BIGGIE'S PLACE

This is a follow-up to my last post where I rewatched all 7 seasons of The West Wing, my second-favorite TV show of all-time. Because of the high I was on after diving into that show again, and because HBO Max basically demanded it via its recommendations, I figured I’d also revisit Aaron Sorkin‘s most recent TV outing, The Newsroom, which aired 3 seasons and 25 episodes starting in 2011 (I finished this rewatch in just over a week as opposed to nearly 4 months going through West Wing again). I also wanted to keep the writing tools sharp since I’ve been on a roll recently. Three posts in a month! What’s gotten into me?

When it was originally announced Sorkin would be doing a show on HBO, I nearly soiled myself. Sorkin’s writing, unburdened by network content restrictions and commercial breaks? I was all in. His unique tendency to investigate and reveal the behind-the-scenes machinations of major American industries is also a favorite subject of mine and probably a big reason I’m drawn to his work. I was most definitely excited to get an inside look at how a major cable news show operates.

I still really like the overall format of the show, which was to peer in on how this group of fictional reporters responded to and covered the major news events of the time it aired, from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to the killing of Osama bin Laden, the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Boston Marathon bombings and the shooting of Congresswoman Gabby Gifford, among other major stories. That was a clever way to bring us into this world. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Sorkin got to go back to these events with the benefit of hindsight.

There are morsels of Sorkin at his best spread throughout the show, but for the most part the good stuff is stuck in between a lot of intolerable wacky romance scenes that are clearly not his specialty (cringe, as the kids would say now). It’s not a coincidence that the 2 or 3 best episodes of the show have almost zero romantic subplot in them. Those episodes: S2E7, “Red Team III”, S3E3, “Main Justice”, and S3E4, “Contempt”, all of which I gave 9’s on IMDb. As I did on West Wing, I rated every episode of the show as I went, but there’s not a big enough sample size to do a statistical breakdown as I did for that show. I can tell you now, the final season is the best of the three. The show’s abbreviated 6-episode final season was comprised of four 8’s and two 9’s, so it did end strong. One just wishes it had been that consistent all along.

The emergence of Jeff Daniels as a top tier dramatic actor has been one of the best things in entertainment over the past 15 years. Now that I look at his credits, he’s probably a lot higher on my list of favorite actors than I previously would have thought. Will McAvoy is my favorite character on the show and he gets some really great material throughout the run. There are points where he comes across as too high and mighty, but of all the actors who get pie on their face during this series doing one annoying or absurd thing or another, he wiped his off the cleanest. He plays a sane Republican, which might seem like an oxymoron now, but there are several episodes where he defends what Republicans used to be compared to what they are now that were quite well done. It may be naive in practice, but as he makes his case, it almost gives you hope that these people exist in the real world. The Tea Party movement happened around the time this show aired, and they spend a good bit of screen time rightfully knocking some of those people down a peg. In hindsight, those Tea Party members in Congress probably set the stage for the environment that allowed Donald Trump to emerge as a serious politician.

The rest of the cast is good even if all of them except Jeff Daniels are made to look foolish at one point or another (or at many points). Emily Mortimer in particular is made to look like an absolute lunatic on many occasions for the sake of Sorkin’s attempts at romantic “comedy”. I don’t know how many scenes there are of her screaming in the newsroom about her love life in front of dozens of people (Get it? It’s even more embarrassing when everyone around you hears!), but that same number is how many there shouldn’t have been. I don’t hold this against her because I’d seen and liked her in several other projects before this. And the scenes where she actually gets to do her job (as the executive producer of the news show) are very well done. Similarly, the great Sam Waterston, playing the news director Charlie Skinner, has one psychotic outburst for every one scene of excellent drama he’s involved in. As a viewer and fan of everyone involved, this caused me a great deal of frustration.

The only other lead actor I can highlight is Olivia Munn, who played financial reporter Sloan Sabbith. I’d of course seen her before and knew she was off-the-charts beautiful, but it wasn’t until The Newsroom that I also learned she could be a great actor with the right material. This is one of the only times she hasn’t been cast just for her looks, and I wish that weren’t the case. Of the supporting or recurring roles, Jane Fonda is spectacular as the billionaire media conglomerate owner. She appears just a handful of times but they are all excellent.

The show actually turned me off from wanting to see some of these actors again, most notably Allison Pill (Maggie Jordan) and Thomas Sadoski (Don Keefer), whose characters I loathed then and loathe now. It’s not a coincidence they were the two characters most involved with the irritating workplace romance drama. Sorkin even managed to insert another angelic minority character into the show (something I referenced in my West Wing post). This time it’s Dev Patel‘s Neal Sampat, the show’s internet guru. His heart is always true, his principles are etched in gold, he’s always right, he’s just as good a hacker as he is a web manager, and he never does anything he would have to apologize for later, because that might indicate he’s a flawed human being, which you definitely do NOT want in a drama series. If these traits sound just like Dulé Hill‘s Charlie Young on West Wing, it’s because Patel is playing basically the same character with a different job.

One of Sorkin’s repeating flaws is that he loves having his characters talk about how smart they are. As a writer myself, I believe this is a subconscious thing that is very hard to avoid. Never is that more apparent than on this show where characters are constantly reminding each other to fight the good fight because of how smart and right they are, and they’re incapable of masking their disdain when they have to deal with people who aren’t on their level who dare to bring up topics that aren’t important. Never has this Sorkin trope been more obnoxious than it is on this show.

There are a few other Sorkin tropes that don’t age well here, most notably his personal hatred of internet culture and disdain for technology, which he cannot help infusing into his characters. How David Fincher wrangled in that tendency on The Social Network I’ll never know. It seems this is only a problem when Sorkin has no one to answer to creatively on a project (it also pops up on The West Wing, but to a mess lesser extent because of how new the internet was during the early 2000s). I also remember they had to change the opening title sequence from season one to season two because the first one, being an ode to all the old school news anchors who did it the right way, featured nothing but white dudes in black & white clips from half a century ago, which the real-world internet did not appreciate. That said, Thomas Newman‘s opening credits themes are both excellent.

I praised The West Wing for its idealism with regards to American politics and the people doing important government work. I cannot similarly praise The Newsroom for its over-the-top depiction of hyper-moral, noble heroes of journalism in its purest form. And this is coming from someone who loves great movies and shows about journalists. It’s one of my favorite subgenres.

I think my opinion of the show is the same now as it was when it first aired. But again, because I so love when Sorkin is great, it was worth enduring the times here that he wasn’t. I don’t know if he’ll ever create another TV show. Because of how hands-on he is and because he writes almost every episode, I can understand why that kind of stress is difficult to commit to. He set the bar absurdly high on The West Wing and hasn’t been able to replicate that since. He’s also finally tried his hand at directing films, and that’s pretty much all he’s done the past decade (Molly’s Game, The Trial of the Chicago 7, and Being the Ricardos). In 2022, he had a stroke from high blood pressure and has had to make several lifestyle changes as a result. Thankfully, it doesn’t seem to be stopping him from writing. He had been working on a remake of A Few Good Men that would be a TV movie for NBC (a strange choice, but I’d certainly watch the final result), but that isn’t officially happening yet. He’s also been linked to several potential theater projects, which would return him to his roots as a playwright. But as of October 2024, we don’t yet know what his next project will be. No matter what it is, I’m interested, with fingers crossed.

I couldn’t not include the episode 1 speech that put this show on the map: