The Sorkinese Newsroom: the good, the bad and the shippy
So I’m just going to throw this out on the stoop, see if the cat licks it up: anyone been watching Aaron Sorkin/HBO’s The Newsroom?
When I first heard that Sorkin was tackling broadcast news, I was thrilled (‘what if it’s like The West Wing!?’) and terrified (‘what if it’s like Studio 60?!’). At the end of the first season, I think the outcome takes a little from both.
There’s a lot that irritates me about The Newsroom, and that’s disappointing because I had such high hopes. But despite my issues with the show, I’m still kinda hooked. So this is my attempt to clarify what I liked, what I didn’t and why, and as always to see if anyone feels like chatting about it! (I’ll warn you... this gets long.)
OK. Here’s something you should know about me: I love journalists. I love their tenacity, their dry wit and their ink-black humour. I love that they’ll show a bolshy face to the world - and mean it - but they’ll still lose it when no one’s looking, after they’ve covered a disaster or sat through a horrible court case. I love their capacity to be simultaneously intensely cynical and deeply idealistic. And I believe a press corps in full flight, working together and going after someone who really deserves to be gone after, is a sight to see. It makes my heart sing. Yes, absolutely, some journalists are arseholes, but I know quite a few of ‘em and I’d argue most are not.
So because it’s Sorkin (and I love The West Wing with the fire of a thousand suns) and because it’s theoretically about journalists being awesome, I really wanted to love The Newsroom.
But, in the spirit of a newsroom, I’m going to start with the bad news. If it bleeds it leads, people.
My Sorkin conundrum
I have defended Aaron Sorkin to many people, god knows I have. And for good reason, too. A lot of his work is genius.
But if I take off my Sorkin fangirl goggles I also can’t deny that yes, his shows tend to centre around Great (White) Men Who Spout Wisdom. And yes, as a non-American, there are times when the jingoism can be a little hard to stomach. And yes, as much as I love Donna, CJ and Mrs B, I’m not sure Sorkin can write a female character who is not at least a bit of a nutjob. A nutjob, no less, who is not infrequently going to get patronised by The Great Man, other male characters or indeed Sorkin himself. (And look, that’s even though, as a bit of a nutjob myself, I am more disposed to forgive him for the nutjob thing than others are.)
And yes, all those traits are certainly in evidence here.
Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), the reawakened, re-engaged former prosecutor and News Night anchor, is definitely The Newsroom’s Great Man. But it seems Sorkin has tried to undercut that stereotype by introducing two other elements: First, Will shares his Spouting Wisdom function with a woman (Mackenzie. More on her later...), as well as with his boss, Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston being truly awesome as a fabulous, alcoholic, old-school hack who somehow ended up in management, but who longs for the fabled days of real news and real journalism and then realises that he actually has the power to make it happen. I love him. He feels absolutely believable in this world). Don Quixote is an oft-referenced motif in The Newsroom, but it’s never entirely clear (at least to me) who in this little triumvirate is Quixote, who is Sancho, and who is the ass.
Secondly, Will is a total basketcase about having been cheated on three years earlier (by... guess who?). Now I’m not attacking someone’s right to get over being cheated on in their own good time, but the way the story plays out here weakens Will in such a way that it makes him seem more pathetic than sympathetic. I want to shake him and yell, “for god’s sake man! I know it hurts but you need to snap out of it!! Live your life!!”. Also, my feeling is that newsmen of his generation would deal with such an emotional crisis with a whole lot less therapy and a whole lot more alcoholism. I’m not saying that’s the healthier choice, of course, just that therapy feels like a strange choice for journo of Will’s ilk. But whatever. His sessions are a useful exposition device for Sorkin, so... *eyeroll*.
All of that said, though, Will is a newsman and is a character who belongs in his newsroom. He’s a decent representation of an anchor too. He’s believable. Which is more than I can say for some of the other characters in this newsroom... but back to my Sorkinian issues...
Jingoism? Look... yes. But even if you’re hypersensitive to the nationalism thing, it’s not that bad here and I also felt a need to get off my own high horse. This is, after all, an American show, made by Americans, primarily for their American audience, about the state of American democracy and newsmedia... they’re kinda allowed. The rest of us knew what we were signing up for. What jingoism there is, though, doesn’t usually come from Will. At least, not as straightforwardly as that. In a ripper of a series-opening scene, Will comes out swinging against the assertion that America is the only great and free country in the known universe. I won’t lie. I liked that scene. And in articulating what he thinks went wrong for a great and proud democracy, Will/Sorkin also lays out a path back to the light/top of the heap, which is effectively the heart of both these shows - The Newsroom, and the fictional News Night. It’s beautifully done, it’s vintage Sorkin, and it’s a cracker start. I lapped it up.
The first episode’s other flag-waving moment comes from the aforementioned and appallingly-named MacKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer). She’s been brought in as the new EP (executive producer) of Will’s show after his old EP, Don, goes to work on the new 10pm show and takes the staff with him, essentially because Will’s a prick and he can. Ouch. MacKenzie and her senior producer/protege Jim Harper (more on him later) are just back from more than a year reporting in Afghanistan and Pakistan and have been hired by Charlie Skinner without Will’s knowledge, which is controversial because, just in case you couldn’t see it coming, Mac is Will’s ex-girlfriend.
Will is furious. Mac gives an impassioned speech to try to convince him that they can work together in spite of their history, and they can do a real news program, to “speak truth to stupid”. This includes her pronouncement that she’d rather do a great show for a hundred people than a bad show for a million (if that’s true, commercial news is probably not your natural home, Mac. Maybe try PBS. But I digress...).
I was sold on her Very Important Speech and idealistic attitude in spite of myself, though, not least because her patriotism is tied up in her journalistic passion for giving people the news they need, not the crap they’ll click on. And god help me, I love her for believing that if you broadcast it, the audience will come. There’s all evidence to the contrary, sadly, but in a newscape that includes such luminaries as FoxNews... man, I wish someone would try. Or try harder, anyway. Mac’s got a great line about why she doesn’t want to do the same old crap about new iPhones and Casey Anthony and Anthony Weiner: because she doesn’t believe that the American people are “preternaturally stupid.” And I love her for that, because they’re not, just like no other country’s population is wholesale stupid. But increasingly, the way serious things are covered is. And that is not only the fault of journalists.
Certainly the trend towards dumber and dumber news isn’t just an American problem, it’s a global phenomenon that’s more pronounced in the States because, for one thing, they got 24-hour cable news first. Give it time and an uninterrupted trajectory and the rest of the world’s English-language broadcast media will be there too. It’s already on its way. Non-English-language media may be the same, I don’t know. And it’s because the partisan and the ridiculous get the ratings and the web clicks. You headline a story ‘Shark attack victim caught in kinky sex romp: video’ and it’ll top your most-viewed stories. Journalism costs money and most media organisations are businesses that need to make money, and advertisers follow the ratings. It’s a vicious cycle and it’s not all the fault of the media, is my point.
So, you know what, I have all the time in the world for Mac making the case in defence of real news and smart audiences. I just wish she were right.
The crackpots and these women - oh no, wait. The crackpots ARE these women
Sadly, my love affair with Mac is over pretty quickly. Like, from the second episode, quickly. And that brings me to Sorkin and his crackpot women. Ironically, while I love Big Block of Cheese Day, I think one of my most shuddery, patronising Sorkin moments was the end of the Season 1 West Wing episode called ‘The Crackpots and These Women’ (The title alone shits me. Add to that the atmosphere of ‘Oh look at these women who are really good at their job. How about that! Let us look paternalistically at them and smile indulgently at their foibles over scotch’ and....ugh. But maybe that’s just me...).
MacKenzie McHale, I’m sorry, is a crackpot. The woman certainly doesn’t have the temperament to be a war correspondent and there’s precious little evidence that she could possibly be ‘the best EP’ in this fictional business. If she’s truly the best (and just back from a warzone - huge journo cred there), why is it that the only person willing to hire her is the drunk cable news exec? There are moments, sadly only really in that first episode, when she’s great. Those taper off pretty quickly as the season progresses. She’s too frazzled, too prone to losing it, and there’s a whiny, whinging, wheedling sensibility about her that truly offends my sensibilities.
