Overrated Series: The Newsroom

 

 

The Newsroom doesn’t fit this category as easily as some of the other shows I’ve mentioned because when it was on the air, not even the most generous critic would have considered it a great show. On the contrary from the start the reviews were disappointed at best and openly hostile at worst. The series was never nominated for Best Drama by the Emmys and though it did win some awards no one ever considered them deserved. It was only on the air three seasons, the last one abbreviated, but unlike so many other shows in recent years that have truncated runs (Reservation Dogs is the most recent example) no one mourned its loss or even noticed that much. And no one would seriously consider it among the best shows HBO put out during the 2010s; if anything it’s very close to the bottom of the successful shows that debuted during the decade.

But at the time there were a lot of people who thought of it highly and still do. As of this writing it ranks 171 among imdb.com’s top rating shows of all time which is ludicrously high, above among other The Good Wife and Homeland. Leaving aside that both shows were on the air far longer and therefore had weaker seasons this is insane considering that The Newsroom not only was never as good as either of these shows in their worst seasons. It certainly wasn’t as inventive or imaginative as those series and certainly by the standards of HBO series, it ranks as the most traditional shows it’s probably ever put it out.

Perhaps part of this is something to do with the aura of Aaron Sorkin. I’ll confess that’s why I, in one of my bigger blunders as a critic, gave it above average reviews the first year was on the air. To compound the error I actually watched the second season in his original runs – while the final season of Breaking Bad was airing almost simultaneously. I watched the season finale of The Newsroom the same night Ozymandias was airing for the first time. If I’d had any credentials as a critic I would have been drummed out just for that mistake. (In fairness, I was watching the show with my mother and she didn’t watch Breaking Bad until years later. That’s also, for the record, why I missed many of the early episodes of Mad Men because I was watching Desperate Housewives with her.)

It doesn’t change the fact that I was under the spell of Aaron Sorkin and was willing to defend him to the death even when I knew better. It was clear to me by the end of the fourth episode of Season 1 that this wasn’t the Sorkin who’d written The West Wing or The Social Network or even Sports Night. I watched all three seasons of the show almost in defiance but by the time the third one was airing I had cut my losses and was watching the fourth season of Homeland first and The Newsroom was much lower on my priorities.

I suspect events of the last decade, both political and in the world of cable news, might have led to a halo effect over The Newsroom to the same extent that our current political system has led us to rediscover The West Wing. There’s a critical difference, however; The West Wing was a masterpiece partly because it took place in a fictional world with a fictional White House. Aaron Sorkin never attempted to name actual elected officials that Bartlett and his staff to deal with and he never had actually news reporters used. (When John Wells took over the show, he relaxed that standard when it came to the reporters.) Indeed The West Wing was least successful when it tries to bring in the modern world, particularly in regard to events after 9/11. By contrast Newsroom made it very clear that it took place in today’s society with all of the broadcasts that Will MacAvoy was covering and the staff at ONN were dealing with, often giving days of major media events starting with the Pilot. Sorkin has always been a lifelong Democrat but he managed to be even handed when he was writing The West Wing and most of the political films he’s done after it. By contrast there’s absolutely no subtlety or nuance during The Newsroom from the first minute to the end of it and Sorkin (who wrote every episode) doesn’t have any of the gift for banter or the delicate touch he had with everything else he’s written. It’s like during the three years he was writing the show Aaron Sorkin forgot how to write and only remembered when he wrote Steve Jobs who he was.

But that isn’t the real problem with The Newsroom, and to understand why this is by far the worst thing Sorkin has ever written for film or TV (I can’t speak for his plays) we have to go a little deeper as to what the basic problems are.

