Okay, so Sunday marked the end of Aaron Sorkin’s ode to television news journalism, The Newsroom. I’m trying to figure out what exactly it was that I watched for three seasons. I worked in television for four years. I loved Sports Night, The West Wing and The Social Network. I’m right in Sorkin’s wheelhouse. I could relate with what he was trying to do. I was totally in.
But then things got weird.
The first season was an ode to model television reporting. Essentially, Sorkin decided to take all the big news stories from the previous year and put them in the proper perspective, so to speak. He believed that he had the 20/20 hindsight in rose-colored glasses to show how each story should have been reported.
Sorkin basically started things off with a speech to remind America that it wasn’t as great as people thought it was, a three-minute segment so jarring that it moved many people (including myself) to proclaim that Sorkin was going to break through to his audience and show them just how wrong we were.
Instead, the show’s biggest critics pounded Sorkin dead for 10 weeks. The hindsight, the deus ex machina writing, the near-chauvinism shown with the many inter-office relationships, the arrogance that comes with Sorkin’s writing that came through even more when he was trying to show people how the news really should have been done, it was all a bit much for people.
But that didn’t stop people from watching season two. Even with a turbulent first season, people hoped that Sorkin — who couldn’t possibly do much worse, considering he’s responsible for two of television’s best dramas in the last two decades — would step up and be the Sorkin we all hoped he would be.
Instead, he floundered even more. The Genoa storyline was a bit flimsy and the relationship nonsense got turned up to 11. Even the reporting side of things got mired in too much drama, somewhat flailing amongst the backdrop of the overdrawn Genoa saga. But the Sorkin dialogue was still there. The acting was still top-notch. The content was just… not all that enticing. With interest waning, HBO called for the next season of The Newsroom to be its last. And so it was.
http://youtu.be/7YxFHaq7bRk
Yet all of a sudden, the beginning of season three looked like a show we could envision ourselves watching. There was character development, payoffs, relationships even grew up and didn’t look completely forced. Sorkin had dipped into the parts of his previous shows that reminded you just how much you enjoyed his work. Even the kitschy stuff, like the last-minute wedding of Will (Jeff Daniels) and MacKenzie (Emily Mortimer), was charming in an odd way.
That all went away in the penultimate episode of the series, “Oh Shenandoah.” In a last gasp to try and get a point across that didn’t really need to be made, the episode centered around a story of a Princeton co-ed that was raped at a party. Said co-ed created a website as a way to have victims post information when the police can’t help them. That got back to Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston), who sent Don (Thomas Sadoski) to do the story at the behest of new ACN owner Lucas Pruitt (B.J. Novak), who thinks it would be huge for his network to get the co-ed and the man who raped her to discuss the event face-to-face, live on air.
In writing the storyline, Sorkin pitted the journalist’s credo to get both sides of the story against the moral obligation of the rights a rapist has. The timing of the episode really couldn’t be any worse with the recent Rolling Stone article about a rape at the University of Virginia (which itself had the issue of not being correctly fact-checked) and the numerous allegations about Bill Cosby. That combination led the episode to be volatile enough for people who had “hate-watched” the show to determine that Sorkin had gone too far and salivated over the show being brought to a merciful conclusion.
http://youtu.be/4qtBeoTakZc
And then Sorkin had to go and write THAT finale.
Charlie had a heart attack at the end of “Shenandoah,” something brought on by an argument over an interview Sloan did with the new head of ACN digital about an app in which she verbally destroys him. Pruitt was mad, fired Sloan and Mac, but Charlie screamed and told Pruitt he was the only guy who could do that. He turned, fell down, and he was gone. That night, after spending 53 days in jail for contempt of court (refusing to give up a source who leaked government documents), Will would be released only to hear the news, leading to the finale.
“What Kind of Day It Has Been,” ended up being the best episode of the show, and I’m not sure how close it was. Combining flashbacks of how the crew came together along with some goofy yet poignant conversations and moments (including an impromptu jam session in Charlie’s garage), Sorkin hit all the right notes in many ways, even if some of his old habits couldn’t help but arise. (The idea of Maggie going after a job instead of doing what Jim wants? How dare you, A-a-ron!)
http://youtu.be/nEIn7R9zxNs
Even then, he countered that with a nice gesture of giving Mac the network president job, replacing Charlie and moving Jim to executive producer by bringing up that Pruitt hadn’t exactly been great in how he treated his female employees (with an assist from ACN’s former owner, Leona Lansing.)
When I wrote about Sons of Anarchy coming to an end last week, one thing I forgot to mention was how the pacing of the show sped up too much towards the end. The famous story of David Chase not having much more to write about The Sopranos after three seasons, which then led to the somewhat panned seasons to follow, became a cautionary tale to shows that continued on a path towards ratings glory at the detriment of artistic merit.
SOA definitely had that issue at times (Hi, Belfast), but like The Sopranos, it knew how to end things. Even with the last few minutes of the series, Chase had a clear vision for his show that was overshadowed by the ambiguous ending. SOA had a similar feeling right up until the not-so-subtle final scenes.
The Newsroom, however, had only 26 episodes to tell the story it needed. HBO has loved the 10-episode arc ever since the beginning of Game of Thrones. It’s become easy for the network to rotate shows in and out over the course of a year. The Newsroom was considered one of those shows that would be a great non-Thrones contributor to HBO’s quarterly run. It obviously didn’t hold up its end of the bargain as well as they had hoped.
There’s an argument to be made that Sorkin favored the traditional network season arc, where anywhere from 22 to 26 episodes in a given season allowed him to pen out the stories he wanted while slowly advancing the story along without cutting corners.
The counter to such an argument is that would have allowed Sorkin to have more time to show off his bad habits. The counter to that counter is that in a 10-episode season, Sorkin would have an easier time writing for television considering he’s focused on feature-length scripts in recent times. The counter to the counter of the original counter was what Sony thought of Sorkin in the recent email hacks.
The constant back-and-forth about whether or not The Newsroom was good or not is going to be talked about for a long time to come. Even after the Emmy larceny of Jeff Daniels beating out Bryan F’n Cranston for the Best Actor Emmy in 2013 during the season where Walter White became television’s greatest anti-hero ever, people saw the cast acting its butts off and the promise of all the things Sorkin did as reason enough to tune in. Many, however, were left underwhelmed.
The legacy of the show will be odd enough: A group of really good actors got together and rode the Sorkin dialogue wave to notoriety while also becoming somewhat infamous for its creator’s faults. In recent memory, there hasn’t been a more divisive show that both supporters and haters backed with such ferocity… while also agreeing with the other side begrudgingly every once in a while.
I’m not sure television is better off having had The Newsroom be a part of its canon, but sometimes it’s better to be interesting than it is to be good. Sorkin has his Hall of Fame card punched already. The Newsroom seemed to be a passion project gone slightly awry.
