Tag: Will McAvoy

The Newsroom: Season 1, Episode 10–The Greater Fool

“The greater fool is someone with the perfect blend of self-delusion and ego, to think that he can succeed where others have failed. This whole country was made by greater fools.”

NewsroomMackenzieWill

Now that’s how to do a season finale. In a day when I’ve seen two such beasts, it was reassuring to know that, despite my equivocal feelings on the True Blood one, The Newsroom came up trumps with a stirring finale that seemed to encapsulate all the strengths (and, yes, weaknesses) of the show so far. Plots were resolved, character arcs completed, and a sense of closure achieved, even while leaving avenues open for the story to continue.

Of course, this is probably because The Newsroom finale, unlike True Blood, was written before it was known whether the show would be renewed. That closure was needed in case this was the last we ever saw of Will, Mack and the gang. Aaron Sorkin has presumable learned from bitter experience that a TV showrunner doesn’t always manage to finish those ambitious multi-season arcs, and the result is an ending that the viewer can feel satisfied with that doesn’t preclude further stories.

How much you enjoyed this depended (like the series as a whole, in fact) on your tolerance of two things. Firstly, Aaron Sorkin using the drama as a platform for grandstanding his own political views. That one I have no problem with. Secondly, the fact that the storytelling, characters and direction are unashamedly old-fashioned. Will and Mack are basically Tracy and Hepburn. Charlie Skinner is every wise old mentor in every news drama. Leona is every grasping corporate executive with a hidden heart of gold. And every problem can be solved at the last minute by the basic common decency of the people involved, who all pull together and make it right.

That kind of storytelling can often rankle with me, particularly because of its heartstring-tugging sentiment. In my early reviews of The Newsroom, it was a style I did find somewhat objectionable, but it’s a measure of how much I’ve come to like the show that while I still see those flaws, they matter less to me now.

Which was fortunate, because that need for character closure meant that this finale was lighter on the actual news stories than most episodes. After all, we had to deal with all the soap opera. Can Will and Mack overcome their past and get together, as they’re plainly meant to be? Can Maggie and Jim? And in a shock reveal this week, can (gasp) Don and Sloan?

The ‘rom com’ aspects of the characters have always been the biggest stumbling block for me – it’s a recurring Sorkin trope that various major characters must behave as though they’re constantly in a Richard Curtis movie. But by this point, I’ve come to care about the characters enough to genuinely want to see how it all plays out.

Not that it doesn’t still make me gnash my teeth with frustration every time that Jim and Maggie just miss out on getting together. This week, they came closer than ever before, due to a Freudian slip in a restaurant and a surprisingly vitriolic diatribe against Sex and the City.

So Maggie ‘accidentally’ let slip to Lisa how hard it was to see her with Jim, meaning she’s not only admitted her feelings to Lisa, but more importantly, to herself. Which was where Sex and the City came in. Having been soaked by a passing tour bus for that show’s NYC locations, Maggie totally went off on one about what it’s really like to be a single girl in New York: “Not all of our jobs revolve around shoes and gallery openings!” I’m guessing Aaron Sorkin’s not a big fan of Sarah Jessica Parker and the girls…

Unfortunately, Maggie’s rant included her feelings about her best friend’s boyfriend, who she now knows came to see her that fateful night in the last episode. I say ‘unfortunately’ because in a genuinely funny (if hugely contrived) moment of high romantic comedy, said boyfriend was actually atop that same tour bus, trying desperately to cram up on Lisa’s favourite TV show.

Yes, it was very much the stuff of traditional rom coms as Maggie realised and tried frantically to backpedal on her declaration. But I still laughed! And to cut a long story short, they kissed, dear reader. I mean, thank God! At last! They’ve finally worked out who they want to be with!

But oh no, Jim knows that the commitment Maggie finds lacking in Don is just round the corner, as he’s going to ask her (for all the wrong reasons) to move in with him. And so, her mind is changed back. Again. Just as Sloan has, quite unexpectedly, revealed not only an insight into Don’s personality (he thinks he’s a bad guy and tries to hard to be ‘good’) but also that she wants to go out with him herself! Just when you thought it was all resolved, the Don/Maggie/Jim/Lisa quadrangle is now a pentangle.

Ah well, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that this is obviously going to run and run – at least as long as the show does. Arguably more important is the relationship between Will and Mack, as the de facto leads of the ensemble, and slightly more progress was made there. In a script full of shout outs to the opening episode (I love a good circular narrative), Will revealed that the whole Don Quixote-like quest for his own integrity started with that ‘hallucination’ of Mack at the University seminar. And wouldn’t you just know it, Mack happened to be carrying the exact same pad she was that day, with her prompts to him still written on it.

So Will now knows that Mack was really there, and cares for him as much as she believes in him. Not sure that justifies such overwhelmingly sickly dialogue as “I bet your heart’s melting just now, isn’t it?”, but it turned out to be germane to the wider plot as Will made Mack aware of the message that he’d left her while stoned on the night of Bin Laden’s death. A message, it turned out, that Mack hadn’t received but bitchy gossip columnist Nina had. There could be only one explanation – Mack’s phone had been hacked and the message deleted.

That was a typical last-minute save after Charlie’s NSA source had been shown as lacking credibility, then actually killed himself apparently in desperation at the uncaring attitude of his own children. That’s more of that old-fashioned storytelling, right there – spend most of the episode dashing Charlie’s (and our) hopes of getting the upper hand over Leona Lansing, then pull out the save at the last minute.

And ‘hand’ really is the correct term here – the final showdown with Leona and Reese turned out to be as good a poker bluff as I’ve ever seen. The envelope full of ‘evidence’ Charlie brought along turned out to be Hancock’s recipe for beef stew. But by the time Leona found that out, Reese had already admitted to having ordered the hacking (after some James Murdoch-like slippery equivocation about “maximising profit”).

Given that this makes Leona effectively the Rupert Murdoch figure here, the script wrongfooted me by actually giving her more of a conscience than the genuine article. She was appalled at Reese’s methods (I notice the list of hackees involved some very emotive ones like relatives of Somali kidnap victims). And she finally succumbed to Charlie’s appeal to her integrity by letting the News Night crew just get on with it, but only with the stern warning that Will shouldn’t miss the target. Good advice from Jane Fonda, whose unfeasibly fit body had been the subject of Will’s opening remarks at the meeting – a nice sly reference to all those ‘Jane Fonda Workout’ videos so prevalent in the 80s.

And that target, as it has been throughout, was the Tea Party. The actual tangible news story the criticism was hooked to was the increasing use of a photo ID requirement to disenfranchise poorer voters in Republican states – not coincidentally, those voters least likely to vote Republican. This despite the fact that a Bush-era survey taken over several years revealed a mere 86 instances of voter fraud in a country of 314 million people.

Like so many of the issues the show addresses, this is still absolutely relevant, especially with the 2012 Presidential elections mere weeks away. As Will pointed out, some 33 Republican controlled states have instituted similar measures which make their poorer citizens less likely to be allowed to vote. It is, and should be, an absolute scandal – voter manipulation to ensure a doctored result. Jon Stewart has been rightly focusing heavily on it on The Daily Show, pointing out the same absurdities that Will McAvoy has; the motives seem very clear when you realise how little voter fraud actually happens. It is, plain and simple, to stop those who would vote against Republicans from voting at all. As an amusing side issue, there’s now a theory that Mitt Romney himself may actually be one of that tiny minority of actual electoral fraudsters, and that’s why he refuses to release his tax records from the period concerned…

Still, it’s really just the tip of an iceberg that is the Tea Party’s seizure of the Republicans. This final episode served to let Sorkin really let rip as to his opinions of that – Mitch McConnell’s asinine outbursts came in for scathing criticism, as did the repeated Tea Party insistence that the USA was founded as a “Christian nation” – despite evidence to the contrary from the Founding Fathers, and not least from the US Constitution itself. Sorkin’s indignation was neatly summed up at the end by Will on air, speaking the show creator’s words:

”Ideological purity. Compromise as weakness. A fundamentalist belief in scriptural literalism. Denying science. Unmoved by facts. Undeterred by new information. A hostile fear of progress. A demonization of education. A need to control women’s bodies. Severe xenophobia. Tribal mentality. Intolerance of dissent, and a pathological hatred of the US government. They can call themselves the Tea Party. They can call themselves conservatives. And they can even call themselves Republicans – though Republicans certainly shouldn’t. But we should call them what they are – the American Taliban. And the American Taliban cannot survive if Dorothy Cooper is allowed to vote.”

Yes, the shots of everyone watching (including Leona) looking tearfully moved were cheesy in an Airplane-style that’s easy to mock. But it was stirring. And in a week which has seen the Republicans settle on the most reactionary political platform in their history, it’s absolutely relevant and frighteningly true. This, for me, is what makes The Newsroom compelling drama, week after week – an address to real world issues that, in actual US news media, are worryingly neglected.

There’s an element of confirmation bias, of course – I already feel the way Sorkin does about these issues, and I doubt anyone who holds the views he despises will be much inclined to change them on the say so of a fictional character like Will McAvoy. But by using drama to give us facts that are all too often overlooked by an increasingly partisan press (the liberal side becoming every bit as bad as the conservative one, it seems), Sorkin sweetens a bitter pill that we all need to swallow. The medicine’s easier to take if administered by the charming likes of Will, Mack and Charlie, and I’ve enjoyed it so much I’m looking forward to more next year.

The Newsroom: Season 1, Episode 9–The Blackout part 2: Mock Debate

“The story is this: Will is a heavyweight, and for a long time he pretended to be a lightweight.”

NewsroomDebate

I still think it’s an odd/brave decision to have The Newsroom’s first two-part story at this point – in the first season before the show has properly proved itself, but late in that season so that there’s actually only one more episode after it. But actually the rationale holds up a little more strongly than I thought now I’ve seen ‘Part 2’ – because apart from the somewhat contrived cliffhanger last week, it doesn’t really feel like a two-part story at all, merely another episode in what’s basically an ongoing drama serial. In fact, given that it’s hard to point to any episode that feels totally self-contained so far, the whole idea of a two-part ‘story’ seems rather redundant.

Having said all that, how does this stack up as a ‘conclusion’ to The Blackout? From a straightforward perspective of dramatic structure, not all that well. We open with the studio in darkness, the evening’s broadcast jeopardised at the worst possible time, with ratings dropping and the network execs circling like sharks scenting blood. But Mack insists that, with a little ingenuity, they can carry on. Generators can be procured. Permissions can be obtained from the NYPD. And the show can be broadcast, from a single camera, right on the streets of New York City. Yes, Goddammit, let’s do the show right here!

It was an inspirational speech – but a contrived seeming one, like Bill Pullman’s toe-curling effort in Independence Day. Thankfully, just as it really was starting to look like an old Judy Garland musical where they stage the show in the barn, the lights came back on, to Mack’s disappointment. It was a belly laugh moment, and worked well at that; but having the ‘crisis’ of last week’s cliffhanger resolved (with no intervention from the heroes) in the first five minutes of the episode seemed to not only undermine the cliffhanger, but make the ‘two-part’ format seem a bit of a contrived cheat.

Further, it seemed to make the title a bit of a nonsense too – why call it The Blackout when said blackout, presumably intended as the dramatic pivot of the episodes, came and went in a couple of minutes? Still, Aaron Sorkin’s a clever man, so I immediately started looking for a more metaphorical meaning. Was it the ‘blacking out’ of honest news? The ‘blacking out’ of Mack and Will’s integrity, in their compromise over Casey Anthony to keep their proposed GOP debate? Had I missed something?

Still, if the ‘blackout’ of the title was a metaphor that passed me by (assuming it was more than a reference to a momentary plot blip), at least the second part of the title made sense on two levels. Yes, it was about a ‘mock debate’ staged by the newsroom staff to gain RNC approval for ANC to host it; but it was also about ‘mocking the debate’, as it became clear that the RNC shills sent to evaluate ANC’s proposal were never going to approve this in a million years, and the US voter would be left with such penetrating questions as CNN’s, “Miss Bachmann, do you prefer Elvis or Johnny Cash?”

Yes, after last week’s plethora of news story targets, this week the show focused down on just a couple, most prominent of which was those interminable Republican Primary debates that seemed to take up most of last year. The older of the two RNC officials (Adam Arkin as Adam Roth) sent to evaluate ANC’s approach used to work with Will in the Bush (1) White House, and shared his distaste for the pablum that passes for political debate on TV these days. But principles can be a costly thing; he can’t afford to stand up for them when the GOP’s wages are paying for his son to attend Stanford.

Sadly, it was obvious to anyone with a knowledge of how this kind of drama works that Will and Mack’s proposed debate format was never going to get off the ground. The Newsroom can comment on recent history, but to show our fictional characters taking an active part in such real events would stray too far out of the real world Sorkin’s so intent on commenting on. Nonetheless, it made the frustration he felt about the debates perfectly clear. As Roth commented, Will’s approach would “clear out the clown car” of the more outlandish Republican hopefuls. No such luck; instead we got a seemingly endless series of debates which began increasingly to resemble the theatre of the absurd, at the end of which the Party settled on the candidate least likely to cause offence. That Mitt Romney was that man tells you quite something about the electability of his competitors.

A shame we never got to see more of the mock debate, but I concede that Sorkin had already spent a fair bit of time last week demolishing the bizarre rhetoric of some of the more eccentric contenders. Instead, there were a few more tidbits on the newsworthiness of the Casey Anthony and Anthony Weiner stories. In particular, the absurdity of singling out the Casey Anthony trial as ‘tragedy porn’ was highlighted when it (highly conveniently) turned out that Maggie’s roommate (and Jim’s ‘Schrodinger’s girlfriend’) Lisa actually went to school with Casey, and was therefore summoned to appear on air as a promotable interviewee and an exclusive.

Her appearance was secured following a somewhat protracted comic scene showing Jim and Maggie pestering her at her job (selling insanely expensive dresses for commission only). Yes, it was quite amusing, but felt a bit dragged out – even though the script managed to work in an almost-quote from British comedy legends Morecambe and Wise. After Maggie spewed out various media jargon about ‘promotability’ and Lisa commented that she’d never hear Maggie use such words before, Maggie retorted that she certainly had, “but not in that order”.

That aside, Mack cleverly turned Lisa’s interview into a Trojan horse (at Maggie’s suggestion) by furnishing the interviewee with a detailed list of all the recent child murder trials that weren’t being reported sensationalistically coast to coast. Unfortunately Lisa, carried away with crusading zeal, then unwisely decided to shoehorn in her views on why abortion should be more acceptable. Given that this is one of the most incendiary subjects in US politics right now, it was little surprise that she found a brick being hurled through the window of the shop she worked at, and ‘Baby Killer’ sprayed all over the storefront.

This again gave Will a chance to show how moderate he is as a Republican. He may be ‘pro-life’ rather than ‘pro-choice’ (gotta love the linguistic contortions each side goes through to ensure they’re not seen as ‘anti’ anything), but he’s certainly anti-throwing bricks through windows.

Moderation, however, is not a big part of his emotional makeup when it comes to relationships. Following the trend last week, this episode saw yet more delving into the motivations behind Will and Mack’s breakup and inability to sort out their current feelings for each other. Will unloaded (again) to his therapist Dr Habib, who perceptively worked out that he’d been scouring internet dating sites for advice; meanwhile Mack intermittently fumed at her ex Brian, perhaps inadvertently giving the impression that she’s some kind of a ‘news groupie’, and prefers Will because he’s a more important journalist.

Despite yet another ‘reconciliation’ scene at the end of the episode, it’s plain that Sorkin thinks this plot has plenty more mileage in it yet. As indeed does the Maggie/Don/Jim/Lisa one, which is beginning to be actively frustrating in all of its participants’ inability to tell each other the truth and reach some kind of conclusion. Steps at least were made in that direction this week, as Mack’s inspirational quoting of a 17th century poem made Jim resolve that he was going to go for Maggie after all.

But with the inevitable comic timing of classic farce, he turned up at her apartment to tell her this just as A) Don was already there and B) Maggie had talked Lisa into giving Jim another go at dating. Just as I was about to scream with annoyance, Don, in a rare moment of empathy and perception, twigged that Jim had actually come to see Maggie, and spilled his guts about his own recent infidelities in an attempt to do the right thing. Perhaps some good will come of this. On more recent form though, Maggie will probably decide to take the plunge with Jim just as he’s got back with Lisa. And round and round it goes, until someone (possibly me) brains Aaron Sorkin with a tea kettle.

Speaking of violence, Neal’s comic quest to infiltrate the online community of trolls took a turn for the serious. Having tried and failed to gain their respect by trolling a discussion on economics and altering Sloan’s Wikipedia entry to say that she started out as a stripper, he was in the chatroom trying to claim responsibility for the death threat against Will. But he may have stumbled on a bigger story than he anticipated, as one user knows he’s lying – because that user was the real culprit. Cue Neal’s frantic call to Will’s bodyguard Lonnie, and the episode closing on a shot of a pensive Will, still a target.

This was an uneven episode with its none-too-convincing form as the second half of a two part story, but as an ongoing drama it was still pretty compelling. There’s just one more episode to go, though thankfully the show’s been renewed by HBO and will be back next year. News of the renewal may have altered the form of the final episode – I dread the possibility that the various ‘near-miss’ relationships’ resolutions will be artificially extended yet further. But there’s also the genuine drama of the death threat against Will, who seems to have been ditching his bodyguard with alarming regularity, and the impending exposure of ACN’s parent company as a News International-type phone hacking operation. However it goes, I think there’s going to be plenty of excitement next week.

The Newsroom: Season 1, Episode 7–5/1

“America thinks Bin Laden’s alive. If I can make him dead one minute sooner, my entire life in journalism will have been worth it.”

Newsroom

It didn’t take long to work out what big news story from a year-and-a-bit ago The Newsroom would be covering this week. If you didn’t get it from the portentously earnest date-only episode title, the opening scene let the cat out of the bag fairly early on. After a sub-Watergate mysterious phone call to Charlie (“I’m not calling you Deep Throat, that name is sacred.”), we were ushered into a party at Will’s to celebrate “one year and one week” since the first broadcast of “News Night 2.0”.

It looked like a fun bash, though some of the US party games left this Brit a little baffled. What was that thing with everyone flapping their arms up and down? I was on more familiar territory when Will was presented with a bag of highly strong ‘hash brownies’, only to disclose that he’d already eaten two. After taking Vicodin. This set in motion a slightly bizarre but rather funny plotline of Will being pretty much baked throughout, leading to a beneficial state of Zen-like calm only hampered by his inability to tie a tie or distinguish between the names ‘Osama’ and ‘Obama’.

For indeed, as Charlie waited anxiously for the call from the White House promised by his mysterious informant, the clues began to stack up that this was, definitely, the night the President announced Osama Bin Laden had been shot dead by US Special Forces. It was interesting to see how this announcement played out, since it took place in the middle of the night for us in the UK, and we awoke to find it leading story on the early morning news.

But as I saw from this episode, it was played very cagily by the White House in the US, as they announced that the President would be making a very important broadcast (important enough to interrupt Desperate Housewives), but wouldn’t tell anyone what it was about ahead of time. This led to the basic plot of this episode, which took place over a mere three and a half hours of time, as the ACN crew scrambled to try and work out what was so important.

If you had worked out what the story was going to be already (and did The Rock really scoop everyone with an enigmatic Tweet hours before the announcement?), then there wasn’t much suspense in watching them trying to figure it out. But I suspect that wasn’t really the point; what Sorkin was doing here was showing what happens in a news room under such dramatic and unusual circumstances. Well, in the ultra-perfect ACN news room anyway – he couldn’t resist a dig at Fox News by showing the contemporaneous clip of Geraldo Rivera confirming that the President was about to announce the death of Colonel Gaddafi.