I don’t think HBO would have greenlit The Newsroom at any other time but the early 2010s. At that point, it was at the end of the first wave of great dramas that had made the vanguard of the revolution and they were struggling to come up with replacements. This led to them being more experimental with the kind of dramas they greenlit and many of them were very interesting even if they weren’t all successful. I’ve mentioned before that I was a fan of In Treatment when it debuted in 2008 and I was a bigger fan of Big Love which I thought was flawed but frequently was as great as any of the earlier shows in HBO’s big three. Boardwalk Empire’s first two seasons were absolute masterpieces and while the behind-the-scenes behavior of Michael Pitt caused it to lose what momentum it had afterwards, it remained one of the more fascinating (and historically accurate) shows of the period. I’m also a huge fan of Treme and I believe it’s reputation suffered because anything David Simon did would have looked inferior next to The Wire. However during this period, the only audience hit HBO had was True Blood and while this was going on AMC had basically stolen the thunder of being the major source of Peak TV with Mad Men and Breaking Bad and networks like Showtime and FX were regular producing the kinds of dramas and comedies that were the sole property of HBO for the first decade of the 21^st century.

I suspect that HBO sought out Aaron Sorkin sometime in 2011. After Studio 60 had ended in disaster for both Sorkin and NBC, he had written his first screenplay in over twelve years. Charlie Wilson’s War had been highly acclaimed when it debuted (I will get to it in my Sorkin movies section later) and he had followed that with The Social Network and Moneyball. Sorkin had become the first writer to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay in consecutive years since Woody Allen in 1994 and 1995 (Bullets over Broadway and Mighty Aphrodite). Seeking him out was a no-brainer for HBO.

The problem was that Sorkin was going to be an odd fit for the network famous for bringing us Deadwood and The Sopranos no matter what he wrote. All of the dramas that HBO produced to that point (and to an extent almost all that followed over the next decade) were known for their darkness of their subject matter, the relentless cynicism and the antiheroes that were at their center. In that sense Sorkin fit as well into that dynamic as David E. Kelley was at the time who in a world where network dramas were following cable, was still producing legal procedurals that were just variations on The Practice. Perhaps the network heads at HBO thought that they would be getting a show with something who had the antihero genes of Mark Zuckerberg or Billy Beane. Instead, they got a drama that, for all intents and purposes, could have just easily fit on a broadcast network – circa 1988.

I’m not saying that The Newsroom doesn’t have an air of cynicism about it, but from the moment we meet Will MacAvoy and he delivers a monologue about how America isn’t the greatest country in the world – and then follows it up with a model of how good it could be again – we know that we’re not going to the next Tony Soprano or even Bill Hendrickson. Wiil is essentially the kind of prototype that’s almost fundamentally that of a Sorkin character; a man who has gotten jaded with his job and his success and rediscovered his love of it. In fact this is basically the exact model we get for Peter Krause’s character in Sports Night in the Pilot – a husband who is finalizing his divorce, is worried about his son, and has become jaded with the world of sports coverage. The difference is, among other things, Sports Night was a comedy more than anything else and it never took itself or its idealism that seriously. Even if it did almost all of the other characters are always grounded in reality, waiting to puncture that balloon.

 The Newsroom by contrast exists where everybody in the show exists in the world of this kind of idealism when it comes to their profession and while you can believe that could exist when you covering sports, it would have harder to do so in the world of cable news even had the show debuted on network television five years earlier. There’s a relentless optimism that dogs the show no matter how horrible things are going either for them or the network that would be tonally off-putting on any network in 2012, and certainly on a show whose first season aired after True Blood.

I realize coming from the man who has frequently complained about even the best prestige shows being too bleak this may seem hypocritical and I like idealism in my characters. But there’s idealism and tempered idealism and we almost never see the latter throughout the first season and much of the next two. And honestly idealism in comedies is nice; idealism about broadcast journalism, particularly in regard to cable news, well, these characters live in a world more fantastic then Westeros if they truly think that’s how the world works.

Those of you who think The West Wing is just a machine for Sorkin’s liberal propaganda would have a much better argument for The Newsroom. I don’t know when the phrase ‘reality has a liberal bias’s was coined but it’s clear that Sorkin is using it as a mission statement for every episode of the show. And he is not subtle about it at all. It’s clear Sorkin believes in educating the viewer as much as he does with all of his films and TV but he clearly forgot the core principle: don’t make it seem like you’re lecturing them. The contrast between this and The West Wing is impossible not to make. Whenever Bartlet talk to his staff or Josh told Donna about political history, it was done with self-awareness and kindness to it that never made it sound unpleasant. There’s also the fact that the staff would also groan and mock everything they were hearing, which meant they didn’t take it seriously.

