: Exceptional details, Good acting, Interesting characters
The Bad: Exceptionally dated and plot-specific
The Basics: The Newsroom had only three seasons, which amount to a body of wonderful television that ages poorly.


When it comes to the works of Aaron Sorkin, there are a number of things that casual viewers do not immediately recognize. For example, Sorkin recycles a lot of his lines and plotlines. When people quote The Social Network (reviewed here!), they often recall the line about how if the Winklevoss brothers had invented Facebook, they would have invented Facebook. While it is memorable and was used in many of the trailers, loyal fans of Aaron Sorkins work will easily recognize the line as a bastardization of one of Sorkins lines from Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip (reviewed here!). In a similar fashion, Sorkin's latest television work, The Newsroom, used a few of its plots from Sorkin's work Sports Night (reviewed here!). Despite the third season of The Newsroom using the network sale plot from Sports Night, most of the HBO series is actually fairly original.

The Newsroom - The Complete Series is a compilation of the discs from:
The Newsroom - Season 1
The Newsroom - Season 2
and The Newsroom - Season 3 with new packaging, but no new material.

The Newsroom is an hourlong show that explores the behind-the-scenes aspects of a cable news show. Fighting for legitimacy and credibility in a 24 hour news cycle, jaded reporter Will McAvoy accepts his ex-girlfriend as his new Executive Producer whose goal is to make the news show on their cable news network great again. Instead of softball news, McAvoy and MacKenzie McHale fight to change the tableau of nightly news by delivering stories the right way.

While breaking stories on the Deepwater Horizon (BP oil spill), Egypt's coup and the shooting of Congresswoman Gabriel Giffords, McAvoy tries to expose the Tea Party as extremist hijackers of the Republican Party. McAvoy gambles his newfound principles by covering the Casey Anthony story in an attempt to get a strong Republican primary debate. Failing that, ACN gets lured into reporting a story that gets the team in legal trouble. The series climaxes with the fight between legitimate news and crowd sourcing the news when ACN is bought by a young, hip man who does not value McHale's approach.

As one might expect in a work by Aaron Sorkin, the writing in The Newsroom is exceptional. The dialogue is fast and witty and the characters are interesting. Unfortunately, The Newsroom is somewhat erratic. The first season is rooted in real-world events that are incredibly specific and remarkably dated (even now). The second season detours from the harshly realistic to create a fictional story that was analogous to how less-legitimate news sources get bamboozled. And in the third season, The Newsroom relies upon Sorkin's fictional African nation to sell a plot that allows for a contempt of court story for Will McAvoy.

Wound amid the stories are the behind-the-scenes dramas of the relationships of the people who work at ACN. Will McAvoy and MacKenzie McHale are exes who struggle to have a relationship that works while working together. Jim Harper is a professional who has a weak spot for Maggie, but can't seem to get it together with her. And Sloane Sabbith is a consummate professional not looking for a meaningful relationship when her most meaningful friendship develops into a shockingly good romantic relationship.

The Newsroom is dominated by distinctive characters and the essential characters are:

Will McAvoy – The lead anchor of ACN’s flagship program, NewsNight, he is unliked by his underlings and peers at the outset. When MacKenzie returns to the show, he starts doing the show they both wanted. He returns to integrity while fighting the Tea Party on air and standing by his employees,

MacKenzie McHale – Executive Producer of NewsNight, she loves Will and works to get him back on track. She is smart, efficient and runs the newsroom with integrity,

Jim Harper – MacKenzie's loyal assistant, he travels with her from her pre-ACN rut to ACN. There, he starts running the newsroom efficiently, despite developing feelings for Maggie. He starts dating Maggie's roommate at her insistence and tries to avoid her by going off on the Romney press bus,

Maggie Jordan – Initially in a bad relationship with Don, she works the newsroom with mixed professional results. To avoid her feelings for Jim and the consequences of confessing those feelings in a viral video on the internet, she takes an assignment in Africa that leaves her fundamentally shaken,

Don Keefer – The executive producer of the show that follows McAvoy's Newsnight, he is treated poorly by McAvoy's staff after being replaced by McHale. He dates Maggie until her true feelings come out and then he finds himself in an unlikely relationship with Sloan,

Sloan Sabbith – The economics expert at ACN, she is smart, efficient and professional. Despite that, she ends up in multiple personal quagmires - usually by men treating her poorly - and struggles to warn ACN of an impending hostile takeover,

Neal Sampat – He is the director of ACN's online presence who is ridiculed by his peers who do not see the internet as a legitimate way to gather information. But, after years of following internet clues to stories, he becomes mired in the heart of a story that exposes genuine government corruption,

and Charlie Skinner – The president of ACN, he fights for Newsnight to make the transition from soft news back to strong journalism.

The Newsroom is led by Jeff Daniels and Emily Mortimer and they bring instant credibility and gravitas to their roles of Will and MacKenzie. Younger performers like Allison Pill, Dev Patel and Olivia Munn play off the mature portrayal of Charlie Skinner by Sam Waterston and the mix of actors creates an environment that feels very real.

Ultimately, The Newsroom makes a good argument, but it belabors that argument and ends up as a body of work that was timely, but sadly ineffective.