It was clear that, for an American news outlet, this might be the biggest story they could ever broadcast, so they had to be sure. This led to a scramble of research into any likely contingency – and I do mean any. Asked to think “outside the box”, Neal (predictably) suggested that the President was about to announce first contact with extra terrestrials (“get back in the box, Neal.”). The other, more plausible story was the death, as announced by Fox, of Muhammar Gaddafi (“Why can we never reach a consensus on how to spell his name?” Will asked, rhetorically).

But Will had already ruled this out with a call to the NSA (while buying a falafel to sate his munchies), so clearly Bin Laden it was. With other news outlets beginning to gain confirmation, Mack was impatient to run with the story, but Charlie had more caution. He remembered broadcasting missile locations during the 1991 Iraq war, and thereby giving the enemy exact targets to aim for. The point was clear – the White House could be embargoing the story for a reason, perhaps involving danger to troops in the field, and it shouldn’t be broadcast until the go-ahead was given.

Which it actually had, but Will had been too stoned to remember to check his email and discover the message confirming this from none other than Joe Biden (apparently they used to play softball together). So it was on with the story that Will went, intoning the news solemnly with a short but distinguished speech that (with contrived convenience) happened to end at the exact second Obama stepped up to the lectern to begin his address. This being a story of great import, Sorkin made the decision to let Obama’s speech play out over the end credits, which might have worked better if there’d been a climax to end on rather than just fading the President into the distance for the HBO logo.

It was a somewhat uneven episode, its convincing attempt to show a news room hard at work in a crisis rather undermined by the reverence for the story’s subject matter. This is the first time the show has done an episode dealing in depth with a single news event, and while this was a good candidate to do that with, the air of mounting jubilation as the certainty grew about the President’s announcement left me faintly uneasy – as uneasy, in fact, as I was at the time, watching frat boys partying in New York streets to celebrate their leader’s execution of a major criminal without due process.

Now, I can see that this might come across as ultra-liberal whinging from a Brit who was thousands of miles away from the emotively charged crime of the 9/11 attacks. I can also agree that we in Britain acted in a pretty similar fashion on April 30, 1945, after hearing of the death of Adolf Hitler. But Hitler had been raining death on the UK, Europe, Russia and Africa for the last five years, and his death was at his own hands. I still think it would have been far preferable to bring him to trial at Nuremberg, alongside his lackeys.

And I felt/feel the same about Bin Laden, who (unlike Hitler) had not been consistently killing thousands more since his initial attack, but hiding away. Yes, finding him was (as it should have been) a matter of paramount importance. But not state-sanctioned execution without trial. To be fair, the details of what went on that night in Pakistan are still hazy, and it may well have been that the Special Forces troops had no other option than to kill him. But at the time, even suggesting the alternative was tantamount to admitting support for Al Qaeda, as though it was a binary choice – you either wanted Bin Laden killed without trial, or you supported him.

I know that this was felt very differently in American culture than it was here, with a proud country still smarting from the realisation that it was neither invulnerable nor impregnable, and catapulted into fear and paranoia as a result. I can see how Bin Laden’s death came as a huge catharsis. But getting drunk on the streets? Smiling as though you’ve been given the best news of your life? It made me uncomfortable then, and it makes me uncomfortable now.

Even at the time, there were voices saying this, even in the US, and I’d hoped Sorkin might be even-handed enough to address that. For a moment, it seemed that he had, with Neal’s girlfriend Kaylee (The Middleman’s Natalie Morales) leaving the room quietly. But no, it turned out that she only felt it a huge anticlimax – her father had died in the Twin Towers, and the perpetrator’s death hadn’t been the all-purpose cure for her grief that she’d expected. Still, it was a note of scepticism, and we should be grateful for that.

All that aside, the big news story angle meant that there was little room for the ongoing ‘romcom’ aspects of the show. But they weren’t entirely absent. The Don/Maggie/Jim/Lisa ‘love quadrangle’ was a major player for screen time, with Jim having to admit that he’d been surprised by Lisa’s declaration of love for him into saying that he reciprocated the feeling. Which he didn’t, leading a horrified Maggie to insist that he should break up with Lisa immediately.

As it turned out, Lisa had worked half of this out (from seeing Maggie’s horrified expression in the background of her and Jim’s Facetime conversation), and graciously but improbably offered Jim an out. She could tell (like every character on the show and its entire audience, but not the characters concerned) that Jim and Maggie were made for each other, and offered to stand aside in their best interests.

This seemed slightly less than believable. Yes, I know we’re often prone to saying “I love you” a bit too early for one partner in a nascent relationship, but it’s usually because the partner saying it really has that depth of feeling. I’m doubtful whether that would be so instantly negated, or whether the partner concerned would bow out of the relationship quite so sanguinely as Lisa did. It smacked a little of a disturbingly male-compliant fantasy woman. Still, I thought, at least the plot’s finally working itself out. One down, one to go – we only need Maggie to realise what an asshole Don is and get together with Jim instead. But then – d’oh! – Jim feels guilty enough to offer Lisa another try, with a new ‘first date’. Damn, I thought this thing was working itself out!

And Don certainly was being an asshole this week, in a surprisingly effective B plot which saw him, Elliot and Sloan stranded on the tarmac at La Guardia, unable to exit their plane, while the biggest news story of their lifetimes unfolded without them. Early indications of Don’s continuing assholery came as he turned on his phone while the plane was still in the air (“I can see the runway. Do you need navigation to drive from your garage to the street?”).

This unfortunately led to him, Elliot and Sloan finding their emails as to the Bin Laden story, and trying frantically to swap seats so they could confer about it confidentially. Opposing them was a harried cabin stewardess who initially seemed like a bit of a jobsworth for not letting Don undo his seatbelt on a stationary plane. But I’ve worked in the service industry, and I’ve had to deal with customers as obstinate and annoying as Don was – my sympathies were with the stewardess the whole time.

There was also much frothy toing and froing with their seatmates, stuck unwillingly between them. Sloan had to contend with the attentions of a cute (but far too young) guy called Lester, played by Ashton Moio – usually a stunt player, but on this basis, I’d like to see more of him.

It was a fairly disposable plot that could have been excised without any detriment to the episode, but it worked both as a counterpart to the frenzy of the news room and as a piece of drama in its own right. Don was finally convinced (again) to have some sort of empathy with his fellow human beings by the sight of the Captain’s wings and name badge – not being a frequent flyer, I had to Google it, but yes, it was United Airlines. Recalling the bravery of the 9/11 aircrews finally gave Don some sort of perspective, and he quietly explained to the crew what was happening rather than peremptorily broadcasting it himself to the concerned passengers.

As I say, a slightly unbalanced episode, if undeniably exciting, though this probably comes as much from my own misgivings as any fault of the writer’s. I had expected a little more perspective from Aaron Sorkin, but I recognise that, for many Americans, there is no bad side to this story. My perception is that of an outsider, and one from a different culture at that.

Still, at least during the drama, we had the seeds of another plotline which sounds really interesting, and definitely a subject for timely debate. Charlie’s mysterious NSA informant, it transpired, had only forewarned him of the White House announcement to prove credibility for his real revelations – that ACN’s parent company AWM has been merrily hacking people’s private phone messages with the gleeful abandon previously displayed by News International.

With the various inquiries into this issue still ongoing in real life, together with the show’s own gossip magazine’s vicious campaign against Will, I can see this being an interesting twist that could come back to bite the network’s would-be saboteurs of Will and Charlie’s campaign for integrity.  Not to mention being a very interesting subject for debate about the press’ right or need to intrude on privacy in the public interest…

The Newsroom: Season 1, Episode 6–Bullies

SPOILER WARNING – THIS IS FROM SUNDAY’S US BROADCAST, AND MAJOR PLOT POINTS ARE DISCUSSED. DON’T READ AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN EPISODE 6 YET.

“I know what you think of this. But I really urge you to spend an hour a week faking it.”

NewsroomCharlieSloan

Give me some balance, I said in last week’s Newsroom review, and lo and behold, this week I got some. And from a most unexpected source – who’d have thought the most dignified speech in the episode would come from a committed former aide to Rick Santorum?

But we’ll come back to that. The theme this week, as less than subtly alluded to in the episode title, was bullying – and how even the most sympathetic of people have it in themselves to be bullies, as we see this week from the unlikely examples of a fuming Charlie and an overcompensating Sloan. It could be argued that Charlie at least is a bit out of character, given his previous ‘channelling-James-Stewart’ folksy adorability, but it actually made him more plausible for me. He’s a high ranking journalist in charge of a major TV news operation. You don’t get to that position just by being nice.

Of course the biggest (and least surprising) bully is Will McAvoy himself. It’s unsurprising because the character has been portrayed as crassly insensitive, along with impassioned and idealistic, from the start. Here, Will gets to put the story in perspective himself by means of that hoary old dramatic standby, the therapy session that functions as a framing narrative. I mean really, this was pretty old as a dramatic device even when being used by the mighty Sopranos, which at least subverted and abandoned it fairly early on. The tropes of the scenario were present and correct – the awkwardness, the ‘comic’ dialogue about dusty old waiting room magazines, the Freudian slips that the super-attentive therapist pounced on to reveal deeply-hidden aspects of his patient’s personality. Oh, and the bodyguard.

Yes, that last is more unusual. Turned out that Will’s been having a stressful time, hence his sudden desire to visit a therapist he’s been paying but not actually seeing for four years (hence his failure to notice that said therapist has actually died and been replaced by his son in the mean time). Will’s not sleeping, as we discover in an opening broadcast where he’s suddenly incapable of reading the autocue (“thanks for washing us”). My credulity was somewhat strained by that as a clue to Will’s mental state – isn’t he meant to be a consummate professional no matter what the stresses? Reading an autocue, even with insomnia, shouldn’t be too onerous a task.

