TMC
03-31-2015, 03:37 AM
http://www.wewantinsanity.com/am2/publish/Peter_Dawson/When_Good_Shows_Go_Bad_The_Newsroom.shtml
The History
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip effectively put a wall between Aaron Sorkin and Hollywood, at least in terms of television. Fortunately a return to theater seemed to be doing the man some good, and the screenplay he cooked up for Charlie Wilson's War worked out fairly well (not my favorite film but I sure wouldn't call it bad). This however was followed up on with The Social Network and Moneyball, two more nuanced films (compared to some of his other works) that both garnered Academy award consideration, the former winning three including one for Sorkin's screenplay. Television however beckoned in the form of HBO, and Sorkin had been following cable news quite a bit in recent times so he had inspiration for his new program. Debuting in June of 2012, The Newsroom ended up lasting twenty-five episodes, ending its third season in December of 2014. Jeff Daniels would win an Emmy Award for Best Leading Actor in a Drama Series, and while never a ratings hit The Newsroom remained a hotly-discussed program, pop culture often commenting on it.
The Show
Atlantis Cable News is a fictional cable news network (what gave it away?), whose flagship program is News Night, hosted by Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels). With ACN seemingly becoming a network indistinguishable from all the others, Will one day snaps during a question and answer period at Northwestern University, lambasting the state of the United States and, by extension, media coverage. Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston), President of ACN, would like to see Will and, by extension, ACN change, so he hires Will's ex-girlfriend MacKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer) to be executive producer of News Night, knowing she'll be for the change as well. Also on board are MacKenzie's senior producer Jim Harper (John Gallagher Jr), nervous associate producer Maggie Jordan (Alison Pill), media expert Neal Sampat (Dev Patel), and economics expert Sloan Sabbath (Olivia Munn). Former News Night executive producer Don Keefer (Thomas Sadoski) is more jaded and beaten down but slowly comes around to everyone else's way of thinking. ACN's new direction is not without its hurdles however, the owner of its parent company Atlantis World Media Leona Lansing (Jane Fonda) and her son Reese (Chris Messina), President of AWM, are more focused on avoiding backlash and ensuring good ratings. A framing device is that The Newsroom takes place in the recent past, covering major news stories from roughly a year earlier than the episodes originally aired, providing commentary on the events and how the characters handle them.
The Good
Aaron Sorkin is simultaneously really good and really bad at writing characters, so I'm going to talk about this first in both sections. I should stress however that pretty much every actor on the show plays their character more or less how they're supposed to be played. Jeff Daniels as Will is primarily angry, effectively bipolar shouting, yet we see in his character at times nuance and depths I wish every character had. One of the best episodes in the show's run is Bullies, and a big reason for that is that the boisterous McAvoy is slowly peeled away as we see despite his new-found zeal he's afraid of many things, including his complicated relationship with his father and becoming the bully he seeks to constantly deflate. Sloan Sabbath also offers the right balance of quirky, socially-inept charm, with solid emotional vulnerability while lacking some of the more problematic issues other female characters on the show could have. Aside from the fact that her character is meant to be a super financial genius (which is something solidly backed up in the show, if still somewhat rudimentary) she's arguably incredibly relatable. Even goofy storylines like her obsessing over tracking down someone who bought a fake signature of hers fit her more obsessive personality, and human beings can often obsess over nothing (or has Seinfeld taught us nothing?). Don Keefer, despite starting out as a fairly big twerp, quickly becomes a more rounded character as we see him for what he is: a beaten down idealist who has let cynicism cloud his better nature. If the idealist nature of the ACN new path helped one person its Don, especially since he went from a one-sided if complicated antagonist of sorts to arguably one of the more likable characters on the show.
The Newsroom has a solid core, which is one reason even when an episode sucked I would never say the show itself sucked. While Sports Night and Studio 60 one could question the program's value of the greater network narrative and how important the behind the scenes issues of the shows within the shows really were, the news is one of the most important elements of our daily lives. Many people today may not necessarily watch the news, but popular information still finds a way to reach people. The number one melting pot for dissecting information and providing a clear explanation for what exactly happened in the world today is news media. The framing device of going into the recent past may seem clumsy, and definitely preachy, as it can be seen as a strange attempt to fix the past, and in a way it is. Characters tend to always seem to know the right way to 'fix' whatever problems there are in news coverage, or obsess over the nobility of reporting good news to people who need to hear it. Despite these cheesy if not ridiculous elements however the fact remains media over-saturation, the 24 hour news cycle and such are making finding the relevant information that much trickier as well as what the point of the news is. It's preachy but it's worth noting that we see exactly how other networks and such could have entered the pitfalls the characters try to avoid, and while major consequences aren't really an issue (more on this later) getting the news done 'right' doesn't always happen either.
Lastly one can't talk about The Newsroom without talking about the monologues. As per usual in Sorkin's works characters aren't just prepared to talk, they're prepared to speechify. This can be a bit goofy, but people on television rarely seem to fumble over words as is, the monologues just make it more glaring. What's important to note however is that these epic speeches are damn good speeches for the most part, even the ones the more antagonistic characters offer up comments on morality, actions taken and just the state of life. Even with these speeches at their sides however characters still find themselves perhaps being undone with a few simple words. Effectively the characters are all able to say exactly what they want to say when it would be prudent to say it, but while we're left with even the most unassuming of characters being fairly eloquent they are still not able to shake the world with their words, just be heard. The speeches effectively blur the line between show and tell, as while we're getting a clear picture of how a character feels through words the passion they put into the words and such help make the transparent look into their minds feel more bombastic, and create the show's own little world parallel to our own.
The Bad
So I praised Sloan and Will in particular, and Charlie's an okay enough character I suppose, being that lovable kind of badass grandfather you want to call delusional but you just can't, even when he's clearly being so. Unfortunately Sorkin's general lack of ability at writing women comes into play hard. I wouldn't say Aaron Sorkin doesn't know how to write women, more he just tend to fail do a good job consistently as both MacKenzie and Maggie are pretty much a mess. Maggie and Mac are the two biggest bumblers on the show, constantly screwing up and acting like basket cases (not to mention spending more time talking about their love lives than the men tend to). While Mac manages to still be a tolerable character by playing an okay enough foil to Will Maggie not only manages to be annoying to downright insufferable but her big emotional scenes tend to suck and for some reason she was turned into a brilliant journalist on her first field assignment, which doesn't match up at all. Neal unfortunately suffers from being the resident geek, most people clearly zoning out when he talks about fairly basic Internet stuff and becoming more like a blank Hollywood example of a geek character as the series went on (his interesting girlfriend just flat up vanished). Finally, Jim Harper is the worst. Creating seemingly to be this awesome but somewhat socially inept producer who fights the good fight for idealism, Jim quickly became a self-important ***** who was incredibly petty. Essentially Jim's redeeming characteristic is supposedly that he's not sexist, but his interactions with women and 'saving them' quickly made it clear he is in fact the kind of person who thinks, “I'm a nice guy, why don't women want to get with me?” It took until the third season for Jim to finally get his ass torn a new one but by then he's become such an unlikable ***** it's hard to care less.
So I mentioned the problem with consequences. The big problem with The Newsroom, and one honestly I'd wished Sorkin had managed to convince HBO to let him address a bit better, is consequences. People on The Newsroom screw up a lot, and indeed a major plot of the second season was the network airing a piece on the US Army supposedly using sarin gas that ended up being utterly wrong. The only person to get fired from the incident was a bland new character who quite frankly was an idiot, and whose best bit was done off-screen after he was fired. Even slam dunks like Maggie freaking out after having a child die in her arms (by the way, people who complain that this isn't traumatic? A KID DIED IN HER ARMS!) were messed up by how poorly it was executed and the resulting trauma being handled a bit too easily. More characters needed to be fired, demoted, or moved around, as instead we got situations like Leona Lansing pushing to try and get Will fired, but once she was a good reason she just decides she loves ACN too much and tells him and Charlie to just go and win the opinion of the public back by covering the 2012 US Presidential Election. By the time we got a legit consequence for an action, with Will going to jail over a storyline that ends up not really mattering in the grand scheme of things in the end (which I guess is kind of the point since there will always be new news stories), it felt a bit like too little, too late.