For other works that are or were on HBO, please be sure to check out my reviews of:
Game Change
Veep - Season 1
Game Of Thrones - Season 6
Girls - Season 1
True Blood
Carnivale
Rome
Extras
Six Feet Under
Sex & The City - Season Three
Da Ali G Show
Jim Henson's The Storyteller

5.5/10

For other television reviews, please check out my Television Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2016 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Surviving Space: The Martian Balances Practical Science And Entertainment Shockingly Well!

The Good: Decent performances, Interesting characters, Good pacing for the relative lack of plot
The Bad: Glossed-over characters/initial pacing seems very fast
The Basics: The Martian does what several of the recent science fiction space exploration films have failed to do in creating a plausible narrative that remains entertaining.


Whatever NASA is currently spending on advertising - if it even has an advertising budget at this point - it might as well reroute that money. Hollywood films are produced with a much more significant budget and between Gravity (reviewed here!), Interstellar (reviewed here!) and now The Martian, the enthusiasm for practical space travel seems to be the highest it has been in years. Despite all of the initial hype for Gravity and the fantastic elements that made Interstellar a box-office hit, the superior film of the three is The Martian.

I was drawn to The Martian based on the strength of director Ridley Scott's prior science fiction work, Prometheus (reviewed here!) and I was somewhat surprised that my appreciation of that film did not get me excited about any of Scott's projects in between. I was pretty psyched to go into The Martian without any knowledge about the film outside the tagline on the movie poster and the fact that Matt Damon was the lead in it. That led me to the rare pleasant surprise of a survival film whose ending was not immediately apparent the moment the initial concept of the film was revealed.

Eighteen days into the Ares III exploration of Mars, NASA suddenly detects a storm that will sweep over the mission's landing site. The crew of the lander is notified minutes before the storm hits and they evacuate the land station for the lander. In the process of struggling through the storm, astronaut and mission botanist Mark Watney is impaled by a transmitter antenna and blown back. Mission Commander Melissa Lewis opts to save the remaining crewmembers by lifting off after trying everything they can to search for him in the space of a minute. The rocket lifts off and the next morning, Watney wakes up to his suit's oxygen alarm going off. He makes it back to the shelter, removes the metal that pierced him and his suit and he resolves to survive for the four years needed before the next manned mission to Mars arrives. He builds a greenhouse, creates a water supply, and plants potatoes.

On Earth, NASA's director Teddy Sanders declares Mark dead and the director of the Ares project, Vincent Kapor starts to look ahead on funding the subsequent missions to Mars. When Mindy Park at the satellite station on Earth notices movement at the Ares III landing site, Kapor and Sanders work to control the narrative and figure out how they may best help Watney out. Sanders remains adamant that the crew of the Ares III not be told Watney is alive (as they are not equipped to mount a rescue mission and NASA does not want to risk losing them in such an attempt). Months in, though, Watney tries to figure out how to get to the Ares IV landing site (some 3500 kilometers away) and how to communicate with Earth (which he does by scavenging the old Pathfinder probe. But as NASA prepares to drop supplies to Watney, the airlock to the greenhouse blows off and Watney's chances of surviving until supplies can arrive plummet. When Chinese scientists step in to assist with the problem of resupplying Watney, the mission has the potential to change and everyone involved is faced with critical choices.

The Martian is a geek's dream for a practical space film that also manages to be entertaining. Until very late in the film, the practical problems are practically addressed. Unlike Gravity which relied a great deal on spectacle, The Martian features scientists who are utilizing mathematics and science to solve problems. The Martian has spectacle, but it is minimized in favor of quiet moments, references to budget problems, and a surprising amount of time where Matt Damon's Mark Whatney talks to himself.

What The Martian does exceptionally well is balance the story of Watney on Mars with the rescue attempts being made by the people on Earth. Initially, Watney's story seems ridiculously simple. He finds himself abandoned on Mars with all of the supplies he actually needs and the moment he sees the first potato plant growing, it's hard to feel a sense of urgency about him being lost in space. In fact, the two biggest plot issues seem to be with the set-up and the solution.

Mark Watney gets left behind on Mars in a very reasonable way. The mission commander makes a tough call and opts to save five lives over prolonging the search for Watney. The storm that causes the initial conflict is incredibly severe and seems to come out of nowhere, such that the team barely makes it from the habitat to the lander ship. That's a tough conceit to buy right off that bat; that NASA either so blunders the weather models or that the Mars team doesn't have weather monitoring instruments of their own forces the film's premise. As well, the moment Watney is discovered alive on Mars, the question becomes how to help him survive or rescue him, which is reasonable. While one might expect a film to not have to address all contingencies, in a film as science-laden as The Martian, it seems odd that no one on screen pitches that Ares IV would come with a more advanced rover to pick Watney up at the Ares III site. Unburdened by the thoughts of how to move himself to the Ares IV site, Watney could have been more cautious and, perhaps, done some things like focus on building a secondary greenhouse to double down on his survival chances.

All that said, The Martian is otherwise gripping. Matt Damon does an excellent job of playing an astronaut who retains his humanity and wry sense of humor in the face of exceptional odds against his very survival. It takes a pretty impressive performer to carry a film on one's own, but Damon pulls it off. Every minute one spends watching Watney try to figure out how to survive is gripping.

Watney's story is balanced - mostly effectively - by the NASA storyline where Teddy Sanders basically acts like the average Star Trek captain and forces engineers to do things faster than they are comfortable and with a seemingly unlimited budget (budget problems are referenced, but what the film lacks is a single, key scene with the American President where Sanders bluntly states that he does not want to be the President who let an American astronaut die in space out of respect for budgetary concerns). Jeff Daniels plays Sanders with credibility, as Chiwetel Ejiofor does as Vincent Kapoor. Kristen Wiig is entirely underused, as are the talents of most of the crew of the Ares III mission. And there is something unsettling, these days, about watching a film where Sean Bean plays a character that has every reason to be expected to survive the film.

Ultimately, with minimal flare, Ridley Scott paints a picture of what space exploration looks like when smart people work together to survive a very basic problem with finite resources. And Scott and Damon make it entirely watchable and entertaining.

For other films featuring Chiwetel Ejiofor, be sure to see my reviews of:
Doctor Strange
12 Years A Slave
Salt
2012
Children Of Men
Serenity
Four Brothers
Love Actually

8.5/10

For other movie reviews, please check out my Film Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2015 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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HBO Enters That Irksome Spot Between Brilliant And Bastardly With The Perfect Third Season Of The Newsoom!

The Good: Engaging plot development, Great acting, Good character development
The Bad: SHORT!
The Basics: In its final season, The Newsroom is short, focused, original, and perfect, which is wonderful and frustrating!


Unlike a lot of networks, HBO has the tendency not to kill shows before their time - Carnivale (reviewed here!), notwithstanding – so when it does cancel a series, it is usually because it has gone long past its prime and is no longer drawing an audience. When HBO announced that the third season of The Newsroom would be its last and it would only be getting six episodes for the season, fans like me wondered what the hell was wrong with HBO. After all, The Newsroomwas one of the network’s smartest shows and there did not seem to be any deficit of excitement for Aaron Sorkin’s latest series. Coming off the disastrous plot for the Atlantis Cable News team in the second season (reviewed here!), there seemed like plenty of interesting potential directions for the third season (and beyond) to go in.

The result of Sorkin only having six episodes to wrap up The Newsroom with is that Aaron Sorkin created one of his best seasons of television yet. The fear for Sorkin fans with some of the elements that set-up the third season – the potential buy-out of ACN smacked of the conclusion to Sports Night (reviewed here!) – was that Sorkin would once again reuse some of his previously created character arcs, plot devices and (especially) witty lines. Fortunately, for a series that was always in danger of being derivative, Sorkin and his team pulled it out with six episodes that create a tight, powerful, meaningful season of television that allows The Newsroom to go out on a high note and end before it succumbed to Sorkin’s lack of creativity.

Picking up in the wake of ACN’s expose of a fictitious story, NewsNight With Will McAvoy struggles for credibility among its cable news competitors and its dwindling audience. When the bombing of the Boston Marathon occurs, Will McAvoy and MacKenzie McHale are incredibly cautious about their sources with reporting the story – so much so that they end up discrediting a number of other reports that use false leads. While the rest of the ACN team is championing good reporting while social media gives law enforcement bad leads in the Boston Marathon case, Neal finds himself in possession of tens of thousands of documents of classified intelligence materials. Neal is handed a story about how U.S. operatives planted stories in foreign newspapers and one of those stories led to a riot in which thirty-eight people (including three Americans) were killed.

Almost immediately, Will and MacKenzie realize that Neal has committed a serious felony (encouraging his source to commit espionage) and when the Justice Department descends upon ACN, Will has Neal flee the country. As the Justice Department interrogates Will (Neal told him his source), Sloan realizes that ACN is the subject of an impending hostile takeover. Attempting to avoid a buyout by a ruthless billionaire who wants to make ACN into a network serviced by “citizen journalists” and social media, Charlie and Sloan find themselves completely at his mercy. When Lucas Pruit buys ACN and retools it, the team tries to keep things together without Will McAvoy’s leadership. Jailed for contempt for refusing to reveal Neal’s source, Will struggles to maintain his sanity while imprisoned and Mac, Don and Jim fight with Charlie to maintain the network’s integrity.

At its worst The Newsroom was always in danger of retreading where Sports Night had gone fifteen years prior. Fortunately, while the set-up for the final season of The Newsroom was identical to the final arc of Sports Night, the third season of The Newsroom takes the series in a different direction. Instead of being a savior for the beloved show, Lucas Pruit becomes an antagonist who menaces everything the protagonists for the series have built. The difference makes all the difference: it allows The Newsroom to go out on a completely different note than Sports Night and it allows Aaron Sorkin to finish the show with a sense of originality that his prior two works have lacked.

The third season of The Newsroom is notable, as well, for telling some stories that are not actual news story, sucking it out of the real world and into the fictional world of The West Wing (reviewed here!). That makes it problematic as it blends fictional television universes (Equatorial Kundu, which is at the heart of the story that captivates Neal and Will, is a construct of The West Wing) and the real world (Edward Snowden is on monitors in Charlie’s office and the Boston Marathon bombing coverage is relayed in a fashion identical to reality). While this might seem like a real conundrum only for fans of Sorkin’s works (how to reconcile a world where after Bartlet and Santos, Bush and Obama came to power), it guts the authority of The Newsroom for fans of this show alone as well. After all, The Newsroom has been very rooted in speaking truth to power as we know it in the U.S. right now. A show that called out the Tea Party and explored genocide in Africa that then cannot come up with a real story to use to tell the whole journalist integrity/espionage story seems troubling.

Regardless, The Newsroom Season Three manages to be entirely engaging and even pull out some real surprises. “Oh Shenandoah,” especially, is unlike anything else on any other Aaron Sorkin production. The result is a pleasantly surprising season of television that is almost impossible not to binge watch into a single sitting!

For those unfamiliar with it by this point, The Newsroom is dominated by distinctive characters. In the third and final season, the essential characters are:

Will McAvoy – The lead anchor of ACN’s flagship program, NewsNight, he is engaged to MacKenzie. Their marriage plans soon go awry when McAvoy buys Neal the computer he needs to get his informant to trust him. McAvoy stands by his ethical standards to fight the government cover-up in Kundu, going to jail rather than naming Neal’s source. His time in prison for protecting his source is a transformative one for him,

MacKenzie McHale – Executive Producer of NewsNight, she loves Will and works to protect his legacy while he is in prison. She realizes very early on how much trouble Neal and Will are in, thanks in part to a friend in the intelligence community with whom she confides. While trying to fend off the hostile takeover of Atlantis Cable News, she actually meets their source face to face. Her wedding plans are very suddenly altered, which leads her to make an important, abrupt, decision,

Jim Harper –After getting his girlfriend a job at ACN, he is shocked when she makes an ill-timed Tweet and he is forced to take her to Charlie to be fired. They have a falling out over the type of job she gets afterward, where he worries that she might be wooed by ACN’s enemies, and that sets him and Maggie up for a relationship. He gets little done as Producer at ACN, though he and Maggie attempt to get an interview with Edward Snowden as he leaves Russia,

Maggie Jordan – Having recovered from the incident in Africa, she returns to a more traditional look and refocuses on her health and professional development. She overhears a potentially big story from an EPA source while on a train and she decides not to take the salacious story in exchange for reporting the more substantive one. She starts dating another man she met on the train and they have tension based on Maggie’s attraction to Jim,

Don Keefer – He starts dating Sloan, though the two struggle to hide that fact from a member of Human Resources. He is given the unenviable task of vetting a young woman with a problematic website for the new ACN, which leads him to his ultimate conflict with Charlie,

Sloan Sabbith – Giddy over her new terminal that seems to give her inside financial information, she is the one who figures out that Reese and his mother are about to lose ACN. She starts dating Don and fails his tests when he realizes that she is very much like him in relationships,

Neal Sampat – He is eager to get respect and legitimacy from his coworkers and, in the process, eagerly gives the ACN encryption key to a source who requests it. To prove to himself and the others that the source is legitimate, he informs the source how to transfer the classified documents from the U.S. internal sites to him. After inadvertently inciting espionage, he goes on the run while the rest of the team fights for his rights and freedoms back in New York,

and Charlie Skinner – The president of ACN, he goes toe to toe with Lansing’s other children, who will inherit and buy enough of the company’s stock to completely own the company. Fearful of the direction they might take it, he tries to suck up to them and then tries to find a buyer who has as much integrity as Reese and his mother. Under Pruit’s ownership of ACN, he is truly miserable and finds himself fighting against his own goals and agendas.

In its third season, everyone on The Newsroom know their parts and how to play them expertly. This is a flawlessly-delivered season of television and the few guest stars for the season, like Kat Dennings and B.J. Novak, figure out how to play perfectly within the seasoned cast who know their characters backwards and forwards. Jeff Daniels uses the last few moments of the show to infuse Will McAvoy with his own interest and talent (singing) and he is such a professional that he makes it seem organically like a trait of McAvoy instead of Daniels. That is a talent that few actors possess!

All of that adds up to an engaging season that packs a lot into six episodes and makes one figure that HBO is brilliant and figured out how to get something new out of Aaron Sorkin . . . even as it infuriates viewers with how the show is already done!

For other works from the 2014 – 2015 television season, please check out my reviews of:
House Of Cards - Season 2
Doctor Who - Season 8
True Blood - Season 7
”Now Is Not The End” - Agent Carter
”Aftershocks” - Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D.

10/10

For other television reviews, please check out my Television Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2015 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Local Legends, The Tough Sell Outside The Culture: Escanaba In Da Moonlight

The Good: The acting is fine, Captures the U.P. culture well?
The Bad: Weird in an awkward way, Bland plot, Obvious character arc.
The Basics: After years, I take in Escanaba In Da Moonlight and discover a Michigan movie classic that plays poorly to my New York sensibility.