But Sorkin apparently decided the fact that he was writing with a news anchor as his lead gave him permission to essentially fulfill his fantasy of putting words in people’s mouths during news events. And therefore every time Will delivers one of his broadcast, he sounds very much like a pontificating asshole. In this sense there’s no real difference between him and the Tucker Carlsons or Rachel Maddow’s of the world but I’m relatively sure their off-camera persona isn’t exactly like their on-cameras ones when it comes to talking to everyone else. I never got that sense with Will, who always talks as if he’s the smartest person in the room and never misses a chance to put someone down, even if he’s wrong.

It’s as if every major flaw in Sorkin’s writing is on display in The Newsroom. The biggest one is his problem is his sudden inability to write strong female characters. CJ Cregg is one of Sorkin’s greatest creations as is Donna Moss and so many of the minor female characters in their orbit. And what makes them all brilliant is that they are smart, independent and fully capable. Their interested in being professional first and romantic second. We also saw version of this play out superbly on Sports Night with Dana Whitaker and Natalie who were more than the sum of their love interests.

But perhaps having writing two films where there were no major female leads caused Sorkin to forget how to write independent women. (He recovered from that with Steve Jobs and  by the time of Molly’s Game, he was back in form.) Here he has three of the most brilliant actresses at his disposal: Emily Mortimer, Olivia Munn and Alison Pill. All of them are skilled at both comedy and drama, as I saw before in films and TV shows. And under Sorkin’s tutelage, they are completely useless.

Mackenzie McHale (and why did Sorkin think this was clever?) was involved with Will until she cheated on him and has now returned as his producer. Mac never gets played as anything outside of Will’s shadow in the first season, is frequently stumbling over elemental things and is so mad at herself that another writer might consider her slut-shaming herself. Sloane (Munn) is a brilliant economist who took a job that paid less to work at a media network; we rarely see her intelligence and far too frequently see her used as a buffoon. (Munn later complained that she was used for sexual purposes more than she had been told.) And poor Alison Pill. She was so good in the underrated The Book of Daniel and she was incredible in Milk. She’d done exceptional work in the second season of In Treatment and The Pillars of the Earth and in Snowpiercer she played  the kind of kindergarten teacher we all think we should get.

And Maggie Jordan may absolutely be the worst character Sorkin ever created. She seems to only exist to be the center of a love triangle between Don Keefer and Jim Harper from the start of Season 1 and she spends the entire series denying it. She may be a competent professional and we do see signs of it, but every episode she’s doing everything she can to deny her attraction to Jim and loyalty to Don. She spends the entire series in denial of her feelings, Sorkin basically creates the crisis of Season 2 entirely based on the fallout of everything going wrong with their major encounter at the end of Season 1. Maggie Jordan might as well be called either ‘plot device’ or ‘romantic obstacle’ for all the originality she gets to display in two seasons.

All of which, of course, reminds us how absolutely horrendous Sorkin is when it comes to romance. While he never got to make it pay off in Sports Night he never handled it very well for any of his characters at the Bartlet White House during the four seasons he was the showrunner. (The Donna-Josh romance only played out after he left the series in 2003.) That was fine; it wasn’t what The West Wing was about and it certainly wasn’t what we watched the show for in the first place.

But on The Newsroom Sorkin’s usual deftness is replaced with romantic machinations that would be heavy-handed in a 1980s rom-com. Every time he tries to refer to the Will-Mac relationship in any form, it’s delivered with subtlety of the brick going through a plate-glass window. We don’t believe a moment of Don and Maggie’s romance when it’s happening or when it’s not working; we don’t believe Jim could be attracted to Maggie; we don’t believe that Don is attracted to Sloan. And for a man who has characters who can articulate anything under the sun, the fact that not one of them can talk about their feelings to anybody on the show really makes you question why Sorkin put it there in the first place.