Be that as it may, the episode was spent examining (primarily) the reasons for Will’s stress. Turns out he’s received a death threat on the internet for having the temerity to debunk criticism of the so-called ‘Ground Zero mosque’ (actually a community centre) then following that up with a montage of all the nasty things done in the name of Christianity. Hence the bodyguard, a former football-playing giant named Lonnie. Terry Crews was a lot of fun as Lonnie, trading acid barbs with his unwilling client (ACN’s insurance company had forced him on Will). Sloan even popped in to check out his remarkably firm pecs.

Ah, yes, Sloan. It’s fair to say that in the show’s ensemble cast, there are some characters that could reasonably be called ‘secondary’, but Aaron Sorkin is determined to expand them with their own little subplots. Last week it was Dev Patel’s Neal, and this week the spotlight was firmly on Olivia Munn as Sloan Sabbith, a character whose ridiculously alliterative name actually rings all too true in the US news media. I didn’t know this about Olivia Munn (though I guess Sorkin did), but she’s fluent in Japanese, making her a handy candidate to explore this week’s big retroactive news story – the crumbling infrastructure of the Fukushima nuclear plant.

At this point, Tokyo power company TEPCO was still trying to downplay the severity of the crisis, but it turned out that Sloan had a friend who worked as a spokesman for the company. Off the record, she got him to admit that the problem was far worse than currently being stated.

Then, to her surprise, Don asked her to fill in for Elliot in the 10 0’clock slot (as fourth, or maybe sixth, choice). A bit daunted, she asked Will for advice on probing journalism, receiving his opinion that she didn’t challenge her interviewees’ obvious falsehoods enough.

Unfortunately, her brief stint as a main anchor saw her veer in completely the opposite direction, while interviewing her friend in Tokyo, coming across less as a truth seeker than a simple bully. Confronting him on air with his own off the record remarks was bad enough for a professional journalist, but anyone knowledgeable enough about Japanese culture to speak the language should have known what a massive loss of face it would be for a Japanese professional to be accused of lying on international TV. Obvious result – her friend felt honour-bound to resign from his job. Clearly she had Gone Too Far.

Given Will’s advice (which he admitted to his therapist was not well-put), Sloan’s sudden ferocity was reasonably convincing, as was (for reasons I mentioned earlier) Charlie’s furious tirade at her. Nevertheless, he too came over as excessively harsh, and it was left to the unlikely figure of Don to play peacemaker. As the season progresses, Don seems to be gradually evolving into a human being as he gains sensitivity; this week, he finally spotted the glaring neon signs of the chemistry between his girlfriend and Jim Harper. Shame he chose to ask Sloan about it – he’s not sensitive enough yet to work out that she has little concept of emotional empathy.

Biggest empathy vacuum this week (as every week) was, of course, Will. But the script went further than usual in examining this, and for the first time portrayed him in a genuinely unpleasant light. Up till now, he’s been shown as an asshole to work with, but a humanitarian of idealistic principle for all his (moderate) conservative politics.

This week, all that changed with his on-air bullying of a former aide to Rick Santorum. The aide was still a Santorum supporter, but Will, like an attack dog, kept aggressively pressing his point – how could he be, as a black gay man, when Santorum had described gay marriage as “a threat to marriage everywhere”, and equated it with bestiality and incest in a Congressional speech?

Tired of being ever more aggressively attacked, the aide came back with his own fierce, impassioned speech that served to make Will take a step back and look at his behaviour. “How dare you define me by my blackness or my gayness?”, he fumed, at one stroke piercing the often-patronising liberal agenda of reducing people to uncomplicated cyphers that need protecting. Turned out he still supported Santorum (even though disagreeing with him about gay rights), because he saw Santorum as the best spokesman against abortion, a position he strongly agreed with.

Sorkin didn’t use this moment to make any point about his views on abortion – it really wasn’t the point of this exchange. The point was that the liberal media can so easily simplify people into single issues, then patronise them by suggesting they are incapable of standing up for themselves. It was a very necessary moment of balance in a show that has been preachily canonising its own liberal heroes up till now – and nice to see that same preaching flung back at them from someone who doesn’t share their viewpoint.

And even in the face of that, Will couldn’t let it lie, finally just about reducing the man to tears with his last, quiet question – “Does Santorum think you’re fit to be a teacher?” Of course, he doesn’t. But by this point, winning the debate seems less of a moral victory than an unnecessary beating.

All this comes out via the medium of that framing narrative in the therapist’s office, at which point we learn something new about Will himself. His father was a violent, abusive drunk, and when Will was in the fifth grade, he had to be violent back just to protect his mother and brother. Now, in the classical style, he’s followed in his father’s footsteps and become a bully himself; he just uses words and intellectual points rather than fists. It’s not a very original dramatic observation, but unfortunately it’s a cliche because it’s too often true in reality; the bullied become bullies themselves.

To an extent, the suddenness with which we see these more unpleasant aspects of characters who have, till now, been so likeable, is a little jarring. It might have worked better if Sorkin had at least hinted previously that these ‘nice’ people could turn with such sudden ferocity. That had at least been the case with Will, but Sloan and Charlie came across as much more of a surprise, and perhaps not an entirely convincing one, as a result.

Nonetheless, it was good to see that balance I’d been wanting, even if it felt like the show had perhaps swung too far and too suddenly in the opposite direction. It continues to be a dramatic platform for Aaron Sorkin to espouse his own political views via his characters, but this episode was a good reminder that not everything is as black and white as it often seems in his ‘liberals=good, conservatives=bad’ universe.

The Newsroom: Season 1, Episode 5 – Amen

SPOILER WARNING – THIS IS FROM LAST NIGHT’S US BROADCAST, AND MAJOR PLOT POINTS ARE DISCUSSED. DON’T READ AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN EPISODE 5 YET.

“I’m just a middle aged man who never lived up to his potential. You don’t want to be on the wrong end of me if I ever do.”

NewsroomNealMackenzie

After last week’s character heavy episode, it should perhaps have been a relief to find the focus of this week’s The Newsroom more thoroughly on actual news. And yet, Mr Sorkin’s skill with characters means that I’ve come to enjoy the ‘soap opera’ aspects of the show too. This week, the show managed to balance that with its critique of news and politics, together with its ongoing narrative, just about right. For this viewer at least, it lurched a little too far into Sorkin’s frequent mawkish sentimentality at its climax, but the rest was strong enough for me to forgive it that.

The big news topics covered this week were as important as ever (Will McAvoy might be aware of Justin Bieber, but you’ll never see him treated as news) – the emergent Arab Spring and the aftermath of President Mubarak’s resignation in Egypt, along with Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s undemocratic public sector union-busting bill with the spurious justification of balancing the state budget. As we now know, neither of these stories ended well, at least if you’re of the political leaning shared by Sorkin and myself. The Egyptian people managed to topple a dictator and end up with a military junta that dissolved an uncooperative Parliament, while an attempt to recall Governor Walker recently met with defeat. As usual, the slightly unfair advantage of ACN news in being written from a year into the future allowed the show to cast a few notes of caution on both stories.

Along the way, the script, as cleverly constructed as usual, allowed for musings on journalistic integrity and courage, particularly when it comes to journalists putting themselves in harm’s way to report the facts. Will’s former colleague Elliot was reporting from Cairo, but stuck in his hotel room and unable to see the hell breaking loose in Tahrir Square below, much to Don’s frustration. After generally behaving like an asshole in the control room (his signature move), Don disappeared only to re-emerge later with the news that Elliot had after all ventured outside and got himself seriously beaten as a result.

It didn’t take a genius to work out that this must have been on Don’s instructions – as Will pointed out when Don finally confessed, everybody had known already. But it allowed Don to once again make amends for behaving like an asshole by overcompensating with acts of contrition throughout. I may have been wrong in my earlier assessments of Don as a one-dimensional asshole; at least he’s learning. And to be fair, his flaws here probably make him a more realistic character than half the staff – who hasn’t screwed something up at work and then tried to justify it afterwards?

The difference here being that screwing up can get people killed, an echo of similar storylines in The West Wing about shouldering responsibility for sending people into danger. As a former war correspondent, Mackenzie presumably knows all about that, but it was Neal’s turn to learn the lesson when he made contact with an underground Egyptian blogger and suggested they use him as a correspondent in the injured Elliot’s place.

After being reduced to stereotypical nerd comic relief with last week’s Bigfoot obsession, this week saw Neal restored as one of my favourite characters by giving him some truly meaty dialogue and storylines. We learned some of his news background as an amateur cameraman caught up in the 2005 London bombings, giving Dev Patel the chance to expertly deliver some well-crafted dialogue that truly captured the horror of that situation. It also gave him every reason to draw parallels between himself and the Egyptian blogger calling himself ‘Amen’ – as Neal pointed out, not the Christian blessing, but an Egyptian word meaning ‘hidden one’ (deriving from the god Amun, the ‘hidden’ form of Amun-Ra).

But Neal’s experiences in London hadn’t been in the context of a state in anarchy, and he soon came to realise the danger ‘Amen’ was putting himself in – especially when Mackenzie apologetically insisted that, for his reports to have validity, he’d have to reveal his real name and his face. So off came the bandanna to reveal a handsome young guy called Kahlid Salim (Amin El Gamal), and from then on it was pretty predictable that he was going to find himself in some danger – if not actually killed.

Predictable it may have been, but it was well played when Kahlid inevitably disappeared after being sent to military HQ chasing a story. Dev Patel was so good at showing Neal’s anguish that I just wanted to give him a hug. And his mounting anger at a clip of right wing pundit/moron Rush Limbaugh making light of the situation led him to punch the monitor with Rush’s visage so hard that he broke two fingers, adding him to the ever-growing list of injured ACN staff.