Ever since I moved to Michigan, my wife has tried to get me to watch Escanaba In Da Moonlight with her. After watching The Newsroom (season two is reviewed here!) with Jeff Daniels, she redoubled her efforts given how she saw how much I liked Jeff Daniels’s performance in that show. Escanaba In Da Moonlight is an indie film that is very much a work of Jeff Daniels. Daniels wrote the play upon which the film was based, then adapted the screenplay and directed Escanaba In Da Moonlight. Jeff Daniels is also the lead star of Escanaba In Da Moonlight.

It bears noting that I am from upstate New York originally. I’ve never lived in a big city and I’m a big fan of rural life (most of it anyway). Escanaba In Da Moonlight is a distinctly rural Michigan movie. Set in the Upper Penninsula where life, apparently, is very much hunter-oriented, with little in the way of technology or amenities, Escanaba In Da Moonlight hinges on the viewer’s ability to accept and appreciate U.P. culture. The story and character development all hinges on the importance of men being men, kids killing animals through hunting and accepting weirdness unseen in daily life since Twin Peaks (reviewed here!).

Rueben Soady is forty-three years old and as hunting season begins, he leaves his wife to go north with his father, Albert, and disturbingly slow brother Remnar. At their camping lodge north of Escanaba, Albert and Remnar work to distance themselves from Rueben, fearing that he is cursed when it comes to shooting a buck. Rueben is on the cusp of being the oldest Soady man to not shoot a buck and he is determined to beat the curse. While they are out during the day, flashing lights appear and in their wake there is the incoherent Jimmer Negamenee sitting on their roof. Drinking a foul protein-based concoction made by Rueben’s wife, the quartet hunkers down to prepare to hunt a buck that will keep them fed for a year.

Soon, though, they are visited by Ranger Tom (from Detroit) and the weirdness escalates. Rueben has waking dreams, sees flashing lights and ends up outside in the middle of the night. Tom and Jimmer become possessed, speaking in unnaturally deep voices and fearing they are inhabited by dark forces beyond their control. But through the harrowing night, Rueben gets the strength to go out and hunt the buck that will break the curse and make him a man in his family’s eyes.

Rueben Soady is a strangely bland protagonist. The others around him are quite a bit more active (manic, even) while he slouches through the attempt to break his curse. Escanaba In Da Moonlight makes no real sense – not the supernatural stuff, that’s pleasantly weird, much like Twin Peaks - on the character front to anyone who is not a Upper. Why does Rueben Soady care so much about the alleged curse and his family’s esteem? He’s a forty-three year-old man who has a hot wife and two children of his own; why does he care about the ritual of hunting the buck even? Escanaba In Da Moonlight is not Moby Dick; Rueben pursues the buck without passion or obsession and the motivations on him seem largely external instead of internally-motivated.

Daniels is supported by Harve Presnell, Joey Albright, and Wayne David Parker (who might well be a perfect stand-in for Russ Tamblyn) and they play their parts well. They also play off one another fine, though their characters are monolithic in the way they embody the Upper culture, as opposed to having distinctive characters independent of their culture.

Jeff Daniels directs Escanaba In Da Moonlight well, though there is a decidedly low-budget quality to it. The supernatural is represented by bright lights, shakes that look like they were mimicked from later seasons of The X-Files and Star Trek-style special effects. The story is not presented in a particularly compelling way.

Ultimately, Escanaba In Da Moonlight is locally relevant, but hard to sit through even once . . . even for those of us who have been waiting years to watch it.

For other indie films set mostly outside, check out my reviews of:
The Wait
Assisted Fishing
The Way

3/10

For other film reviews, please check out my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2014 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Build-up To Catastrophe, The Newsroom Season Two Is Good, Not Exceptional!

The Good: Good writing, Great acting, Interesting plots and characters, Engaging plot construction
The Bad: Dramatic tension hinges on forgetting how the season begins?!
The Basics: When The Newsroom returns for Season 2, Aaron Sorkin tries something new, but the season’s sense of dramatic tension builds on something of a folly.


As a big fan of the works of Aaron Sorkin, when I reviewed the first season of The Newsroom (reviewed here!), my biggest criticism of the new Aaron Sorkin series was how much Sorkin recycled from the other works he wrote. The Newsroom proved that Aaron Sorkin either does not understand just how much of a fanbase he has or that he is the biggest pro-recycling advocate working in entertainment today. The second season of The Newsroom starts out appearing to buck that trend, though the astute fans will find a lot in the nine episodes of the second season that is familiar.

In fact, the new concept season for The Newsroom actually appears on the surface to be the freshest thing Aaron Sorkin has done in years (though fans of his works will be utterly unsurprised by the prevalence of lawyers in this season – Sorkin has legal entanglements and depositions in virtually all of his major projects), though it has two fundamental flaws. The minor flaw is that the first season made a big deal of Jenna Johnson (the former student who set off the firestorm that began the series) joining the ACN team as a new intern. The second season finds Jenna in a background role in only a few of the episodes; the nearly-absent Lisa (Maggie’s roommate) ends up having a vastly more significant role in the season than the new ACN intern! So, there is the feeling that the bloated cast is not even using the supporting talent it had when it loaded up with two to three new recurring characters for the second season.