 He was capable of doing it with Sports Night: he made the dance between Sabrina Lloyd and Joshua Malina wonderful; the ups and downs of their relationship adorable and their breakup heartbreaking when it happened in Season 2. Here he’s in a virtual identical setting with so many similar characters in the same positions and it’s as if he’s suffering from a serious head injury as if he’s forgotten his past work.

But that’s to be expected in a series where everybody speaks as if they are delivering portentous news as if they’re on camera themselves. It’s not enough that Sorkin is telling us what’s happened on camera; he has to have everybody in the room explain it to the viewer as if they’re uninformed. This is a series where I genuinely feel Sorkin is writing leftist fanfiction; everyone talks as if they’re Michael Moore talking to the audience and not people who are actually educated on the subject.

And this is by far the most clear with the character who is the engine for this Charlie Skinner. I love Sam Waterston; I really do but this is the most unrealistic character he’s ever played. He doesn’t sound for a moment like a man whose been covering the news for forty years; he sounds like as if he is the character he plays in Grace & Frankie. Only the secret he’s been hiding for forty years is that he’s actually a Weatherman and his cover has been for forty years to play a member of the Georgetown Elite. That so many scenes involve him clashing with Leona Lansing, played by Jane Fonda, makes me wonder if at one point the two of them decided: “Next time let’s do something less serious and Sam asked for Martin Sheen’s number from Sorkin.

Because every filters from Charlie who makes the decision that he’s going to use his cable news network to do something brilliant and that’s deliver news. He sets up Will and Mac to work together, the two of them start moving away from human interest stories and punditry towards the kind of journalism that honestly has never existed at any time in our history but that Sorkin clearly believes should. He is smart enough to cover his bias by pointing out that Will is a registered Republican, which is clearly a plot device on Sorkin’s part to make it clear how far he thinks Republicans have strayed from the path. Cue lines such as this: “I’m a registered Republican. I just sound liberal because I believe hurricanes are caused by high barometric pressure and not by gay marriage.” That’s actually one of the better lines a character delivers in the show, so that alone tells you how little Sorkin cares for nuance.

And make no mistake: The Newsroom is an indictment of everything the Republican Party stands for. In the third episode Will points out the rise of the Tea Party for the sole purpose of the show to study it and realize that the GOP controlled by the Kock brothers. There are stories about Citizens United, delivered as if we were being lectured to by Jon Stewart but with no jokes,  gets to lecture an African-American gay man represented Rick Santorum until he falls apart on camera and ends the final season with a story where he gets to call the Tea Party ‘the American Taliban’ on live TV. I honestly wonder if the people who love this show so much are some of the progressive writers I’ve met on line and are doing a different kind of review-bombing: this is the kind of doom-porn they’d actually watch.

To be fair to the show (and I’m really contorting myself to do so) Sorkin seems to have realized he’s overreached after the first season and spends the next two dealing with more serialized stories that deal with the problems of the news industry. But he never forgets that the Republicans are the enemy, as in an episode where Will talks after laughter at a Republican primary debate where the audience cheers the Iraq War and Will tells that he hopes ‘the audience is in Hell.” That’s there’s almost coverage of Obama during this period or anything involving the Democrats problems during the three years the show covers is no doubt intentional: as far as Sorkin’s concerned this is what fair and balanced should be.

That’s bad enough but what’s worse is that The Newsroom takes place in this mythical theoretical world where so many leftists seem to live. Every decision that is made by Will and the team takes place in a purely moral world where such constructs as politics and economics are irrelevant to doing the right thing.

And the worst part is, it shouldn’t be. In the third episode Leona and Charlie have a long conversation about how what Will is doing is dangerous not because of any political construct but because it will hurt the company’s bottom line. Charlie regroups and tries to talk to her. Leona stops him. “Your entire network makes up less than five percent of my business’s revenue. So stop pretending this is a meeting between equals!”

