If you have not seen this episode yet and do not wish to be spoiled, do not continue reading!
Recap: Will McAvoy, a once-compelling news figure who has become popular but marginalized in an effort to appear balanced, is on a college discussion panel, giving jocular non-committal answers to any questions presented as left-wing and right-wing panelists go at one another. In the audience, he keeps seeing the face of a woman he knew from his past. When asked by a student what makes America the greatest country in the world, he attempts to avoid the question with a saccharine response. The moderator goads him for an answer and when he looks to the familiar face in the audience, he sees her holding a notepad with a page that states “IT’S NOT” and one that says “BUT IT CAN BE.” One last prod by the moderator and Will lets loose a telling view of his personal opinion on the declining status of America on the world stage.
Backstage, Will tries to assign the blame of his outburst on vertigo medication. The bevy of responses to the rant — shock, amazement, appallment — forces the Atlantis Cable Network (ACN) to send their main anchor on a three-week vacation. He returns to find out that a colleague he has pushed to take over a 10pm new show not only got the job but is taking Will’s executive producer and the majority of his show’s staff to the new show.
During the three weeks, the network head, Charlie Skinner, hires a new EP for the show, much to Will’s chagrin as he thought he had approval privileges written in his contract but doesn’t. Made worse is the fact that Skinner hired Will’s ex-flame, Mackenzie McHale, for the position. Will confronts his departing EP, Don, about the defection and Don explains that for as well-liked as Will is by his viewing audience, everyone that works for him can’t stand him.
Don, meanwhile, is trying to get out of going to dinner with his girlfriend Maggie, Will’s assistant, who has invited her visiting parents out to meet Don for the first time. As they’ve only been dating a few months, Don feels it’s too early to meet her parents and asks her to lie to them and say he has to work late. As this flusters Maggie, Mackenzie arrives with her number two, Jim Harper, to meet with Will. Will has left the building, though, to go renegotiate his contract with his agent.
Mackenzie and Maggie bond and, impressing Mackenzie enough by saying she’s staying with Will over loyalty, she promotes Maggie to an associate producer position. Also deducing her and Don’s relationship, Mackenzie suggests that Maggie not play the angry card with Don over her parents. And that she also shouldn’t go over to see Don after the dinner as he’s requested.
Will returns and he and Mackenzie speak in his office. He tells her that he renegotiated his contract and had her three-year guaranteed contract changed to a 156-week contract in which he has the option to fire her or keep her on at the end of every week. She accepts and argues with him that she believes in the things he was stating during his rant at the college and that they can make a better news program.
In the newsroom, Jim has been relegated to watching the incoming news alerts, which are color-coded to reflect importance. He sees one come over about the BP oil rig explosion off the Louisiana coast and we are told that the time is April 2010. Jim tries to bring this to Don’s attention but he dismisses it as being a yellow alert. Jim sticks with the story — originally presented as a search-and-rescue piece — getting comments from a source at BP that they don’t know how to cap the well to stop the oil leak and from a source at Halliburton about the methods used to seal the tapped well to begin with. Jim continues to push the story on Don, recruiting the help of the news team’s blogger Neal, who has some interest and knowledge of the welling procedures. Don continues to rebuff him until Jim marches in and presents the story to Will and Mackenzie directly.
After some debate, Will decides to pursue the story with some pushback from Don and his staff. Fed up, Will asks which of the staff are going with Don to the new show. Nearly all of the room raises their hands and Will announces that they can all leave now with two-weeks pay. Mackenzie and Jim run the story, using Neal, Maggie, and the remaining staffers to source quotes and pull scientific evidence.
Will goes on the air with NewsNight and no script. Everything is prompted from Mackenzie in the control room. Despite a pleasant press release from BP talking about thoughts and prayers being with the victims of the accident, Will presses a BP spokesman at Mackenzie’s insistence. The group also manages to find a well inspector who talks about the lack of finding, the too-small inspection force, the infrequency and inadequacy of the inspections, and the fact that he was just out of training when he gave approval on the well of the rig that exploded. The entire broadcast is dedicated to the oil spill.