The far more significant issue with the second season of The Newsroom is that the nine episode season has a continuous arc that hinges almost entirely on the viewer forgetting the first five minutes of the season. The concept of the second season of The Newsroom is that ACN reported a story on the air that was quickly debunked. Given that the season starts with lawyers taking depositions from the key staff, the viewer knows what is coming, so there is a distinct lack of dramatic tension that the season seems to be trying to build. As the pieces of the story begin to come together, only the inattentive viewer (which is not, traditionally, the HBO audience) forgets where the story is going.

Opening with most of the senior staff of ACN being interviewed by Rebecca Halliday, a wrongful termination lawyer, the season flashes back to the beginning of the 2012 Presidential Primary season. In the wake of Maggie confessing her feelings (inadvertently) to Jim and the footage of her rant making it onto YouTube, Jim flees New York for the Romney Campaign’s tour bus. Aboard the Romney tour bus, Jim becomes frustrated that his role there is largely to provide the candidate with good press and he becomes a malcontent, even as he starts a relationship with Hallie, a reporter who is on the assignment that is likely to be her last.

Back at ACN, Jim’s replacement Jerry Dantana shops a story that instantly troubles Mac and Charlie. Dantana has a source that claims that during a black op in Pakistan, the United States military used sarin gas on civilians while extracting U.S. Marines. Slowly, Jerry, MacKenzie, and Charlie follow the thin leads surrounding Operation Genoa. Long before the final betrayal that leads to the onslaught of lawyers turning on ACN and a huge rift forming between Will and MacKenzie, the staff of ACN becomes troubled by the leads surrounding Genoa and the appearance that the story might be valid.

The Newsroom is a season with severe tension among the main characters. Fans of Sorkin’s works will be unsurprised that Will develops a relationship with Nina Howard (anyone who knows of the saga of Casey and Sally will see this coming a mile away) and there is something refreshing in how quickly it dissolves. But most of the season’s emotional melodrama comes from Will McAvoy and MacKenzie McHale rehashing how their relationship dissolved before the series began. To fill the gap left by the rising sexual tension between Maggie and Jim, The Newsroom slowly builds the romance insinuated at the very end of the first season between Sloan Sabbith and Don Keefer. The romantic aspects of the Sloan and Don subplot is almost enough to overlook just how dark Sorkin goes with Maggie’s character.

Like all great dramas, The Newsroom Season 2 is about great characters. In the second season, the essential characters are:

Will McAvoy – A Republican cable news anchor, he starts calling out candidates during the Republican primary. As ACN takes fire because of Will’s scathing commentary on the Tea Party, Will pushes for a more conservative approach to presenting the news, hinging all his hopes on presenting a real debate for the Republican candidates. Pulling his punches and kept out of the loop on Genoa until the last possible moment, he becomes the public face of ACN’s scandal leading into Election Night coverage,

MacKenzie McHale – As executive producer of News Night, she feels the loss of Jim most acutely. Not quite trusting Jerry, she still feels compelled to investigate Genoa, while at the same time being frustrated by how Will keeps her at arm’s length,

Jim Harper – The News Night producer goes rogue to work well beneath pay grade and position to try to get coverage on Mitt Romney that will expose the contradictions in his campaign. Jim is deeply interested in bringing to public attention the public policies Governor Romney changed once he began running for President. He returns after a fumble on the campaign bus to discover the distance between him and Maggie has grown insurmountable, especially as he continues to grow his relationship with fellow reporter Hallie,

Maggie Jordan – An Associate Producer on News Night, she pushes for a story in Africa. There, she has a traumatic experience that leads her to cut off almost all her hair and dye what was left. Maggie begins engaging in risk behaviors including drinking and promiscuous sex with strangers in the wake of the incident in Africa,

Don Keefer – The ex-producer of News Night, he is now the executive producer on the ten o’clock show. After the fallout with Maggie, he becomes a pretty harsh critic of Jerry Dantana and the Genoa story. He starts to let his attraction to Sloan and she becomes one of the people who counsels him more than anyone else,

Sloan Sabbith – An economist with two Ph.ds, she starts to act as Will’s “big sister.” She is horrified when a book she did not actually autograph sells in a charity auction,

Neal Sampat – The writer of Will’s blog, he finds a serious lead in the Genoa story using Twitter. He becomes obsessed with the idea of Occupy Wall Street and works to bring that story to the attention of ACN, with somewhat disastrous results. He works to control the negative Tweets surrounding Will and News Night. He also tries to get MacKenzie’s Wikipedia page updated as a gift to her,

and Charlie Skinner – The head of the news division, he continues to go head to head with the corporate owners of ACN. Despite drinking quite a bit, he remains highly ethical and serious about keeping ACN focused and delivering hard-hitting news. As the Genoa story becomes more and more of a reality, he remains one of the longest holdouts to airing the story.

In the second season of The Newsroom, the acting remains exceptional. Led by Jeff Daniels and Emily Mortimer (who, despite all the teasing on the first season’s commentary tracks, does not appear naked in the season!), The Newsroom provides its performers with the opportunity to play triumph and heartbreak in almost every episode. Sam Waterston is tragically underused as Charlie, though he has some wonderful moments he provides both gravitas to go head to head with Jane Fonda’s Leona Lansing and goofy humor to deliver some of the season’s most memorable lines.

Thomas Sadoski almost entirely removes the bastardly qualities from Don Keefer to make him a surprisingly watchable and interesting character for the second season. The attention paid to Magge Jordan in the first season in The Newsroom is gone in the second season. Alison Pill surrenders most of her acting talent and substance for the season in exchange for a brutal haircut and a scared look in her eyes. She is easily outshined by recurring guest star Marcia Gay Harden, who starts out as efficient and sarcastic in the role of Rebecca Halliday (the lawyer) before degenerating into a pretty typical Sorkin female character who craves male attention.

Still, The Newsroom is worth watching in its second season. The show looks good and despite the structural issue, the season goes a decent distance to assuring fans that Sorkin still has some new tricks up his sleeve, even if they do not entirely land.

For other works by Aaron Sorkin, please check out my reviews of:
Moneyball
The Social Network
Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip
Charlie Wilson's War
The West Wing
Sports Night
The American President
Malice

7/10

For other television reviews, please check out my Television Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2013 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Sports Night 2.0: The Newsroom Season 1 (My 2300th Movie/Television Review!)

The Good: Exceptional writing, Great acting, Interesting plots and characters, Great DVD extras
The Bad: Recycles so much stuff from other Aaron Sorkin works!
The Basics: The Newsroom Season 1 returns Aaron Sorkin to television and it is incredible . . . except for fans of Aaron Sorkin’s other television works.


Right off the bat, I need to say that I am a big fan of the works of Aaron Sorkin. At this point, the only thing by Sorkin that I have not yet seen (to the best of my knowledge) is Malice. So, when I sat down to watch The Newsroom - The Complete First Season, I was excited because I love the writing, characters and settings Sorkin creates. And The Newsroom is great . . . for everyone but the fans of Sorkins works. I have to say, I’m not entirely sure The Newsroom is a Sorkin work: the season finale is not called “What Kind Of Day Has It Been.” Die-hard fans of Sorkin’s works will get that joke.

They’ll also get that some of the best moments in The Newsroom are lifted directly from Sorkin’s other works. In two different episodes in the first season, Emily Mortimer’s MacKenzie and Sam Waterston’s Charlie deliver lines that Sorkin wrote for William H. Macey’s character Sam Donovan from Sports Night (reviewed here!). Sorkin recycling from his works is not a new thing; he took advantage of the fact that Sport Night tanked to use entire lines and plotlines from Sports Night in The West Wing (reviewed here!). The Newsroom is not at all unsurprising for Sorkin fans: it begins with a character in crisis who begins to turn his life around, finds the characters embattled against an entrenched adversary (2/3 have been “The Network,” for the other Sorkin television work, it was Republicans), and features a relationship that is on again/off again or dissolving. Fans of Sports Night will see a lot of Isaac in Charlie, Dana in MacKenzie, Casey in Will and Natalie in Maggie. After a decade off the air, Sorkin hopes that viewers will have forgotten about his beloved Sports Night characters, but his fans will not.

So, fans of Aaron Sorkins works will not be surprised by any number of the early “surprises,” like the fact that MacKenzie cheated on Will in their backstory, that Maggie and Don do not actually break up and Isaac, er, Charlie, stands up for the show without telling Will and his team just how endangered they are.

And, despite all of the Sorkin conceits familiar to the fans, The Newsroom Season 1 is still amazing television. In fact, it is better than 95% of the other programs that are on the air and the only show in recent memory where my wife and I got at least one chill per episode. When, by episode four “I’ll Try To Fix You,” the series creates a perfect episode (10/10, absolute perfection!), it is hard to deny that the viewer is watching something absolutely incredible. It is so easy to overlook the recycled lines and Sorkin conceits in the season.

As the title suggests, The Newsroom is set behind-the-scenes at a cable news network. Opening with a college seminar panel where anchor Will McAvoy declares that the United States is not the greatest nation on Earth, ACN – Atlantis Cable Network – puts McAvoy on three weeks of forced vacation. When he returns to work, he finds most of his staff gone and his ex-girlfriend, MacKenzie McHale, is being brought on as the nightly news’s new executive producer. MacKenzie comes with some of her own staff and her assistant, Jim, begins to have real chemistry with Maggie Jordan, who is still in a relationship with Will’s ex-executive producer, Don. Together, Charlie and MacKenzie push Will to produce news that is informative and substantive, as opposed to safe and easy.

Over the course of the season, Will takes on the Tea Party and does his best to stop their stranglehold on the Republican party leading up to the 2010 midterm elections. The staff covers the shooting of Gabriel Giffords, the coup in Egypt, the nuclear reactor meltdown (or near meltdown) in Japan, and the Casey Anthony trial. The season climaxes in the debt ceiling debate and the way the Tea Party is holding the U.S. hostage.