This was a peculiar little running plot point, perhaps meant to (hamfistedly) indicate that being in the studio can be just as dangerous as being in the field. Since this is plainly not true, I can only hope it wasn’t the intent, but that was how it came across. Still, it did allow for some blackly comic moments as a mounting number of ACN staff found themselves bandaged, splinted or in slings (or some combination of all of these). It started with Maggie tripping up (a slapstick character trait I’d hoped we’d left behind), and bashing Jim on the head with a door, which later required stitches. Elliot returned from the field looking pretty battered, and Don managed to sprain his shoulder trying unwisely to break into Reese Lansing’s office (in another attempt to assuage his guilt by trying to secure ransom money for Kahlid). By the end of the episode, the newsroom was starting to resemble a hospital emergency room, there were so many bandages and slings in evidence.

While all this was unfolding, Will and co were doing some digging into Gov Walker’s reasons for trying to shut down public sector unions in Wisconsin, coming up with an interesting conspiracy theory I hadn’t come across before. Will noted the involvement of conservative lobby group Citizens United in the Walker campaign, along with some carefully circumspect speculation about the alleged funding for the organisation from the billionaire Koch brothers (yep, them again).

He followed that up with some more carefully circumspect theorising about the 2008 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United’s favour, which for the purposes of free speech gave corporations the same rights to fund political campaigns as individuals. It has been alleged that Supreme Court justices Thomas and Scalia had a conflict of interest in ruling on the case, particularly Thomas, whose wife Virginia’s own political group was apparently in receipt of significant donations from the Tea Party, and by implication the Kochs. Having secured a judgement that would allow corporations the same freedoms as individuals, the only thorn in the corporate side was the fact that it gave the same freedoms to unions. Unions like those Walker was trying to drive into the ground, for reasons that now seemed obvious.

This had no real bearing on the story per se (and the Walker story wasn’t given as much prominence as the Egypt one anyway). But it was an interesting collection of information to have, whether or not you accept the conspiracy theory (and I’m inclined to). Yes, it was Aaron Sorkin once again using the show as a political platform, but it still worked as drama, I thought, in much the same way as similar scenes of speculation in Oliver Stone’s JFK.

This was some heavy stuff, but the tangled love lives of the characters at least provided some light relief. Maggie is still, bizarrely, trying to salvage her relationship with Don, shooting herself in the foot by trying to set up the much nicer Jim with her roommate Lisa instead. This week, this manifested itself in a somewhat contrived plot of Maggie determinedly trying to set up a date between Jim and Lisa so Lisa wouldn’t spoil her own night with Don. Inevitably, in sitcom style, it didn’t work out because Jim was so busy working he forgot to meet Lisa. But not to worry, the storyline can be strung out further yet, because Lisa’s initial fury soon melted with her confession that she was wearing edible underwear. Perhaps I’m beginning to see some reason behind those criticisms of Sorkin’s female characters…

Mackenzie wasn’t helping much there either, as it turned out her boyfriend, who she’d had on the show repeatedly as a guest, was running for Congress, leading to inevitable speculation as to her political bias and corruption. This fed into the running plotline of ACN’s attempts to discredit News Night and Will by using their own, vicious, gossip columnists. Charlie stepped in with a voice like thunder in the earpiece of a smarmy daytime show presenter when he repeated these allegations on air, but the damage was done – so badly, in fact, that Will was considering the option of actually paying the columnist in question to buy her off the story.

This led to another of those scenes in which Will confronts hypocrisy with the cheerable but improbable eloquence of a signature Sorkin character. On the point of paying the woman, he balked when she referred to herself as a journalist, going on a long rant about how real journalists (ie his staff) were honest and altruistic (possibly not true of all journalists in reality).

It was another wish-fulfilling moment, common on Sorkin shows, of being able to batter your opponent down with your intellect and your moral integrity; realistic it may not be, but satisfying it most definitely is. Mackenzie, of course, realised she’d been had and told the boyfriend to “go to Hell”, while Will made better use of his money to pay the ransom for the captive Kahlid.

This was where the schmaltz came in, rather too heavily for my taste. Earlier in the story, much had been made of Will’s fondness for a tearjerking sport movie called Rudy. Sorkin’s use of sport and sporting drama as reference/metaphor is always rather lost on me for a variety of reasons. I don’t really like sport, most American sporting dramas are about sports we know little of in the UK (baseball, American football), and the vast majority of sport movies are mawkishly sentimental in the extreme (Rocky, Jerry Maguire, A League of Their Own).

So I was unfortunately completely unmoved at what I presume to be a recreation of the heartstring-tugging ending of Rudy – staffer after staffer came in to Will’s office to pay what they could towards the $250,000 Will had paid to secure Kahlid’s release. To be fair to Sorkin, it felt less contrived when it was revealed that Mackenzie (knowing Will’s fondness for the movie) had orchestrated the stunt as a Valentine’s present. It still felt unpalatably sickly though.

Still, as usual there was enough good stuff for me to forgive the comparatively infrequent Sorkin excesses of sentiment. I can understand the objection that the show is “too preachy”, but for me that’s a huge part of its appeal. Yes, Sorkin is using the drama as a political platform, but he’s also using the drama to inform, to debunk widely held conservative myths using facts rather than ill-informed rhetoric – the very mantra of the show within the show, News Night. Of course, your tolerance for this is probably in direct proportion to your agreement with Sorkin’s leanings, and I fear he’s preaching to the choir and unlikely to change the minds of any watching conservatives. But for liberals like me, there’s something very entertaining in seeing your views borne out with actual research, and that polemic is at least half of the show’s appeal. With February 2011 out of the way, I’m looking forward to seeing what issues will be addressed next.

The Newsroom: Season 1, Episode 4–I’ll Try to Fix You

SPOILER WARNING – THIS IS FROM SUNDAY’S US BROADCAST, AND MAJOR PLOT POINTS ARE DISCUSSED. DON’T READ AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN EPISODE 4 YET.

“What you do is a really bad form of pollution, that makes us dumber, and meaner, and is destroying civilisation. I’m saying, with all possible respect, that I would have more respect for you if you were a heroin dealer.”

NewsroomWill

After being pushed very much to the background last week, the soap opera aspects of The Newsroom pretty much dominated this week’s episode. And you know what? It was actually very entertaining, and as ever, the character drama came to have a real bearing on the points Aaron Sorkin was trying to make, and the larger issues of the plot as a whole.

For most of the episode, the actual news reporting was fairly thin on the ground, eclipsed for the first time by the drama/comedy surrounding the characters. But the Sorkin sermonising (not necessarily a bad thing) was very much in evidence both in these occasional flashes of the news and in the drama throughout.

Targeted again this week was the extreme right, and particularly its outspoken mouthpieces in the media. Hence, Will had a pop at the media narrative that Obama is fanatical about gun control, debunking that myth and adding that those who propagate it benefit by gaining viewers and a massive upswing in gun sales. The point was not to take a stance about gun control (though later events in the story made Sorkin’s views on that pretty clear) but to highlight the media lies about it from many hyperbolic rightwing institutions. Considering that the show is primarily about media integrity, this was an important distinction to make, one that was hammered home repeatedly by characters within the show not ‘getting it’ themselves.

To follow that up, Will took an indepth look at the media myth current at the time that Obama was spending $2 billion of taxpayer money on a trade negotiating trip to India. Again, this was thoroughly debunked with actual facts rather than rumour (“travelling with 34 warships, or 14% of the US Navy?!”). These retorts were aimed at actual clips of hard right pundits such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, which intrigued me a little. Do these guys need to give permission for footage of them to be used on a drama show, I wonder? If so, it seems remarkably magnanimous of them to allow that use in such a damning context on such a liberal-leaning script! Mind you (and again, I’m not too clear on the state law here), I spent a while early in the episode marvelling that Will McAvoy can so freely smoke in the workplace. Having been to New York City, I know that smoking is banned in most such places…

I must say though, that the show’s consistent focus on debunking the myths of the right is in danger of making Will McAvoy and co seem as partisan as those whose work they’re decrying. OK, Will is employing facts rather than rhetoric or opinion, but the repeated target of his (admittedly well-constructed) arguments seems quite one-sided. Is the US liberal media (small though it may be) not guilty of any similar transgressions? I’m no rightwinger, but I’ve seen plenty of left wing polemic that could equally easily be demolished by the use of actual facts. Sorkin has the getout clause that Will is a centrist, moderate Republican, but thus far we’ve seen scant evidence that he holds much in the way of conservative views. I suppose it’s fair to say that the liberal media play a far smaller part in shaping the American political narrative as a whole, making them less of a viable target. Still, some balance would be welcome.

Having said all that, the politics seemingly took second place this week in an episode primarily devoted to advancing the character drama. This it did very well, and I’m warming to this aspect of the show more than I did at the beginning, when the characters seemed little more than cyphers.

It all began at a typically awkward workplace New Year’s Eve party, which at least means the story has now advanced to 2011. Much relationship-based skulduggery was unfolding, as Don (still, at this point, being an unperceptive asshole) tried to set Maggie’s roommate Lisa up with Jim, while Neal was functioning as the comic relief nerd, in his overly earnest attempts to convince his workmates that Bigfoot is actually real. I thought this thread, returned to throughout the episode, did his character something of a disservice after having skewed the stereotypical perception of ‘nerds’ last week. But aside from giving a few cheap laughs, it did ultimately have a payoff at the end of the show.

As did Will’s comically hilarious attempts to date various women, with the dubious advice of the none too helpful Sloan (The Daily Show’s Olivia Munn). “This is not my area of expertise”, she commented – a reference to fellow Daily Show alumnus John Hodgman’s book The Areas of My Expertise, perhaps? In any case, a slight degree of contrivance, that put Will in social situations with women he was bound to disagree with, allowed us to see how his forthright principles make him a pretty lousy Don Juan. Each encounter started well, developed into an argument, and ended with Will having a drink thrown in his face. A bit forced maybe, but done so well by Jeff Daniels that it was hard not to laugh while simultaneously nodding in agreement with him.

