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.