The Newsroom features Aaron Sorkin’s trademark banter and characters who have moments of intense social awkwardness. It is one of his more serious endeavors, trying to be less overtly humorous than The West Wing. This is Sorkin’s attempt to actually educate viewers to the dangers of the Tea Party and its corporate sponsors. The ten episodes of The Newsroom Season 1 present hour-long stories that re-evaluate incredible news stories from 2010 – 2011. But for viewers who want to see how poetic and packed with information scripted cable dramas can be, The Newsroom delivers.

Like all great dramas, The Newsroom Season 1 is about great characters. In the first season, the essential characters are:

Will McAvoy – A Republican cable news anchor, he misses the days when the news meant something and did something other than cater to the corporate sponsors of the network. He remains emotionally damaged – three years later – after breaking up with MacKenzie. As he, Charlie, and MacKenzie transform News Night into a hard-hitting news program, he begins dating again (a string of women) and that gets him in trouble with the tabloids. He becomes outraged at how the Republican Party has been co-opted by the Tea Party faction. He gets gunshy when he realizes just how dangerous a position he is in, given that he renegotiated his contract in order to be able to fire MacKenzie and that left him vulnerable to the machinations of Leona Lansing. He works to civilize a tabloid writer and spends money on saving lives, though he refuses to let others know. He becomes the target of death threats and in the process has to have a bodyguard,

MacKenzie McHale – Returning from being embedded in Afghanistan with Jim and the military, she tries to inspire Will. In the process, she takes control of News Night. She dates Wade, a man who wants to run for Congress and takes it personally when Will brings in the man she had an affair with to write a story on News Night. She is smart, articulate, and principled, but socially awkward. She is, arguably, Jim’s best friend in the world,

Jim Harper – A producer who is the assistant to MacKenzie, having been embedded with her in Afghanistan. He is efficient and has contacts that help Will break his first major story with News Night 2.0. He has a crush on Maggie, who is antagonizing to him without reason, but starts dating Maggie’s roommate when she doesn’t make a move and Don pushes him toward it. He has a great deal of authority on the show and has real issues when Maggie acts unprofessionally, though he helps her out when she has panic attacks,

Maggie Jordan – An Associate Producer on News Night, she has an on-again, off-again relationship with Don, though she is instantly attracted to Jim. She is easily flustered, but very smart,

Don Keefer – The ex-producer of News Night, he becomes the exec on the ten o’clock show when MacKenzie comes aboard. He is initially a jackass, but fights for the good stories and starts to fight for Maggie. He wants to be a star and make his anchor into a star above Will, but when push comes to shove with the corporate parents, he steps up to do the right thing,

Sloan Sabbith – An economist with two Ph.ds, she is brought on News Night by MacKenzie to make economic issues relevant. She is incredibly socially awkward and yet passionate about the economic issues that she knows about. She overcompensates from Will's pep talk by embarrassing a Japanese official on the air! She reveals very late that she has feelings for someone else on the staff,

Neal Sampat – The writer of Will’s blog, he has an obsession with bigfoot. He becomes instrumental in getting News Night its Egypt coverage,

and Charlie Skinner – The head of the news division, he looks out for Will and works to protect News Night. He is older and something of a curmudgeon and he is tested by an NSA employee who wants to break a story about U.S. wiretapping of cell phones. He likes MacKenzie and he drinks a lot.

The Newsroom Season 1 features an amazing cast. For probably the first time that I have seen her in anything, Emily Mortimer impressed me with her performance abilities as she was anything but white bread as MacKenzie. Jeff Daniels leads the cast as Will McAvoy and every moment he is on screen, he is credible as a seasoned news anchor. Dev Patel and Sam Waterston round out the supporting cast of seasoned actors as Neal and Charlie and they are unlike they are in any other work in which they have appeared.

The younger cast members are led by Alison Pill, who plays Maggie. Pill is able to emote incredibly with her face and eyes alone. She gives some of the season’s most delightfully goofy lines and makes them seem incredibly real, making Maggie seem like anything but a parody of a young newswoman.

On DVD, The Newsroom is a wealth of bonus features, which is what one expects from HBO. Each episode has a featurette about the episode featuring Aaron Sorkin talking about how he developed the episode. There are commentary tracks on the pilot and a few other episodes – the one for “I’ll Try To Fix You” is actually entertaining as Emily Mortimer describes her experiences with nude scenes and the guys in the room resolve to make season two memorable in that regard! There are a handful of deleted scenes and a featurette on the entire season.

The Newsroom Season One is hard-hitting and smart and the punch it packs will be seen in 2014 if the show can reach enough of the electorate to usurp the Tea Party. While that is not the entire focus of the season, it is a vital component and one of the ways the show tries to be something far, far more than a well-written soap opera set in a news organization. And, even for fans of Aaron Sorkin’s works, The Newsroom is worth watching; the setting is as engaging as in his other works and for his poetry, humor, philosophy and intellect, more is certainly better.

For other current shows, be sure to check out my reviews of:
Game Of Thrones - Season 3
New Girl - Season 2
Happy Endings - Season 3
The Walking Dead - Season 3
Arrested Development - Season 4
House Of Cards - Season 1
True Blood - Season 5

8.5/10

For other television reviews, please check out my Television Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2013 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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