Significantly, the first of these ill-advised pickup attempts was a gossip columnist for ACN’s own parent company, and it was she who held the key to the theme of the whole cleverly constructed script – the disturbing rise of the celebrity gossip culture, and its increasing precedence over news that that actually has any real import. As the episode progressed, Will found himself at the centre of a suspiciously well-informed campaign of gossip attack that had details of each and every one of his failed conquests.

Again, Will’s diatribes made Aaron Sorkin’s stance on this culture fairly clear – why, Will kept arguing, is a ‘celebrity’ personal life somehow fair game for the kind of invasion of privacy that most people would find monstrous? And why, when so many genuinely important things are happening in the world, do so many choose to focus on this instead? The whole ironic “guilty pleasure” thing was dismissed summarily (shortly before its exponent, Will’s second date of the week, threw the requisite drink in his face).

In the UK, we’re familiar with such arguments from the interminably long Leveson Inquiry into press standards, which despite its length seems to throw up new horrors every week. And yet, while I tend to share Sorkin’s views, I found his contempt for that public appetite for gossip a little difficult to deal with. It’s one thing to condone the tapping of a public figure’s private phone message, but quite another (and far less serious) to enjoy the glut of reality shows that came in for so much withering criticism from Will. I too think they’re asinine nonsense (as I wrote in a VERY ranting blog post once), but I’ve realised that I have no right to deny other people’s enjoyment of this stuff whatever my opinion of it. People have different tastes. And if enjoying the panem et circenses of reality shows is a choice freely taken (without underhand exploitation of their ‘stars’), who am I to deny it?

Still, the gossip campaign against Will continued to mount until, finally, it became clear that it was the advancement of a vital plot thread whose apparent abandonment I was ready to be critical about this week. Charlie suddenly realised that, given some of the information, the gossip had to be coming from inside their own organisation. And suddenly it became clear that this was the ‘context’ Leona Lansing had talked about manufacturing last week, the climate by which it would be seen as righteous for ACN to sack Will. This was a very clever way of both advancing the story and addressing the theme of invasive celebrity gossip, and it was at this point that I marvelled somewhat at Sorkin’s clever construction of the narrative.

The Maggie/Don/Jim romcom plot was also heavy throughout, but actually seemed more plausible than in previous instalments. Maggie is still inexplicably intent on salvaging her relationship with Don, but obviously hasn’t come to terms with her feelings for Jim yet. And plainly, despite his altruism in trying to salve her relationship, neither has Jim, hence feeling the need to lie about how well his date with her roommate went and whether he’d be seeing her again. Unfortunately for Maggie, Don chose this point to demonstrate that he’s still an asshole by underhandedly revealing to her that Jim was again with Lisa late at night (“she really should change that ringtone”). This led to an almighty slanging match in the newsroom which severely disrupted Neal’s latest attempt to promote the reality of Bigfoot in the meeting room (“this isn’t soundproof glass!”).

This may seem like pretty light stuff, but it was genuinely enjoyable to watch. And the show managed to pull an eleventh hour ‘serious’ plot thread from its sleeve with the sudden news of the January 2011 Tucson shootings at a rally for Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Suddenly we were again into one of those electrifying, action-packed ‘breaking news’ moments that the show does so well. And along the way came another chance to reaffirm our heroes’ atypical integrity, as they refused to bow to corporate pressure to follow other news organisations’ lines in pronouncing Giffords dead without official confirmation.

Here again, the show’s setting in the recent past perhaps allowed too much perfection in Will and co’s reporting, but it also gave Don the chance to unexpectedly reveal that he’s not a complete asshole after all. In the face of corporate lackey Reece’s furious insistence that Will pronounce Giffords dead, Don spoke up to say, “doctors pronounce people dead, not the news”. It was an unabashed ‘punch the air’ moment, made more resonant by the sentiment being put forward by the show’s resident dickhead, and made Don finally seem like less of a cardboard cutout asshole. Mind you, I had to wonder at the time why Will couldn’t have commented with something like “some news outlets are reporting the Congresswoman’s death, however there is no confirmation for this at this time and we will update you when we have an official statement either way”.

It was another great set piece of reportage, but I did have one criticism. I really wish Sorkin would refrain from employing what’s by now a massively overused cliche of US drama – the climactic montage soundtracked by a ‘profound’ emotional song. In this case, it was Coldplay’s ‘Fix You’, which Sorkin obviously likes well enough to quote in the episode title. While it might work as dramatic shorthand, it’s such an overused trope by now that you’d think a dramatist of Sorkin’s skill wouldn’t fall back on it so easily.

Criticisms aside, this was another enjoyable episode of a show that, for me, is improving week by week from an already promising start. I’m glad to see that The Newsroom has definitely been renewed for a second season, as given time it might even rival the venerated West Wing in viewers’ affections.

The Newsroom: Season 1, Episode 3–The 112th Congress

SPOILER WARNING – THIS IS FROM LAST NIGHT’S US BROADCAST, AND MAJOR PLOT POINTS ARE DISCUSSED. DON’T READ AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN EPISODE 3 YET.

“The newsroom turned into a courtroom because I decided the American people needed a fucking lawyer.”

NewsroomLeona

The news media is vitally important to a free society (unlike, say, sports or comedy, the subjects of Aaron Sorkin’s other two TV-based drama series). It’s only through the news that you know anything of what is happening in the world outside your own immediate experience. It is therefore vital that, when you receive the news, you’re not being presented with opinion – you’re being presented with facts. Those facts will shape your own opinion, and if you don’t trust their source because of bias or corruption, then you’re not equipped with enough information to form a reasoned view on anything. Conversely, if you blindly trust their source despite bias or corruption, the same result is true.

That the American TV news has failed in this was pointed out in painstaking detail in this week’s episode of The Newsroom, beginning with Will McAvoy making an onscreen apology for his own complicity in this failure – from miscalled election results to outright misinformation from news organisations held hostage by commercial interests, specifically the advertisers from whom the broadcasters gain all their revenue.

Will’s diatribe, the concentrated detail of which took a lot of paying attention to, was obviously Sorkin’s own attempt to diagnose the problem with TV news in the US. The increasing divorce of US TV news from facts and its ongoing affair with opinion as a rebound can often seem strange to us in the UK, where (by and large) our TV news is regulated and obliged to remain free of bias. It’s frequently accused of bias (especially the BBC), but the fact that the accusations are balanced from both sides of the argument indicates to me that it at least tries to live up to that obligation.

US TV news, by contrast, often seems closer in style to UK print media, where paranoia, half-truths and corruption are regularly peddled according to the corporate whims of their owners and sponsors. That sector of our news media has now so thoroughly disgraced itself in the eyes of the British public that we’re in the middle of a lengthy judicial inquiry into its ethics and practices; by Sorkin’s argument, the misinformation fed so frequently to the American public by its TV news outlets would probably merit something similar.

One of the major criticisms that many (including myself) have had of The Newsroom from its first two episodes is precisely that Will McAvoy and co’s eager attempt to claw back integrity from the increasingly jaded news media is simply too utopian; that in the real world, those commercial interests simply would not permit an approach so potentially damaging to profit. Sorkin seems to have anticipated this, and this third episode was framed with a new subplot of ACN’s corporate owners giving idealistic news veteran Charlie a damn good bollocking for going against the corporate line.

As a framing narrative, it was effective, with Jane Fonda as Leona Lansing, CEO of Atlantis Media, parent corporation to ACN, glowering silently at Sam Waterston’s Charlie for most of the time, even during a comical attempt to liken his strategy to that of Rocky Balboa in Rocky II. The casting of Fonda is a nice nod to her own iconic role as a crusading news anchor in 1978’s The China Syndrome, but here she’s on the other side of the debate – and when she finally speaks up, it’s like the wrath of a deity of pragmatic profiteering.

The corporate inquiry was peppered throughout by flashbacks to events at News Night in recent months, beginning with Will’s eloquent apology then building through the months of campaigning prior to the 2010 midterms to the climax of election night itself. Along the way, the show’s ideology took precedence over its soap opera aspects as the ACN staff laid into Aaron Sorkin’s target of the week – the Tea Party movement.

As usual, this revolved around characters having a seemingly implausible supply of facts and statistics readily at hand to debunk the arguments of their opponents. But fair’s fair – it’s a news organisation, half the characters are researchers, and those researchers feed the figures to the anchor as interviews progress. Plus, I’m sure they’re capable of remembering the research they’ve done; certainly I’ve been able to pull those kinds of facts out of my mind in pub arguments when I’ve researched them earlier in the day for pieces on this blog.

I was again struck by Sorkin’s clever tactic of having McAvoy, as his main character, be a moderate Republican. As Will himself comments, it legitimises his attacks on ultra-right wing targets. And make no mistake, the Tea Partiers who gained so much ground in the 2010 Congressional elections were ultra-right. As Will himself complained, they were a fringe movement (with, initially, some valid arguments) hijacked by corporate and religious extremists, who themselves went on to hijack the mainstream Republican Party to the extent that US politics has been largely paralysed in uncooperating deadlock ever since.

That they were gaining so much influence was worrying given their apparent incomprehension of the issues they were protesting against. So Will (ie Aaron Sorkin) basically spent clip after clip debunking some of their more notorious misconceptions. These included Sharron Angle’s “Second Amendment remedies” – “so basically, she’s not ruling out the idea of an armed overthrow of the elected government” – and the (at the time) little known fact that this ‘grass roots’ movement was in large part being funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, hardly “average Americans”.

As this went on, it became clear from the cutting back to the CEO inquiry that the corporation were not too pleased about this. Attacking corporatism means losing advertising revenue, not to mention the political awkwardness of losing the support of corporate-backed legislators. But back in the trenches, persistent asshole Don was none too pleased about it either, laying into the infinitely more competent Jim about how this totally undercut his attempts to gain success for the 10 o’clock bulletin straight afterwards.