To cover some lesser but notable issues real quick, we had problems with being a bit too leftist, repetition of past Sorkin works as well as an overuse of coincidences. Aaron Sorkin wrote Will McAvoy as a more casual Republican to the hardline right-wing types you might associate the word with, and to a degree he succeeded (would have been interesting to see a Democrat who supports gun ownership to counter his anti-gun stance though). However The Newroom itself has a problem of being a bit too eager to pick apart popular stances that are more aligned with the right-wing, and the big news story of the second season that turns out to be false, were it true, would have been the most damning strike against the Obama administration. Season three again offered up some critiques (drone naturally), but I wouldn't even call The Newsroom as kind as The West Wing was towards right-wing politics. For repetition, well, a major subplot in the third season of The Newsroom is ACN being sold, which is pretty much the same thing that happened in the second season of Sports Night. Will's big breakdown that opened the show also paralleled how Studio 60 started, and the usual issue of higher up executives meddling with the protagonists of the show once again reared its head. The Newsroom really wasn't that fresh material-wise, aside from the setting to a degree. As for coincidences, more than once (though most glaringly in the pilot) characters would either know someone with key information on a major news story or run into someone with key information on a story. Not much to say here aside from that using coincidence so much can undercut the narrative a bit, as the story is beginning from a contrivance, which is why you want to use coincidences sparingly, or next thing you know you'll be facing the law... and order.
The Blame
Like I said HBO seemed fairly hands off (though I wonder if they're why the show got a new intro for the later seasons after having a damn good one for the first), so a lot of this probably has to go to Sorkin himself. Sorkin more or less wrote the whole show himself, though with many consultants on news stories and some supporting writers to take Sorkin's words and make them into a teleplay. Unfortunately when you seem to more or less get Sorkin unfiltered you get his strengths and his weaknesses, and spread over several hours instead of just two to three (as in plays for film), the flaws really stick out at you.
So can I recommend it? Yes, though I have two caveats. The first is that if you never liked Sorkin's style you'll probably really hate this show, as while the Sorkin walk isn't as prominent there is, as I said, monologues a plenty and a lack of consequences. The second caveat is that The Newsroom, due to how it covered major news stories of the recent past, could end up feeling dated, though personally I've always preferred when we have a set year (so long as it isn't meant to bet he future). Either way the basic theme of balancing integrity with relevance and information is a good one, making the show worthwhile.
- See more at: http://www.wewantinsanity.com/am2/publish/Peter_Dawson/When_Good_Shows_Go_Bad_The_Newsroom.shtml#sthash.dZa9IV5D.dpuf
The History
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip effectively put a wall between Aaron Sorkin and Hollywood, at least in terms of television. Fortunately a return to theater seemed to be doing the man some good, and the screenplay he cooked up for Charlie Wilson's War worked out fairly well (not my favorite film but I sure wouldn't call it bad). This however was followed up on with The Social Network and Moneyball, two more nuanced films (compared to some of his other works) that both garnered Academy award consideration, the former winning three including one for Sorkin's screenplay. Television however beckoned in the form of HBO, and Sorkin had been following cable news quite a bit in recent times so he had inspiration for his new program. Debuting in June of 2012, The Newsroom ended up lasting twenty-five episodes, ending its third season in December of 2014. Jeff Daniels would win an Emmy Award for Best Leading Actor in a Drama Series, and while never a ratings hit The Newsroom remained a hotly-discussed program, pop culture often commenting on it.
The Show
Atlantis Cable News is a fictional cable news network (what gave it away?), whose flagship program is News Night, hosted by Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels). With ACN seemingly becoming a network indistinguishable from all the others, Will one day snaps during a question and answer period at Northwestern University, lambasting the state of the United States and, by extension, media coverage. Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston), President of ACN, would like to see Will and, by extension, ACN change, so he hires Will's ex-girlfriend MacKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer) to be executive producer of News Night, knowing she'll be for the change as well. Also on board are MacKenzie's senior producer Jim Harper (John Gallagher Jr), nervous associate producer Maggie Jordan (Alison Pill), media expert Neal Sampat (Dev Patel), and economics expert Sloan Sabbath (Olivia Munn). Former News Night executive producer Don Keefer (Thomas Sadoski) is more jaded and beaten down but slowly comes around to everyone else's way of thinking. ACN's new direction is not without its hurdles however, the owner of its parent company Atlantis World Media Leona Lansing (Jane Fonda) and her son Reese (Chris Messina), President of AWM, are more focused on avoiding backlash and ensuring good ratings. A framing device is that The Newsroom takes place in the recent past, covering major news stories from roughly a year earlier than the episodes originally aired, providing commentary on the events and how the characters handle them.