This is as close to Sorkin admit the reality of the bottom line in regards to how news business works in Season 1, and almost the entire series. And the thing is Sorkin’s other work this is the kind of thing that is his sweet spot. Jed Bartlet was a Nobel Prize winning economist before he ran for public office; before Sports Night ended the major storyline was about whether the title show would be canceled for financial reasons as part of a corporate takeover and economics were as much a character in Moneyball as Brad Pitt. But in the world of The Newsroom, it’s not even a factor for the head of the news division to consider in regards to reporting. His job – everybody at the show, actually – is based on the ratings that Will gets in his time slot. The moment Will starts to telling actual news rather than the fluff that made up cable news, the show gets mentioned by journalism for ethics but the ratings start to drop.

Yet somehow The Newsroom is the only television show in the history of TV where the actual viewership is irrelevant to the content. Late in the first season the network lowers itself to broadcasting the kind of tabloid stories like Casey Anthony and Anthony Weiner’s downfall (the season takes place in 2011) and everyone at the network moans about having to lower themselves to this standard. Of course the ratings to go up but what does that matter if the public isn’t being informed? The only reason they’re doing this, I should add, is so that they can get a Republican primary debate. Not the average debate, of course, but one where candidates would have to actual be challenged on their answers rather than let their streams of BS go unchallenged. (Again Republicans must be held to the standard that Democrats are not.) Of course when a rehearsal of this is played out to members of the GOP, they immediately reject the idea. But everyone’s secretly fine with that because now they get back to doing ‘real journalism’. All of this, I should add, fits the model of what many would consider a leftist news network to be.

All of this to be clear is pure fantasy, not the least of which is the fact that Will and everyone who works for him genuinely believe that they are making a difference in the world. Most of his staff is made up of very young people, and I can’t help but draw parallels to so many of the Gen Z people we see today (some of whom write for this column) who genuinely believe that nothing matters but whether their version of events gets told. ‘Bubbles’ was not part of the vernacular in 2012 the way it is today but in a sense everybody on the show lives in one where they are sure in the righteousness of what they do and do not have to worry about reality. There’s no evidence that any of this makes a difference to the outside world, and the ratings always range close to third or fourth throughout the show’s run. But this is fitting with the leftist instincts of Sorkin as well: that it doesn’t matter how many people see or listen to what you’re doing as long as you are convinced of your own righteousness. All that matters is they’re doing something that they believe is for the greater good. Whether it actually is for the greater good doesn’t matter because they never leave their bubble.

The Newsroom’s final episode ends with nothing fundamentally different from the pilot. Yes Charlie Skinner is dead, the network is under a completely different ownership and the battles that they will have to wage will supposedly be harder from this point on. (The show aired its final episode in 2014, which is a relief in a sense: trying to tell this story in the era of Trump would have been a delusion Sorkin could not have maintained.) But nothing’s different from the pilot. Indeed, the show flashes back to the first episode where Charlie is giving Will the message before everything supposedly changed. The network’s going to keep the same standard of journalism its been doing for the last three years and that’s all that matters to Sorkin. That they haven’t made a real impact on society doesn’t matter, all that matters is that they keep up their quixotic quest.

The Newsroom no doubt made the right kind of people very happy – leftists, journalists and the kind of Sorkin fans who truly believe Studio 60 was a masterpiece. (As someone who watched every episode, they clearly haven’t seen it.) For anyone else, particularly a lover of Peak TV and everything it can be, it demonstrates the worst aspects of all things that television could represent. HBO has never tried a drama like this since and while I really don’t like a lot of their darker shows (my readers know what I think of Game of Thrones and Euphoria ) The Newsroom is a prime example of why Sorkin’s brand of idealistic television doesn’t fit in on cable. David E. Kelley has learned to adapt he’s now capable of literary adaptations of every variety. But Sorkin hasn’t tried to come back to TV since and, at the very least, I hope he brings his brand of television to broadcast if he does. There is a place for the kind of idealism he writes about in The West Wing but it only works when Bartlet’s your President and not Obama.