I didn’t set out to watch this show again, but I kept seeing clips of it on my FYP on my TikTok feed and when I tracked it back to the source, I found there was an entire account (@newsroom.24) that had sliced and diced pretty much the whole show into TikTok form and I followed it back to the beginning and found myself falling down the rabbit hole of this show once more.
This is a thing on TikTok— I haven’t done a deep dive on Instagram Reels to see if it shows up there and will allow for the possibility that it could just be me and what the algorithm chooses to show me- but, I keep seeing slices of movies and television shows. You see enough of them and you will get annoyed enough to track down the source material so you can just watch the damn thing for yourself in its entirety. Part of the reason I watched ‘House of the Dragon’ before I ever sat down and did ‘Game of Thrones’? It showed up on my FYP. Why did I sit down and watch ‘Hidden Figures’? It wasn’t because I had a burning interest in period pieces about math and the early history of NASA.
What I had not done, however, was track back and watch an entire show in TikTok form.
It was an interesting way to experience a show. It certainly switched me from mindless scrolling through TikTok to more intentional scrolling (I wanted to get to the next part on the list.) Would it have been more helpful if it had been organized into a playlist that I could have gone through continuously? Perhaps— but not necessarily. If the goal is to get engagement with videos on an account, forcing your viewers to go and find your account and then scroll through to find the right part where they left off probably juices your numbers more effectively than a ‘set it and forget it’ playlist. Whether a week and a half of continuous consumption on one topic will forever skew my FYP, I don’t yet know.
But as unique as the experience of watching the show was, it also reminded me that I was watching The Newsroom, and it’s probably time we talk about that.
We have to split our Sorkin experience into two categories: television and film. For the latter, he’s written screenplays for some of the best movies in the past thirty years and won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Social Network. He’s directed Molly’s Game (underrated, IMO), The Trial of the Chicago 7, and Being The Ricardos, neither of which I’ve seen yet. Film Sorkin, I would call genuinely great.
Television Sorkin I would say is closer to good but can produce moments of greatness. His pilot episodes are all bangers (as the kids would say), but your Television Sorkin experience is going to be shaped entirely by which of his shows you watch first. Television Sorkin’s writing is ice cream. Everyone loves ice cream, you can get different flavors of ice cream, but at the end of the day, it’s still ice cream.
Every writer probably does this to a certain degree— there are phrases they like, and there’s a rhythm, a pattern to their dialogue that they just can’t get away from. Sorkin is either infamous or famous for it, depending on your point of view. (Here’s not one, not two, but three compilations from YouTube showing exactly what I’m talking about.) If The Newsroom is your first experience with Television Sorkin, it probably won’t bother you. If it’s not, it might.
Sorkin’s shows tend to be aspirational at their core, which is fine sometimes but can veer into cringy preachiness. His constant references to musicals (Camelot and Man of La Mancha get brought up a lot in The Newsroom) can also be a little grating, but that’s his schtick. The show you are watching is ‘This is the way things oughta be’— whether that’s The West Wing and its alt-90s version of what a Clinton presidency could have been without the sex scandals. Or Sports Night and harnessing the incredible power of television and sports to package the moments that genuinely move people and can inspire them and change their lives.
The Newsroom is where Sorkin turns his attention to the media. The show opens with Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) at a media symposium of some kind at Northwestern. He’s the anchor that America loves because he takes care not to offend anyone. Everyone likes him. But when a young college student asks the panel ‘What makes America the greatest country in the world?’ and the moderator pushes and pushes Will for an answer and finally, he snaps and gives him one.
The moment goes viral and he ducks out of work for a couple of weeks to lay low for a while and when he comes back, he finds that he has no staff. His producer Don Keefer (Thomas Sadoski) has taken the majority of them to the 10 pm hour leaving just Maggie Jordan (Alison Pill) and Neal Sampat (Dev Patel) behind. His boss, Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston) brings in a new executive producer, Mackenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer), and a new senior producer Jim Harper (John Gallagher Jr.) to revamp Will’s program News Night and bring back actual news broadcasts that inform their viewers.
Will has a gigantic problem with this because a. he and Mackenzie used to be in a relationship and b. since they broke up he’s been kind of a giant asshole to work with and it’s while everyone’s arguing about this new arrangement (Will gives up a bunch of money on his contract to gain the ability to fire her whenever he wants) there’s a breaking news story that starts to divert their attention: an oil well in the Gulf of Mexico has exploded and it’s Deepwater Horizon.
That’s right, you, the viewer, get to relive news events you’ve already sat through and experience just how our intrepid news reporters would have covered the stories in question. If the thought of that concept just made you cringe harder than you’ve ever cringed before, don’t worry, you’re not alone: it’s the thing that I hated most about the first season. It brought us moments like this, which must make actual journalists have visceral reactions at the levels of cringe, yet weirdly you can’t help but like the scene.