Sorkin has his characters spend a lot of time telling us how good Mac is at her job, but the evidence we are shown constantly undermines that. There are silly, little things like her being incapable of sending an email and knocking over her whiteboard. And one scene that’s quite sinister, really, that shows how she counts on her fingers. She’s publicly humiliated for it, too, when Will calls her out in front of the whole newsroom. But what really stuck the final nail in her coffin for me? She let her anchor, stoned to high heaven, go on the air to tell America that Bin Laden had been killed. But that’s ok, because he really, really wanted to report that news, and we’re told later that Will knocked it out of the park... whoopee for Will. Fictional or not, no EP in history would ever have allowed that to happen. If they had, they’d have been following that anchor out the door.
The telling-me-not-showing-me-that-she’s-capable deal continues with our second female character, Maggie Jordan, the intern who was promoted to be Will’s assistant because... he thought she was already his assistant. And who Mac promotes to AP (assistant producer) because she loyally did not go with the rest of the staff and Don the departing EP (who is, incidentally, Maggie’s boyfriend)... OK, but Mac LITERALLY just met this girl. She doesn’t even know if she can spell or use a telephone, let alone ask a question or write a script.
Anyway. Maggie? Also nutty. Again, there are the casual suggestions that she can’t quite cut it (she gets up on her high horse about how she’s perfectly capable thankyou very much and then loses them the crucial interview by being unprofessional, she doesn’t know how to put people on hold, she mixes up Georgia the country and Georgia the state).
But all those things pale in comparison to her astonishing lack of awareness about herself, and her own feelings toward Don (the boyfriend) and Jim (Mac’s producer, who’s clearly supposed to be Maggie’s OTP partner), and about their feelings toward her. She also has an almost pathological ability to be a doormat. This is a character, we discover, who once hid under the bed while the guy she was dating ‘got back together’ with his former girlfriend. As she herself points out, she was literally cheated on. Heads up, Aaron... that joke’s not so much funny as horrifying.
Her capacity to sabotage her own happiness knows no bounds, particularly in her pushing Jim to date Lisa, her flatmate and best friend. At first, I thought maybe she’d just inherited Donna’s talent for misdirection, but it’s much more sinister than that. Donna had good reason for misdirecting and not pursuing Josh until the very end, not least the boss/employee thing, but also because she had no evidence for almost as long as the show ran that Josh was actually consciously and seriously interested in her and therefore a chance worth taking (I mean, we knew that he was, but.... y’know what, THAT is another conversation entirely.) Maggie does not have that excuse. She can patently see Jim’s in love with her (or else the actress didn’t get the ‘she’s clueless’ memo and is telegraphing all the wrong emotions as a result.) And given that she and Don break up constantly, and she’s clearly self-aware enough to have admitted to her Lisa (yes, who later dates Jim) that she likes Jim, it makes precisely NO sense that she and Don stay together. None. And that’s without Don and his seeing other people when ‘they were on a break’ thing. It’s bewildering. This character’s motivations make no sense.
There were only really two times when I started to warm to Maggie before the thaw was abruptly thwarted: firstly when she was having her panic attack, and then, in the final episode when she tells Lisa the truth, then screams her feelings to a bus full of women (and Jim, as it happens) on a Sex and The City tour (I know. I don’t know either. I can only explain this scene by assuming it’s because Kristin Davis was dating Aaron Sorkin until, like a couple of days ago. Because otherwise, wtf?). In both those moments, Maggie felt real. She was actually having a real, honest reaction to something. And that moment when it looked like air might actually get cleared between her and Jim? That we might actually get a genuine interaction with Jim from her? Agh!!! Shipper wonderfulness!!! But then.... no. She (or rather Sorkin) sabotages it, again, and she chooses to move in with Don (who had been a booty-calling bastard not five minutes before, with whom she is clearly not in love, and who is clearly not in love with her either) instead of actually following through with Jim. She has no backbone. If she had more to lose by gambling on Jim, I’d get it. But she has nothing to lose. She knows how he feels about her, she’s already lost Lisa, the best friend/flatmate who is dating Jim (and if she hasn’t lost Lisa, then I hate Lisa too, because she shouldn’t be staying friends with someone who seems so determined to sabotage not only her own relationships but Lisa’s as well) and her relationship with Don sucks like a turbo-charged vacuum cleaner. She literally has nothing to lose by choosing Jim. And yet she doesn’t.
Honestly? I think I hate this character. And it’s frustrating, because I really want to be on board the Jim/Maggie ship. Sorkin apparently really wants me to earn it, though, given the obstacles he throws at me to prevent me from signing up. Maggie’s character flaws are just the start. For example, this: in Maggie, we have a girl in a dysfunctional relationship with a guy at her work, who is actually in love with another guy at her work, and that same guy is totally pining after her... Sound familiar?
It should. Because Maggie is a dodgy Pam (/Dawn) from The Office, basically. She’s a far less sympathetic Pam, with less gumption and inexplicably more promising career prospects.
...and it’s funny, that. Because who is Maggie’s shipper interest? Well, as I mentioned, it’s Jim! Whose surname, as I said, is Halpert. Oh wait, no, I’m sorry - Harper. Jim Harper is his name. Harper. See? It’s different.
What’s in a name? Quite a bit when the names are this dumb...
It may be nitpicky, but some of these names are just stupid. ‘Jim Harper/Halpert’ is careless. The improbably alliterative ‘MacKenzie McHale’ is downright ridiculous. Quite apart from everything else, Emily Mortimer’s English accent is ‘explained’ by Mac being the New York-born daughter of Margaret Thatcher’s ambassador to the UN. Now I’m sure there are many people who have called their daughter ‘MacKenzie’, but I’m reasonably confident there is no way in hell an ambassador favoured by the arch-conservative Thatcher would be one of them.
Oh, and then there’s ‘Sloan Sabbith’, the sexy economics and finance reporter played brilliantly by Olivia Munn. Did Sorkin feel the need to saddle her with that name to make up for the pretty and the smarts? We’ll never know. What we do know is that Sloan is also... DING DING DING!! You guessed it! Nutty! She lacks emotional intelligence (although she’s got the other kind in spades) and is massively insecure about her body despite the fact that she is quite clearly smokin’. I don’t know why Sorkin decided to inflict body issues on poor old PhD-holding, fluent-Japanese-speaking, dryly funny and beautiful Sloan, but I gotta be honest, it shits me. Can one of these women not be this degree of insecure? Just one? It’s like we’re on some kind of scale where ‘confident’ and ‘likeable’ are mutually exclusive: the more insecure a woman is, the more sympathetic we’re supposed to find her character. The more confident, the more bitchy. Is this really necessary? Sloan’s self-acknowledged lack of emotional intelligence is actually really interesting. I have no problem with that. Does she have to have something as cliched as body issues as well? I am taking particular exception to this because I actually really, really like Sloan. She’s my favourite female character by a country mile and possibly my favourite character overall. She’s interesting, and she has some journalistically interesting storylines. She, too, cops the patronising writerly gaze, but Sloan (largely thanks to the sensational Olivia Munn, I think) manages to shrug it off better than the others do.
Shipper index rating: yeeeah? Sort of?
There’s obviously the Will/Mac thing, but meh. So. Returning to Jim. Because despite my issues with his name and the other half of his ship, I actually really like the character of Jim. … OK, there is a very small chance that I might be developing a bit of a crush on Jim. … Oh fine. FINE. I have a crush on Jim, alright? Are you happy?
(And there, Clintasha-people-who’ve-made-it-this-far ((congratulations, by the way, that’s a slog)) is the other end of my ‘Boys I Find Spunky’ spectrum. Because let’s be honest, he is at the opposite end of the spectrum to Renner. My fangirl love is a broad church, what can I say?)
Now Jim, incidentally, is a believable journo (as is Maggie’s boyfriend, the dastardly Don, actually. He is a very believeable EP and the show’s embodiment of The Dark Side of populist broadcast news. He’s a pretty good character, actually, but I don’t love him, so, meh. Moving on...). I’m fine with Jim’s big scoop on Deepwater Horizon being a total fluke because it’s acknowledged as such and because flukes do happen. He’s also got the right temperament, he’s smart and he’s a sweetheart. This does things to me.
As I’ve said, Show clearly wants me to ship Jim/Maggie, and I don’t like Maggie. But I’ll ship Jim/WhoeverJimWants no problem. And he wants Maggie, so. But now that she’s shacked up with Don, and he let himself almost get bullied into getting back together with Lisa... I don’t know. He doesn’t love Lisa, I don’t want him to stay with her (for both their sakes). But I don’t know if I reeeeeeally want him with Maggie either. But hey, there’s certainly shippage potential here, which is not going to be easy or pain-free. And you only gotta look at my ships to know that’s how I like ‘em. So, I would say at this point I have one foot on the deck, one foot on the wharf. My commitment is exactly as tenuous as that sounds. It’s actually a completely new shipper experience for me: liking one half of the ship, but not the other. I am academically, fangirlistically curious to see how that goes...you know, for science.
But here’s the real ILoveJim kicker: Jim is played by John Gallagher Jr... who was also Tyler!! That’s right West-Wingers, the love-lorn, politically-engaged teen volunteer Democrat who finally got Josh, Donna and Toby to the (wrong) train and neglected to tell Josh and Toby about the changing timezones in ‘20 Hours in America’ grew up to become a war correspondent and TV news producer!!!! I cannot tell you how much I love this casting for ridiculous fangirl reasons.
Oh - and I’d be remiss in my shipper duties if I didn’t point out that the Lisa/Jim/Maggie/Don love-square got expanded to a pentagon, out of absolutely nowhere, in the last episode. It appears that lovely Sloan wants.... Don. This completely blindsided me. It feels completely manufactured, like they realised they couldn’t wring any more out of Jim/Maggie and they needed to think of something else to keep people interested. But I don’t see in Don what Sorkin apparently would have us believe that Sloan sees in Don. So I don’t get it. God only knows where that will go...
The journo bits
I expected to hate the decision to set the show in the recent past, but I actually think it works quite well. It’s easy to see how the benefit of an omnipotent narrator can fundamentally change the way news is done, and I understand why there’s been so much criticism of this choice, particularly by American journalists who feel like he’s taking a shot at them from his privileged position of hindsight, but whatever. It works for me.
The depiction of what it’s like to be in a newsroom when news is breaking is pretty accurate - it does a good job of capturing the craziness, the excitement and the generally awesome adrenalin rush. The teamwork and tremendous sense of satisfaction when things go well, the shame and devastation when they don’t are also, I think, well realised. And most importantly, you get a sense of the relentlessness, of the turning around the next day to start from scratch and do it all again.
So, Ridiculous... why did you keep watching if so many things annoyed you this much?
Because despite the annoyances, I did find it quite compelling. Strangely so... I think I just wanted to see whether characters like Mac and Maggie would improve. And I was interested to see which stories they’d choose to feature, and how the team/Sorkin would write those.
Despite my nitpicks, I also want to give The Newsroom time to find its feet, and I’m not sure 10 episodes are enough. It’s got good bones, its pedigree is good, its cast isn’t bad either, and I love what it’s saying about what journalism can be (even if I have my pragmatic doubts). Slumdog Millionaire’s Dev Patel as the blogger-wannabe-reporter is also a character with whom so much more could be done - his promising arc was ultimately unfulfilling in the first season and I hope that changes second time around.
And of course the Jim shippiness, which I wanted to take for a test drive to see how it handled... I will lose patience and interest if it carries on in the same way for too much longer though.
So if anyone else is watching The Newsroom (and has made it this far down, in which case, I salute you :/) I’d be really interested to know what you think about it. Otherwise I’ll just play happily in my own little corner over here...
Finally, a round of West Wing Motif Bingo! (Or, Some Of The Things Aaron Sorkin Liked So Much In The West Wing He Decided to Repeat Them Here)
* The opening titles montage is exactly the same format, although the music is nowhere near as good. In fact, I really hate the title music.
* Will (a la Bartlett) doesn’t know anyone’s names. His learning everyone’s names symbolises his getting on board the team effort
* Will-and-Charlie walk-and-talk West-Wing-homage in Episode 1! Woo!
* Plaster falls from the ceiling and narrowly misses Will (aka Josh)
* And finally, one for the Josh and Donna shippers: “gather ye rosebuds” makes a prominent reappearance. Originally quoted to Josh by Donna (who was misdirecting like a champion at the time), here it’s quoted by Mac, awkwardly and at length, in an attempt to encourage Jim to go after Maggie. … I can tell you this right now, though - if Sorkin expects me to hang around for seven years of this before Jim gets his girl, he’s got another thing coming...
