Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom Review: Another Take

rating: 4

(WARNING: Significant spoilers follow!) Aaron Sorkin€™s TV work has been a mixed endeavor. I remember watching a bit of Sports Night, though goodness knows why, since it very much was not my kind of show. I certainly remember The West Wing and recently rewatched all seven seasons. Then came Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which wasn€™t all that it should have been. Now we have The Newsroom. How does it rate? It€™s very hard to say, given that I€™ve only seen the pilot. I think overall I liked what I saw, but I wish there had been more focus, and there were some story choices that I might have done differently. Jeff Daniels is his usual excellent self, playing Will McAvoy, a TV cable news anchor (news reader, to the Brits out there), who is unfavorably, though perhaps accurately, compared with Jay Leno. He€™s clearly been a very unhappy man for a very long time, and when he€™s stuck at a journalism discussion between two talking heads who seem more interested in shouting over each other than actually dealing with any issues, he sort of loses it and tells the truth about America. About how we aren€™t the greatest, best, number one country anymore, except in areas like prison incarceration rates, belief in angels and military spending. The second part, which he later points out no one seems to remember, is a cry to arms to restore our nation to where it was and make it as good as it used to be. Shades of Network, here, really, which is no surprise, since the movie is apparently a favorite of Sorkin. McAvoy then goes onto a forced vacation and when he gets back, finds out that his boss (Sam Waterston) has hired a new executive producer for him McKenzie MacHale (Emily Mortimer), a woman with whom McAvoy, of course, has A Past. It€™s here that the story sort of ground to a halt for me. The first few minutes were really fascinating and compelling, with Sorkin doing what he does best. But then we hit the middle bit. There things got less interesting, as we saw the various news department people struggling for power, and McAvoy acting like a jerk. Things seemed, at first, to get worse when McKenzie€™s friend and coworker, Jim (John Gallagher, Jr), notices that an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico has exploded. Along with McAvoy€™s blogger, Neil (Dev Patel, of Skins and Slumdog Millionaire, now breaking into a role in something that doesn€™t start with S), he starts digging and, yeesh, we€™re suddenly informed that it€™s April 20, 2010, and the oil rig in question is that oil rig; the one owned by BP. I was very unimpressed by this. First off, this firmly puts the TV series two years into the past, and I€™m not sure how that€™s going to play out long-term. Second, guys, too close, maybe? It seemed a little tacky to me, especially because it became the focus of a pissing match between the various people in the news department. But then something interesting happened. McAvoy decided to run with the story from a primarily environmental angle, well before anyone else was. This risked painting him as a left liberal pinko (because somehow it€™s communism to care about the environment), but he goes with it. And when the news program starts, with him sitting there doing the story, that€™s when it became interesting again. That€™s when I noticed I€™d gone several minutes without taking any notes. That€™s when I got drawn into the story, and drawn into it hard, and realized that using a real-world story from two years ago was a great storytelling idea. Because I already knew the story, and knew what happened, I could ignore that part and focus on everything else. Was this a good episode? Well, I€™m giving it four stars, but that€™s on the basis of the start and the finish. The middle really did sag horribly. But if Sorkin and team can stretch what€™s good about the start and finish into a full series of episodes, we might just have something great here. I certainly look forward to seeing next week€™s episode, and at the 45 minute mark on this one, that wasn€™t something I was at all sure of.