After the show, Don admits his error to Jim and tells Maggie that he’ll meet her parents in the lobby to personally apologize for having to work late, which they are aware is a lie. Charlie and Will share a drink where Charlie admits to having orchestrated Don’s departure to bring on Mackenzie to make Will as good as he was this night and once was. Will and Mackenzie run into one another near the elevator as he is leaving. He admits that it wasn’t vertigo medication but that the face he thought he saw in the audience was hers, even though he saw a different face as he launched into his commentary.
As his elevator door closes, Mackenzie reveals the two pages “IT’S NOT” and “BUT IT CAN BE” on her notepad. She considers running after him to tell him the truth but decides against it.
Review:
My moment of full disclosure: I am an unabashed Aaron Sorkin fan. Sports Night and The West Wing are the one-two in the list of my favorite television series of all time. A Few Good Men and The American President are among my favorite films and The Social Network was my pick for top film of 2010. I even have special places in my audience experience for the film Malice and Sorkin’s last attempt at a series, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, though both are quite flawed. To say I was looking forward to The Newsroom — though I prefer the working title More As This Story Develops — would be understatement.
It is with such practiced eyes that I am, perhaps, pre-disposed to enjoy, admire, and even love this new series. In fact, anyone who has spent time with any of Sorkin’s previous television work can surely recognize a number of the themes, tropes, characterizations, and dialogue on display in this extended pilot. The opening frame — where Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) launches into a tirade about the disparity between the America we think we have, the one we truly have, and the one we once did — not only recalls the Network moment of the Judd Hirsch character Wes Mandell that kicked off Studio 60, but is also akin to Casey McCall’s disillusionment that nearly cost his job on Sports Night and Josh Lyman’s castigation of the religious right on a Sunday morning press show on The West Wing. In all cases, this set-up spurs on great stakes for one of the characters but also introduces us both to the world of the show and the individual personalities as they react to this “big bang” event.
Another of those recognizable elements is a past history between two characters, usually a man and a woman, that informs the environment, fuels a fire that leads to breakthroughs in the work, and keeps a spark between the two that plays havoc on their personal lives for good or for bad. This actually becomes as much a focus of the pilot of The Newsroom as the ideas presented about sparking the public discourse through journalism. It’s hard to tell how well this is going to play out but it’s a bit mixed here. Daniels chews through his role with much gusto and his performance is well-lived, warts and all. Emily Mortimer is astonishing as the unfortunately named Mackenzie McHale, providing a woman of exceptional dexterity, poise, and resolve, as well as a fun sense of humor. Together, both do enough to present levels of their past beyond the obvious statements in the dialogue, but as Daniels chooses (or is pushed) to be so antagonistic and unpleasant to give his character directions to grow, it overwhelms their chemistry. As such, it was a bit harder to latch onto these two as romantic partners. A few moments, like their final conversation at the elevator where Daniels softens Will a smidge, give some helpful hints that we will see more as the series goes forward.
In fact, though there were wonderful stanzas of dialogue all about, one can’t say there was a thoroughly likable character among the bunch in this start. Thomas Sadoski’s Don was too concerned about being correct and being in-charge that he gave off a bad vibe. John Gallagher Jr.’s Jim was a little too self-righteous, even though he was right about the big story, and fastidious in a way that might take some getting used to, much like Joshua Malina’s role of Jeremy was tempered a bit from the broad direction of his introduction in the Sports Night pilot. And Alison Pill’s Maggie was sunny but a bit too irksome at points. That said, all of the actors are superbly cast and seem to be game for what the show is going to throw at them, so one has to allow that they are building a full-functioning world rather than simply selling the characters on the audience upfront. The one exception was Sam Waterston’s Charlie Skinner, who had more than a little Issac Jaffe in him — and some Jack Daniels. It was a hoot watching Waterston relish in getting to drop some f-bombs all over the place.
(Okay, to be fair, Mortimer’s Mac Mac was pretty engaging, as well.)