In defense of this show: it does get better. When the second season is taken up with breaking down a story of a purported U.S. war crime involving sarin gas that proves to be a total fabrication, it’s a really interesting breakdown of how you would approach a story like that and how, despite every precaution, the media can still get things wrong. The Boston Marathon Bombings (because the show never completely abandons the whole time travel news concept) provide the show ample opportunity to dunk on the internet— something they mine all the way into the third and final season where Jim and his then-girlfriend break up because he’s ‘old media’ and she’s ‘new media’ and never the twain shall meet.
The show gets Occupy more or less correct, in my opinion (I’m old, crusty, and have no patience for the vast majority of what passes for leftist activism these days and was frankly dubious about it when it was going on.) It spends a whole episode— following a good half-season that seemed to show Vanilla Republican Anchor Will McAvoy slowly becoming Keith Olbermann— trying to pitch the GOP on a debate format for the 2012 primary debates that is pure fan fiction and would be laughed out of the rooms of power of any political party you can name me in this country.
As a vehicle for media criticism, it plays around with interesting ideas. I don’t think the show lands on anything profound or anything particularly new. Do I think an informed electorate was a better electorate? Sure. Do I think good journalism is some kind of sacramental act of patriotism? No. Because of all that this show wants to drag Will away from caring about ratings, that’s all a person in his position would care about. It’s what drives all the narratives on cable news. It’s why they’re complaining so bitterly about the Harris Campaign holding them at arm’s length right now because, finally a Democrat has figured it out: the media would elect Mussolini’s bones if it kept their ratings up.
The heart of any Sorkin show is the relationships between the characters and here it takes a good season or so before Sorkin finds a good groove with these characters. The arc of Jim and Maggie is particularly grating. Maggie likes Jim, but she’s with Don. To cover that fact up, she sets Jim up with her roommate/bestie Lisa, and Jim inexplicably goes along with this before everything blows up in their faces. The second season has Maggie go to Africa and experience some trauma which she reacts to by giving herself a terrible haircut. (I think the Maggie trauma storyline was…unnecessary from the point of view of the plot, though her reaction to the trauma- including the haircut makes perfect sense.) Jim goes to ride the bus with the Romney Campaign where he meets his eventual ‘New Media’ girlfriend Hallie who somehow ends up working for ACN?
Don’s arc, on the other hand, is well done. He starts as kind of a prick and a bad boyfriend to Maggie but winds up with Sloane (Olivia Munn) who is a much better match for him and he winds up as kind of a good guy by the end of this show. Sloane + Don was good writing for these characters because there’s chemistry and they’re not together just to illustrate some larger narrative point.
Will and Mackenzie are destined to be together, but Will has to take a long, tortuous road through his subconscious, sensibly seeking the help of a therapist before he realizes that he loves her and proposes. Is the long tortuous road worth it? I don’t know… they both kind of poke at each other and hold things over each other until Will figures himself out. It doesn’t grate on you— primarily because his therapist calls him out on the fact that buying an entirely fake wedding ring to hold over Mackenzie is a ludicrously insane thing to do, so Will’s got a voice of reason at least.
I will give Sorkin this: Will might be the best conservative character he’s ever written- mainly because of this moment. (I’m also willing to hear arguments in favor of Ainsley Hayes from The West Wing, mainly because of this moment.) For all that Sorkin’s thing about ‘this is the way it oughta be’ can grate, occasionally it works really well too and that’s what we see here: Will’s political affiliation is not a central aspect of who he is. He makes a mention of it so that he can be straight with his viewers, but there’s more than one aspect of who he is. It’s refreshing and I feel like between the two parties today, that kind of ‘mentioned in passing’ approach to party affiliation feels more Conservative than Liberal.
The Newsroom also talks about Don Quixote a lot, which is a strange metaphor to pop up now and again in this show. I mean, I get it: a lot of what these characters seem to be doing is tilting at windmills, but Don Quixote ends with Quixano recovering his wits and threatening to disinherit his niece if she marries a man who reads books of chivalry. So… he kind of quits? And goes back to being just a dude? (They also bring up the greater fool theory— which seems a lot more accurate for the show itself.) The metaphor works on another level as well: this is a show that’s tilting at windmills, fumbling towards greatness.
Overall: There’s a lot I dislike about this show, but the genius of Aaron Sorkin is that I’ll still sit down and watch it, despite its flaws. I don’t know how many more television shows he’s got left in him, but I do think his attitude toward work is going to start seeming very antiquated shortly. I have a problem with treating work as your identity— you can be a good reporter without seeing it as some kind of noble calling— and there are drawbacks to doing so as well. Some of the most heinous toxicity imaginable emerges from those kinds of attitudes and it would be nice to watch a Sorkin show whose characters aren’t convinced beyond reason that they’re doing The Most Important Work Ever. All that being said, this might be one of Sorkin’s most annoyingly flawed shows. But that doesn’t mean it’s not watchable. My Grade: *** out of ****