Aaron Sorkin fails to fix the problems of The Newsroom - indeed, he makes it worse, and I greeted the final episode with a sigh of relief. Like even the worst of Studio 60 at Sunset Strip this remained watchable - Sorkin's dialogue is musical like and I always enjoy listening to tunes, even if the quality of the lyrics and books varies wildly.
A lot of better writers than me have taken umbrage at what Sorkin did, or failed to do with this season. My take: some of of this was good, even excellent; it's a well produced show, and I always enjoy Olivia Munn. But I don't think Sorkin got what his show could and should have been - or maybe he did and wanted to go in another direction.
This should have been a show about people doing good work - trying to be good journalists. We should have seen them investigate stories, come up against big and powerful opposition who put pressure on them to not tell the truth. That would have been awesome. And the times we get that - when we see our people do their jobs - this show was enjoyable.
But instead we have far, far too much time spent on ethics and the declining standards of journalism and scenes of middle aged men or their surrogates lecturing the forces of evil. That's alright I guess if you think the antagonists are evil, like the Tea Party (the targets in season 1), but here it's people who work for websites where you get extra money the more clicks the articles have, or come up with silly ideas for articles on the show websites, or who would like the audience to send in vision and story ideas.
I think Sorkin believes he's got his bases covered by having the other side present reasonable arguments, which they do, and often - but that has the effect of making the lead characters look like sel righteous idiots.
Jeff Daniels was even more insufferable this season, continually going on about how famous he was, then pulling out the abusive father at the eleventh hour to do it. I don't think we ever really saw his character do more in this series than read questions off an auto cue and act the grumpy paterfamilias and be Sorkin's surrogate. I was really hoping he'd get shanked in prison. His chemistry with Emily Mortimer remains nil. Mortimer's character is not shown doing anything hard except sigh at the actions the boys get up to and have comic OTT banter about her wedding. Olivia Munn's Sloan Sabbith gets a few heroic moments. Sam Waterston drones on and on about declining standards, then sells out a bit which was interesting and then he dies. Dev Patel goes on the run but we don't go with him and apparently he's heroic because he doesn't give up his source even though he doesn't seem to do any reporting. Alison Pill is finally giving an empowering story then is dumped into inspired Studio 60 on Sunset style rom com with John Gallagher, whose character was appalling this season - he doesn't do any reporting, is horribly self righteous to a nice girlfriend, can't even find Edward Snowden, gets back with Pill, plays guitar, then takes over the show.... Yuck. Thomas Sadoski impresses and gets to do scenes with Munn but is given the worst Sorkin surrogate story - the date rape campus one, where he scolds a rape victim (admittedly with sympathy) then robs her of a voice by saying he couldn't find her.
An amazing number of storylines were resolved with a deux ex machina - a big government leak and was conveniently solved by a suicide and then the government, a lets-pretend-to-not-go-out-to-HR rom com plot is resolved by the HR guy going "I knew all along", the evil billionaire who owns the company is dismissed by a convenient off screen sexual harassment/sexism claims. This, on an HBO drama.
They shouldn't have bothered coming back for a third season.
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