The Good
Aaron Sorkin is simultaneously really good and really bad at writing characters, so I'm going to talk about this first in both sections. I should stress however that pretty much every actor on the show plays their character more or less how they're supposed to be played. Jeff Daniels as Will is primarily angry, effectively bipolar shouting, yet we see in his character at times nuance and depths I wish every character had. One of the best episodes in the show's run is Bullies, and a big reason for that is that the boisterous McAvoy is slowly peeled away as we see despite his new-found zeal he's afraid of many things, including his complicated relationship with his father and becoming the bully he seeks to constantly deflate. Sloan Sabbath also offers the right balance of quirky, socially-inept charm, with solid emotional vulnerability while lacking some of the more problematic issues other female characters on the show could have. Aside from the fact that her character is meant to be a super financial genius (which is something solidly backed up in the show, if still somewhat rudimentary) she's arguably incredibly relatable. Even goofy storylines like her obsessing over tracking down someone who bought a fake signature of hers fit her more obsessive personality, and human beings can often obsess over nothing (or has Seinfeld taught us nothing?). Don Keefer, despite starting out as a fairly big twerp, quickly becomes a more rounded character as we see him for what he is: a beaten down idealist who has let cynicism cloud his better nature. If the idealist nature of the ACN new path helped one person its Don, especially since he went from a one-sided if complicated antagonist of sorts to arguably one of the more likable characters on the show.
The Newsroom has a solid core, which is one reason even when an episode sucked I would never say the show itself sucked. While Sports Night and Studio 60 one could question the program's value of the greater network narrative and how important the behind the scenes issues of the shows within the shows really were, the news is one of the most important elements of our daily lives. Many people today may not necessarily watch the news, but popular information still finds a way to reach people. The number one melting pot for dissecting information and providing a clear explanation for what exactly happened in the world today is news media. The framing device of going into the recent past may seem clumsy, and definitely preachy, as it can be seen as a strange attempt to fix the past, and in a way it is. Characters tend to always seem to know the right way to 'fix' whatever problems there are in news coverage, or obsess over the nobility of reporting good news to people who need to hear it. Despite these cheesy if not ridiculous elements however the fact remains media over-saturation, the 24 hour news cycle and such are making finding the relevant information that much trickier as well as what the point of the news is. It's preachy but it's worth noting that we see exactly how other networks and such could have entered the pitfalls the characters try to avoid, and while major consequences aren't really an issue (more on this later) getting the news done 'right' doesn't always happen either.
Lastly one can't talk about The Newsroom without talking about the monologues. As per usual in Sorkin's works characters aren't just prepared to talk, they're prepared to speechify. This can be a bit goofy, but people on television rarely seem to fumble over words as is, the monologues just make it more glaring. What's important to note however is that these epic speeches are damn good speeches for the most part, even the ones the more antagonistic characters offer up comments on morality, actions taken and just the state of life. Even with these speeches at their sides however characters still find themselves perhaps being undone with a few simple words. Effectively the characters are all able to say exactly what they want to say when it would be prudent to say it, but while we're left with even the most unassuming of characters being fairly eloquent they are still not able to shake the world with their words, just be heard. The speeches effectively blur the line between show and tell, as while we're getting a clear picture of how a character feels through words the passion they put into the words and such help make the transparent look into their minds feel more bombastic, and create the show's own little world parallel to our own.
The Bad
So I praised Sloan and Will in particular, and Charlie's an okay enough character I suppose, being that lovable kind of badass grandfather you want to call delusional but you just can't, even when he's clearly being so. Unfortunately Sorkin's general lack of ability at writing women comes into play hard. I wouldn't say Aaron Sorkin doesn't know how to write women, more he just tend to fail do a good job consistently as both MacKenzie and Maggie are pretty much a mess. Maggie and Mac are the two biggest bumblers on the show, constantly screwing up and acting like basket cases (not to mention spending more time talking about their love lives than the men tend to). While Mac manages to still be a tolerable character by playing an okay enough foil to Will Maggie not only manages to be annoying to downright insufferable but her big emotional scenes tend to suck and for some reason she was turned into a brilliant journalist on her first field assignment, which doesn't match up at all. Neal unfortunately suffers from being the resident geek, most people clearly zoning out when he talks about fairly basic Internet stuff and becoming more like a blank Hollywood example of a geek character as the series went on (his interesting girlfriend just flat up vanished). Finally, Jim Harper is the worst. Creating seemingly to be this awesome but somewhat socially inept producer who fights the good fight for idealism, Jim quickly became a self-important ***** who was incredibly petty. Essentially Jim's redeeming characteristic is supposedly that he's not sexist, but his interactions with women and 'saving them' quickly made it clear he is in fact the kind of person who thinks, “I'm a nice guy, why don't women want to get with me?” It took until the third season for Jim to finally get his ass torn a new one but by then he's become such an unlikable ***** it's hard to care less.