Don continues to be the least believable character in the show, a serial asshole whose inability to learn from his own mistakes makes you continually wonder how he attained such a prestigious position. I saw a recent Facebook post proclaiming that “Aaron Sorkin can’t write characters who aren’t intellectuals”; this is a large part of the problem, but another part is that he can’t write sympathetic, rounded characters who disagree with him. It was notable that The West Wing’s portrayal of Republican characters actually became more rounded after Sorkin left the show.

Still, the continuing passion of most of the characters goes some way to making up for this, as does the increased portrayal of their own fallibilities. We saw last week how Will wasn’t immune to self-interest; this week, Charlie Skinner’s idealistic crusade to restore integrity to the news began to seem increasingly naive and optimistic in the face of his corporate overlords. Oh, and he also drinks too much – “you’ve had enough bourbon for a lifetime,” comments suit (and mother’s puppet) Reese.

With so much emphasis placed on the ideological crusade of the show this week, the soap opera aspects were less prominent than the first two episodes. I found this a bit of a relief. It’s not because I object to them altogether; I recognise that without being interested in these characters as people, it would be hard to sympathise with their crusade. It’s more that, generally, I think this aspect of the show is being handled in a rather more hamfisted way than it ever was in The West Wing.

Take MacKenzie, for example. She’s an immensely talented and capable professional, able to deal brilliantly and concisely with her egotistical star in their work environment. But introduce any element of their previous, personal relationship – as Will did this week by bringing a string of younger, sexier dates to the office – and she becomes a gibbering, competitive imbecile.

Then there’s Maggie. She at least takes Will to task for his insensitivity, and he listens to her. But she too is stuck in a relationship with the insufferable Don, which for some insane reason she seems incapable of permanently ending. And then the much more likeable Jim (who we’re being transparently manipulated into rooting for as her alternative) advises her to sort it out with Don, despite that being the worst result for himself. Thank heaven then for Neal, who lets Jim work this out via the convenient motif of working on a story about “people voting against their own interests”.

After an initial lack of impression, Neal is quickly becoming one of my favourite characters. He’s as impossibly ‘nice’ as the rest of the gang, but he comes up with the most interesting ideas regarding the future of news in an increasingly digital age – witness his impassioned defence of Wikileaks this week. He also seems to have a girlfriend himself, nicely derailing the usual stereotypes about socially awkward nerd. And it doesn’t hurt that Dev Patel has plainly been to the gym a fair bit since his painfully skinny shirtless scenes in Skins.

No, I’m still generally unconvinced by the ‘soap opera’ aspects of the show, which flowed so naturally in The West Wing. In fact, Aaron Sorkin has been taken to task (again – poor sod gets more of this than Doctor Who’s Steven Moffat) for failing to write credible, intelligent female characters. In MacKenzie’s case, I can see the problem – how can such an intelligent woman be so good at her job yet dissolve into babbling inanity when dealing with the same coworker on a personal level? But I don’t think you can reasonably level that criticism at the writer who created CJ Cregg.

And while there may be some of those problems with the character of Maggie, the one aspect of the show that struck a nerve for me this week was her portrayal of being prone to crippling panic attacks (which Don, typically, just lets her get on with out of his way). I want to be quite clear – this is not a gender issue, and it most certainly is not a ‘weakness’ issue.

I suffer from panic attacks just like these. They’re not ‘being a drama queen’ or ‘attention seeking’ – they’re a genuinely terrifying, crippling set of mental AND physiological symptoms which hit you at times you don’t expect and for reasons you don’t understand, rendering you physically incapable of dealing with the world around you. I tend to keep my own vulnerability to these very much under wraps, as it’s still often perceived as weakness or overdramatisation. I can only hope that the very convincing depiction of it in this show might enlighten its viewers in the same that The West Wing did for multiple sclerosis.

This episode cleverly had two, contradictory endings. One showed Will, Charlie and the staffers celebrating their perceptive election coverage in the usual karaoke bar. This climaxed with the email to Charlie summoning him to the meeting we’d been seeing throughout – a meeting that, just before the bar scene, had ended with Leona’s ultimatum that Will tone it down or be sacked. Clearly, Charlie’s crusade is already in danger.

Which I hope The Newsroom isn’t, despite its mixed reception. Sure, I still think it’s flawed, but episode by episode it seems to be building on its strengths. And if not eliminating its flaws, at least pushing them somewhat to the background. Only three episodes in, and it feels like it’s gaining complexity and credibility from its initial naively optimistic and utopian premise. I’d like to see more of that.

The Newsroom: Season 1, Episode 2–News Night 2.0

SPOILER WARNING – THIS IS FROM LAST SUNDAY’S US BROADCAST, AND MAJOR PLOT POINTS ARE DISCUSSED. DON’T READ AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN EPISODE 2 YET.

“We don’t do ‘good television’, we do the news.”

NewsroomMeeting

Critical reaction to last week’s premiere of Aaron Sorkin’s new show, The Newsroom, was, to put it mildly, mixed. While many liked the sincere, heartfelt performances, powerhouse speeches and super-eloquent characters, just as many were annoyed by its departure from reality in presenting an idealised version of a real environment (a TV newsroom) filled with idealised, too-wonderful characters who, as one common criticism put it, “talk like nobody in the real world”.

To be fair, these are all legitimate criticisms. I noted quite a few of them myself, in my own review last week. But that’s Aaron Sorkin’s style, and it seems a little harsh to have the knives drawn quite so early on a show whose flaws (if you see them that way) are no more than a repeat of those on the hallowed West Wing. That show too presented an idealised, ‘preachy’ version of a real environment – the White House, with the obvious intent being its writer telling us that this is how it could – and should – be. The Newsroom aims to do the same for a TV news environment dominated by pundits and opinions rather than facts and objectivity. That its first episode aired the same week that Fox and CNN managed to totally fumble reporting the Supreme Court’s decision on ‘Obamacare’, because they hadn’t read past page one of the judgement, seems curiously apposite.

That said, you couldn’t have week after week of the guys and girls at ACN doing perfect, crusading reporting unique in its integrity. Aside from problems with believability, it would be boring and formulaic. So this week’s instalment, after last week’s powerhouse broadcast of the BP oil spill disaster, showed our heroes, stumbling over the reporting of Arizona governor Jan Brewer’s draconian anti-immigration law of 2010, producing a mesmerising spectacle of car crash television that was an exemplary case of doing the news totally wrong.

It’s good to be shown that these people are fallible. That idealised version of reality can be both a blessing and a curse, and it’s hard to truly like characters who are, essentially, saints. Having said that, I’m afraid I can’t resist the criticism that, after last week’s excess of perfection, the similar excess of fallibility on display here seemed similarly implausible. The most obvious example was a running subplot about the recent setup of email distribution lists that only resident tech geek Neal seemed able to understand. This intersected with the increasingly romcom aspects of the plot to give us the moment when Mackenzie accidentally sent an email intended for Will, about the breakup of their previous relationship, to everyone in the company. With hilarious consequences.

Now, the plot really couldn’t have moved forward without this conceit, both from a professional and personal perspective. And yes, I’m sure that this kind of slip up does happen among office staff that aren’t very technically minded. But these people are meant to be seasoned professionals who are presumably perfectly conversant with email. And tellingly, it was essential to the plot that these people’s Blackberries never leave their sides. It seems unlikely that anyone so reliant on mobile email would be so incompetent in its use. But then, this is drama, and Sorkin’s style of drama often does depend on contrivance to move the plot forward.

Again, we saw that here as the script upped the ante in the romance stakes this week. Aside from the constant butting heads of Will and Mackenzie (who even compared their situation to a romantic comedy), the manoeuvring of Jim and Maggie into a relationship shifted up a gear. Their impossibly witty, quickfire bickering (actually reminiscent of that by a certain Steven Moffat) was funny, but perfectly demonstrated a common criticism of Sorkin – nobody in the real world talks like that. But again, it’s a dramatic and stylistic device – who’d want to watch a show where everyone stumbles over their speech with frequent pauses, coughs and “errm”s? Amusingly, this very point was put to Sorkin on a recent episode of The Colbert Report, and Sorkin responded to Stephen Colbert with a similarly contrived ‘naturalistic’ retort that, basically, said nothing. It’s a question of dramatic style, and how well you like it is probably subjective.

All that said, it was still a dynamic, gripping piece of television, with the actual broadcast, as last week, the dramatic highlight. Predictably, Jan Brewer dropped out (I hadn’t expected them to take actual interview footage of her and use it out of context), leaving Will with a trio of ill-informed ‘average citizens’ to defend her policy. Said policy was the subject of this week’s sermonising (always an essential ingredient for Sorkin), and in keeping with Mackenzie’s new Rules, both sides of the issue were looked at. It’s clear which way Sorkin himself swings, but it was an interesting choice to have the opposite viewpoint (immigrants steal jobs from hard-pressed Americans) put by Will himself.

The counterpoint, that this is basically a nasty bit of divisive racial profiling, was first stated by Neal early on in the episode – an interesting, or cliched choice depending on your viewpoint, Neal being both Indian in ethnicity and British in nationality. His impassioned plea to include an outspoken ‘illegal’ who’d had his travel to work removed for speaking his mind initially fell on deaf ears. But it was hardly a surprise that, by the end of the episode, Will’s opinions had swung Sorkin-wards, and he was up for anonymously providing said transport. A nice gesture to be sure, but to this cynical old curmudgeon, it also came across as desperately patronising: “Don’t worry, Latinos, the rich white guy has sorted it all out for you. You’re welcome.” That the episode climaxed with Radiohead’s ‘High and Dry’ juxtaposed with a long shot of the Statue of Liberty was, I’m afraid, one sickly heartstring-tugging gambit too much for me.

