It isn't often that the perennial parental advice, "If you can't say something nice, you shouldn't say it at all" is observed when discussing television. A cottage industry of bloggers and Twitter personalities has risen up around snarking on series that fall short of our gold standard. Few shows have taken the brunt of critical backlash as mercilessly over the last few years as The Newsroom.
Much of the criticism has been well deserved. Aaron Sorkin's singular voice has moved from charming to indulgent since the days of The West Wing. With age, his ability to write the young and the female has grown progressively more out of touch while the country has grown more progressive. His tendency toward the grandiose, while understandable in a White House drama, feels odd and self-important in the Newsroom. Even the few staunch defenders of the show have trouble arguing that Will McAvoy's "mission to civilize" isn't (at least partially) Sorkin's thinly veiled attempt to snipe at everything he finds wrong with society.
While Sorkin believed he was writing this:
Far too often, the show has come off like this:
Soon, we won't have Aaron Sorkin and his surrogate to bat around anymore. No longer will we be able to make fun of the show that never seemed to realize that hindsight is 20/20. HBO has given a final six-episode mercy killing to the series that has launched a thousand hilarious recaps. Before we send The Newsroom and its mission to civilize off to Valhalla on a burning pyre of scathing Twitter takedowns, let's prepare for the third and final season, which airs tonight, in as civilized as way as possible. Why? Because, damn it, that's how Will McAvoy would have wanted it. Here is Everything Nice I Can Say About The Newsroom.
Brenden Gallagher is a contributing writer. He tweets here.
The Newsroom has a great sense of rhythm and pacing.
The female cast members make the best of a bad situation.
I don't know if you've heard, but The Newsroom has a woman problem.
We have historical records that tell us that Sorkin has met, spoken to, and even been intimate with females before, but the dialogue in The Newsroom is enough to make you doubt it. It is amazing just how many ways Sorkin manages to write women poorly. Sloan Sabbith (Olivia Munn) is the sexy nerd straight out of a GamerGater's wet dream (she's smart, hot, socially awkward, and cares about ethics in journalism). Maggie Jordan (Alison Pill) began as a hopelessly gaffe-prone youth who has developed into an emotionally scarred wreck who (gasp) cut her own hair after a traumatizing experience that left her emotional paralyzed. MacKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer) is the self-possessed career woman who has inexplicably dedicated herself to winning back a guy who, yes, she cheated on, but has spent the ensuing years clinging desperately to a pathetic grudge against her.
Somehow, all three of these women turn in great performances.
Munn does solid work despite her material, owning her nerd-goddess role with gusto. Pill and Mortimer take things a step further. They play their roles as though they are in a constant debate with Sorkin's plot lines. They work episode in and episode out to ground their characters with thoughtful humanity despite their illogical behavior. The truthful moments they dig out of their characters reveal just how wooden Sorkin has written them, and demand better. We often talk about actors who rise to the level of their material. Just as often, we discuss performers who sink with the ship of their CBS multi-cam or overwrought AMC also-ran. Rarely do we get to see actors get better because of bad writing.
And whether or not you think The Newsroom works, I defy you to claim that these two characters are well written. Here's hoping that Pill and Mortimer find more comfortable landing spots for their next roles.
Neal's plots don't suck.
The Dad Rock soundtrack is perfect.
Jeff Daniels' performance has gotten better as it has grown more self-aware.
Watching Sorkin deal with the Internet is hilarious.
The thing I will miss most about The Newsroom is Sorkin's complete lack of understanding of how the Internet works. Some of my favorite Sorkin web moments of Season 2:
- A Sex and the City fan fiction writer is tracked down with the help of a Foursquare check-in.
- Sloan Sabbith tries to use a retweet as a bribe.
- Will McAvoy, a public intellectual, googles "Will McAvoy hate" for the first time in late 2011.
- The line, "How many followers does she have? And retweets?" is uttered.
- Someone says, "It was picked up by BuzzFeed." without a hint of irony.
Watching The Newsroom this last couple years have been like getting the humor of my parents trying to use a smartphone without the pain of having to fix it for them. Sorkin is alternately dismissive and in awe of the Internet, and watching him wrestle the web until he's red in the face has been one of the great pleasures of The Newsroom. The Internet is Sorkin's white whale, and we get to watch the battle play out in sweet sweet GIFs.
The Newsroom gave birth to the best parody account of all time.
Aaron Sorkin knows his musical theater.
Sam Waterston takes beleagured to a whole new level.
Sam Waterston's Charlie Skinner is among the most rundown, hangdog performances ever to come to the small screen. It's shocking that he hasn't broken down and uttered one Glover-esque, "I'm getting to old for this shit!" after 20-plus episodes of The Newsroom. Skinner is tired of clueless oversight, he is tired of the mistakes of green journalists, he is tired of Will's ego, he is tired of Sloan's ego, he is tired of everyone else's ego, and he is just generally tired. Hell, he is probably tired of the limited bow tie selection at Bergdorf Goodman. Even though he plays this one note over and over again, Waterston's mastery of his craft infuses each scene with an infectious energy no matter how familiar they seem.
Of course, it shouldn't be hard for a man who was once Hamlet for Joe Papp to find something truthful playing "sick of all the bullshit" after years of Law & Order and The Newsroom.
The show is unabashedly optismistic.