So I mentioned the problem with consequences. The big problem with The Newsroom, and one honestly I'd wished Sorkin had managed to convince HBO to let him address a bit better, is consequences. People on The Newsroom screw up a lot, and indeed a major plot of the second season was the network airing a piece on the US Army supposedly using sarin gas that ended up being utterly wrong. The only person to get fired from the incident was a bland new character who quite frankly was an idiot, and whose best bit was done off-screen after he was fired. Even slam dunks like Maggie freaking out after having a child die in her arms (by the way, people who complain that this isn't traumatic? A KID DIED IN HER ARMS!) were messed up by how poorly it was executed and the resulting trauma being handled a bit too easily. More characters needed to be fired, demoted, or moved around, as instead we got situations like Leona Lansing pushing to try and get Will fired, but once she was a good reason she just decides she loves ACN too much and tells him and Charlie to just go and win the opinion of the public back by covering the 2012 US Presidential Election. By the time we got a legit consequence for an action, with Will going to jail over a storyline that ends up not really mattering in the grand scheme of things in the end (which I guess is kind of the point since there will always be new news stories), it felt a bit like too little, too late.
To cover some lesser but notable issues real quick, we had problems with being a bit too leftist, repetition of past Sorkin works as well as an overuse of coincidences. Aaron Sorkin wrote Will McAvoy as a more casual Republican to the hardline right-wing types you might associate the word with, and to a degree he succeeded (would have been interesting to see a Democrat who supports gun ownership to counter his anti-gun stance though). However The Newroom itself has a problem of being a bit too eager to pick apart popular stances that are more aligned with the right-wing, and the big news story of the second season that turns out to be false, were it true, would have been the most damning strike against the Obama administration. Season three again offered up some critiques (drone naturally), but I wouldn't even call The Newsroom as kind as The West Wing was towards right-wing politics. For repetition, well, a major subplot in the third season of The Newsroom is ACN being sold, which is pretty much the same thing that happened in the second season of Sports Night. Will's big breakdown that opened the show also paralleled how Studio 60 started, and the usual issue of higher up executives meddling with the protagonists of the show once again reared its head. The Newsroom really wasn't that fresh material-wise, aside from the setting to a degree. As for coincidences, more than once (though most glaringly in the pilot) characters would either know someone with key information on a major news story or run into someone with key information on a story. Not much to say here aside from that using coincidence so much can undercut the narrative a bit, as the story is beginning from a contrivance, which is why you want to use coincidences sparingly, or next thing you know you'll be facing the law... and order.
The Blame
Like I said HBO seemed fairly hands off (though I wonder if they're why the show got a new intro for the later seasons after having a damn good one for the first), so a lot of this probably has to go to Sorkin himself. Sorkin more or less wrote the whole show himself, though with many consultants on news stories and some supporting writers to take Sorkin's words and make them into a teleplay. Unfortunately when you seem to more or less get Sorkin unfiltered you get his strengths and his weaknesses, and spread over several hours instead of just two to three (as in plays for film), the flaws really stick out at you.
So can I recommend it? Yes, though I have two caveats. The first is that if you never liked Sorkin's style you'll probably really hate this show, as while the Sorkin walk isn't as prominent there is, as I said, monologues a plenty and a lack of consequences. The second caveat is that The Newsroom, due to how it covered major news stories of the recent past, could end up feeling dated, though personally I've always preferred when we have a set year (so long as it isn't meant to bet he future). Either way the basic theme of balancing integrity with relevance and information is a good one, making the show worthwhile.
- See more at: http://www.wewantinsanity.com/am2/publish/Peter_Dawson/When_Good_Shows_Go_Bad_The_Newsroom.shtml#sthash.dZa9IV5D.dpuf