It may sound like I’m being pretty harsh on the show myself, but I should make it clear that I’m still enjoying watching it, for all the flaws that I (and, it seems, many others) see in it. The characters may be stock, but they’re likeable (except Don, who continues to be a one-dimensional asshole). They may speak with a degree of wit and passion rarely seen in reality, but it makes them more entertaining, in this kind of show, than the bumblingly naturalistic ones in other (equally valid) dramas. And that’s because they’re Sorkin characters – how you cope with that depends on your tolerance for his style. It’s interesting to note that his recent excursion into characters based on reality – The Social Network – contrived to do precisely the opposite, presenting all its characters as venal and unsympathetic. The Newsroom, like The West Wing before it, really is about idealism. It’s not perfect, and Sorkin may not be the god of dramatists many hold him up to be. But this week, like the last, still entertained and informed in a way that’s increasingly unusual in actual US news.

The Newsroom: Season 1, Episode 1–We Just Decided To

SPOILER WARNING – THIS IS FROM LAST SUNDAY’S US BROADCAST, AND MAJOR PLOT POINTS ARE DISCUSSED. DON’T READ AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN EPISODE 1 YET.

“…in the old days, about ten minutes ago, we did the news well. You know how? We just decided to.”

NewsRoomStudio

Any new Aaron Sorkin show is something of a TV event. Sorkin’s one of a growing number of TV writers – including the likes of Joss Whedon, Matthew Weiner and David Chase – whose very name is enough to sell a TV series regardless of its stars, producers or network.

Yet Sorkin’s cachet of success rests pretty much solely on groundbreaking political drama The West Wing, which ran for seven seasons (the last three without him). True, both Sports Night and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip were also excellent shows, but the former was cancelled after two seasons, the latter after just one. While everyone acknowledges Sorkin’s skill as a writer, it seems that the public desire for his work is greater with subject matter that affects everyone – the US government – than self-reflective theses about the workings of the TV industry. Given that, it seems rather brave that Sorkin’s new project, The Newsroom, is yet another meditation on that industry. Whether it proves to have the wide appeal of The West Wing or the more limited appeal of Studio 60 is a gamble that might not pay off.

Compounding that is the problem of familiarity. Series set in TV newsrooms are hardly new; there’s been Murphy Brown, Drop the Dead Donkey, Frontline and Canada’s own The Newsroom, all acclaimed in their day. Not to mention a plethora of movies on the subject – Network, Broadcast News, The China Syndrome, Good Night and Good Luck to name but a few. If you factor in their obvious ancestors, dramas set in newspaper offices, that number gets even higher.

The net effect of this is that there’s already a media shorthand for the structures of such dramas. To be fair, this might be drawn from actual realism, but that doesn’t water down the fact that it’s a hard genre to approach without embracing, essentially, cliche. Despite Sorkin’s undeniable skill with a script, The Newsroom doesn’t really manage to escape the trap of that formula.

The first ten minutes are electrifying – significantly, this prologue doesn’t include any of the TV newsroom elements. Veteran anchorman Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), having been pressed for a political opinion at a university debate, finally loses his cool and unleashes an unprecedented torrent of honesty when asked to respond to the question, “why is America the greatest country in the world?”

His speech/meltdown is pure Sorkin, and delivered brilliantly. A profanity-laced, excoriating examination of precisely why America is not the greatest country in the world – but has been, and could be again if its current problems were addressed without intransigent liberals and conservatives butting heads rather than debating the issues. “The first step towards solving any problem is recognising there is one.”

It’s obviously Sorkin himself speaking, through the mouth of his character. But then, that’s what he’s always done, and if you have a problem with that, you’re probably not going to be watching anyway.

Of course, Will’s speech is filmed, put up on the internet and quickly goes viral, leading fictional news network ACN to put him on a three week suspension to ‘rest’. Then, after the title music (the usual Sorkin staple of swelling strings and inspirational piano, courtesy this time of Thomas Newman), we’re into the show proper, and its almost theatrically limited setting, the newsroom.

Turns out that Will’s staff have all jumped ship in his absence, to work on a new 10 o’clock show with his former co-anchor. This gives Sorkin the advantage of introducing the new staff – ie the cast – to the main character and thereby to the audience without masses of extraneous exposition where people tell each other things they must, rationally, already know. As usual with Sorkin, they’re a well-drawn, likeable bunch. But even Sorkin can’t escape the problem of cliche in a subgenre that’s already been almost done to death. His newsroom is actually staffed entirely by cliches. Let’s meet them:

NewsRoomWillThe Veteran Anchor Who’s Become Complacent, Yet Retains the Heart of a Crusading Journalist Under His Cynical, Embittered Shell:
Jeff Daniels as Will McAvoy, an anchor who’s become a soaring success thanks to his policy of “not bothering anyone”. An obvious analogue for Sorkin himself, he’s portrayed as a brilliant man with passionate views who’s a total pain in the ass to work with (some nice self-awareness, Mr Sorkin). Signals his lack of caring by not remembering any of his staff’s names. In the course of the first episode, he will regain his fervour for news as information rather than filler or political polemic, and gain a newfound respect for his staff that will be signalled by his suddenly remembering who they are.

NewsRoomMackenzieThe Plucky Executive Producer With a Passion for News Who Will Turn the Morally Bankrupt Newsroom Around:
Emily Mortimer as the oddly named MacKenzie MacHale. In keeping with the tropes of this character, she’s an award-laden war correspondent returning to the studio with the hardwon integrity she found in Afghanistan and Iraq. For added romcom value, she’s also Will’s impish, British ex-girlfriend and there’s still a simmering tension between them. Prone to delivering speeches about Don Quixote that are plainly straight from the mouth of Sorkin.

NewsRoomDonThe Asshole Who Wouldn’t Know a Good Story If It Jumped Up and Bit Him:
Thomas Sadoski as Don Keefer. Will’s former Executive Producer, and still nominally in charge when MacKenzie turns up. Ignores the good advice of the improbably professional staff all around him, and is so generally objectionable it’s hard to believe the script’s claims that he’s good at his job.

NewsRoomCharlieThe Crusty Veteran Newsman in Charge Who Wants a Return to the Good Old Days of Actual Journalism:
Sam Waterston as Charlie Skinner. A folksy Mark Twain lookalike who dresses as the Eleventh Doctor, Charlie’s been around long enough to remember Ed Murrow, Walter Cronkite and Vietnam. He knows Things Should Be Better, and manipulates his staff accordingly. See also Lou Grant, Perry White etc.

NewsRoomJimThe Bright Up and Comer Whose Unrecognised Nose for News Will Lead to Success for Everyone:
John Gallagher Jr as Jim Harper, a producer whose unswerving devotion to the alliteratively named MacKenzie MacHale has brought him to New York, where it becomes plain that he’s one of the only people on the newsroom staff who can actually spot an important story. See also Peter Parker, Jimmy Olson (which Don actually calls him at one point).

NewsRoomMaggieThe Klutzy, Hopeless Intern whose Hidden Talents Will Lead Her to Greater Confidence and Career Success:
Alison Pill as Maggie Jordan. Maggie’s been promoted from intern to assistant primarily because Will didn’t remember who she was. Spends the first half of the episode comically tripping over things, which unfathomably leads MacKenzie to spot ‘something’ in her and promote her to associate producer for no clear reason. She is of course right, and by the end of the ep, Maggie will be vital to sniffing out news details on the exclusive that will remake the newsroom’s reputation. For added romcom value, also in a faltering relationship with Don into which MacKenzie is trying to insert Jim as a better option.

NewsRoomNealThe Quiet Guy Who’s Always Glued To His Computer, But Will Come Up Trumps With an Exclusive Nobody Else Has Spotted Yet
Dev Patel as Neal Sampat, another Brit whose function is to write Will’s blog (the existence of which Will is entirely unaware of). Employing his usual tactic of likeability, Dev plays Neal almost exactly as he used to play Anwar in Skins, but it will be he who comes up with the breaking story that will Set the Newsroom Back on Track.

To be fair, I’m not knocking Sorkin because these are cliches. It’s actually quite a clever tactic for the scriptwriter to use such instantly identifiable roles to cement the characters in the viewer’s mind, and it’s notable that I felt I knew a lot about these characters already by the episode’s halfway mark. In common with the characters of The West Wing, they’re all improbably great at their jobs (even the asshole realises he was wrong at the end, and apologises) and have a degree of erudition that few people have in the normal workplace. They seem, in short, just a little too perfect.

But that’s Sorkin’s style, and perhaps I’m being a little influenced by having recently watched thirteen weeks of Mad Men, in which all the characters are made of flaws. This is only episode one, and I expect that, as in The West Wing, the flaws in the characters will show up as the season progresses.

And it’s a little novel to set the show in the very recent past, so that the all-important exclusive turns out to be the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s at that point that the grams onscreen give a date – April 20, 2010. At first it seemed a little weird to show this halfway through the story, as I’d naturally assumed until then that it was set in the present. But it was actually quite a clever move. If they’d shown that date at the outset, a keen news viewer might well have sensed what story the script would focus on.

And that advantage of hindsight means that the show can cleverly plunder a plethora of recent big news stories, while allowing the ace staff at ACN to appear preternaturally brilliant by knowing every aspect of a story before any of their competition. It also allows Sorkin to insert yet more righteous sermonising in the mouths of his characters; in this case, obviously, he unleashed his wrath on the incompetence of BP, the corruption of Halliburton and the inadequacy of the US Mineral Survey inspectors.

As I say, it’s only episode one, and it’s perhaps unfair to judge the show as a whole on the basis of that. It’s certainly exciting, and I can understand embrace of cliched characters and situations as a media shorthand to quickly establish the scenario. There’s obviously room to explore them with more depth as the show’s ten episode run progresses.

It has all the hallmarks of a Sorkin show – a mix of brilliance and contrived schmaltz; some electrifying dialogue and performances, but also many idealised, too-perfect characters whose erudition strains credulity. With Sorkin, I often find the positives outweigh the negatives – after all, even the hallowed West Wing was often far from perfect on these lines. But if you’ve enjoyed those in Sorkin’s shows before, you’ll definitely enjoy this – and hope that the flaws will be ironed out later.