The one questionable component of the whole endeavor is the timeframe in which the show is set. It’s not quite clear if giving the show a real news event to hang itself on was a plus or a hindrance. On one hand, the context of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico gives the audience a tangible and relatable frame of reference to work from. You focus the show, or the episode at least, on the process rather than the story. On the other hand, you present another yardstick by which to measure the show, that of the real news coverage, that could very well outshine the show’s presentation of it or prove to disengage the audience by covering that which has already been covered to death. Not to mention the fact that it takes credit from the real life folks that put in the effort to break the story. While fascinating, that did draw from the overall experience for me.
All might sound as if I didn’t thoroughly enjoy myself watching the series unfold. Nothing could be further from the truth. Sorkin’s ability to birth a fully living and breathing world and his crackling dialogue prove to entertain and enthrall once again. The relative shake-up of not having longtime partner Thomas Schlamme direct this pilot also created a new visual sandbox for a Sorkin TV work. Director Greg Mottola instead relies on the very modern and very open-air environment of this news agency to instill the sense of the greater world at play here. For all the grandiosity of his White House set, this feels like the first Sorkin series to not be trapped in tight hallways and squirreled-away rooms. The surprising reliance on static and wider-angled shots instead of that trademark walk-and-talk style also caused the mind to open up to something new.
While I wasn’t as wowed by the production of the news broadcast in the episode in the same fashion as the film Broadcast News (the gold standard here), the assembly of a show on Sports Night or even, at times, Studio 60 — the episode Allison Janney guested on where everything goes wrong on the show within the show and Timothy Busfield’s Cal eventually has to walk her through her closing monologue through an earpiece was sublime — the whole endeavor was done well enough to leave me wanting more. Good, if not great, pilots do that.
Op-Ed: I’d be remiss not to talk a bit about the motivations behind the series. One of the difficulties with Studio 60, and what ultimately sunk the show, was that Sorkin had two main axes to grind. One, he still had residual anger over the way things went down with the network over The West Wing that led to his departure from the series following its fourth season. Two, he still had sociopolitical issues to discuss and awkwardly tried to use a show about creating a sketch comedy series to do that. In the case of The Newsroom, he once again has the perfect avenue to address those two things, amongst others.
A lot is being written about Sorkin’s rose-colored view of journalism employed in the series and that he seems to be coming from wrong-headed assumptions about the profession in his approach. To a degree, I don’t disagree with this criticism. The show makes the point that Will McAvoy has spent the last few years becoming the vanilla choice for the viewing public in an effort to present unbiased news. That he needs to start taking stands to generate discourse and elevate the level of that discourse, in the ways that such metered and measured anchors like Murrow and Cronkite did in their respective times. The show makes the false assumption that journalism has become too unbiased as to matter to the common folk when quite the opposite is true. If anything, the profession seems to have become far more divided and partial and, instead, of driving the talk and debate, it is causing people to check out in disgust.
I would hope that the show finds a way to balance these two extremes, particularly in Will, so that it itself can foster discussion. Sorkin has a way of delivering specific messages, though, and once he’s settled on an issue, he’s known to drive it forward. It will be interesting to see if this is pulpit or round table for him. The fact that McAvoy has personally leaned to the right sets up some intriguing possibilities.
Speaking of the politics, many assume that very liberal Sorkin will once again use the opportunity to shine golden light on the left at the cost of conservatives. It’s an oft overlooked fact that many from both sides of the aisle were avid watchers of The West Wing. I, myself, am a fiscal and governmental conservative and a social moderate. I make the point to illustrate that while I didn’t often agree with Sorkin’s political leanings on display in that series, I still found the process on display, the ideas presented, and the passion of its characters captivating and inspiring.
Lost in the shuffle about politics and journalism over The Newsroom is the fact that Sorkin writes compelling human drama and all facets of it. Whether you agree with everything espoused or not, if you like gripping and entertaining television, that’s the promise that this series holds. That’s what keeps people coming back to his work. The discussion of loftier things is but the gravy.