When I first heard that Sorkin was tackling broadcast news, I was thrilled (‘what if it’s like The West Wing!?’) and terrified (‘what if it’s like Studio 60?!’). At the end of the first season, I think the outcome takes a little from both.
There’s a lot that irritates me about The Newsroom, and that’s disappointing because I had such high hopes. But despite my issues with the show, I’m still kinda hooked. So this is my attempt to clarify what I liked, what I didn’t and why, and as always to see if anyone feels like chatting about it! (I’ll warn you... this gets long.)
OK. Here’s something you should know about me: I love journalists. I love their tenacity, their dry wit and their ink-black humour. I love that they’ll show a bolshy face to the world - and mean it - but they’ll still lose it when no one’s looking, after they’ve covered a disaster or sat through a horrible court case. I love their capacity to be simultaneously intensely cynical and deeply idealistic. And I believe a press corps in full flight, working together and going after someone who really deserves to be gone after, is a sight to see. It makes my heart sing. Yes, absolutely, some journalists are arseholes, but I know quite a few of ‘em and I’d argue most are not.
So because it’s Sorkin (and I love The West Wing with the fire of a thousand suns) and because it’s theoretically about journalists being awesome, I really wanted to love The Newsroom.
But, in the spirit of a newsroom, I’m going to start with the bad news. If it bleeds it leads, people.
My Sorkin conundrum
I have defended Aaron Sorkin to many people, god knows I have. And for good reason, too. A lot of his work is genius.
But if I take off my Sorkin fangirl goggles I also can’t deny that yes, his shows tend to centre around Great (White) Men Who Spout Wisdom. And yes, as a non-American, there are times when the jingoism can be a little hard to stomach. And yes, as much as I love Donna, CJ and Mrs B, I’m not sure Sorkin can write a female character who is not at least a bit of a nutjob. A nutjob, no less, who is not infrequently going to get patronised by The Great Man, other male characters or indeed Sorkin himself. (And look, that’s even though, as a bit of a nutjob myself, I am more disposed to forgive him for the nutjob thing than others are.)
And yes, all those traits are certainly in evidence here.
Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), the reawakened, re-engaged former prosecutor and News Night anchor, is definitely The Newsroom’s Great Man. But it seems Sorkin has tried to undercut that stereotype by introducing two other elements: First, Will shares his Spouting Wisdom function with a woman (Mackenzie. More on her later...), as well as with his boss, Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston being truly awesome as a fabulous, alcoholic, old-school hack who somehow ended up in management, but who longs for the fabled days of real news and real journalism and then realises that he actually has the power to make it happen. I love him. He feels absolutely believable in this world). Don Quixote is an oft-referenced motif in The Newsroom, but it’s never entirely clear (at least to me) who in this little triumvirate is Quixote, who is Sancho, and who is the ass.
Secondly, Will is a total basketcase about having been cheated on three years earlier (by... guess who?). Now I’m not attacking someone’s right to get over being cheated on in their own good time, but the way the story plays out here weakens Will in such a way that it makes him seem more pathetic than sympathetic. I want to shake him and yell, “for god’s sake man! I know it hurts but you need to snap out of it!! Live your life!!”. Also, my feeling is that newsmen of his generation would deal with such an emotional crisis with a whole lot less therapy and a whole lot more alcoholism. I’m not saying that’s the healthier choice, of course, just that therapy feels like a strange choice for journo of Will’s ilk. But whatever. His sessions are a useful exposition device for Sorkin, so... *eyeroll*.
All of that said, though, Will is a newsman and is a character who belongs in his newsroom. He’s a decent representation of an anchor too. He’s believable. Which is more than I can say for some of the other characters in this newsroom... but back to my Sorkinian issues...
Jingoism? Look... yes. But even if you’re hypersensitive to the nationalism thing, it’s not that bad here and I also felt a need to get off my own high horse. This is, after all, an American show, made by Americans, primarily for their American audience, about the state of American democracy and newsmedia... they’re kinda allowed. The rest of us knew what we were signing up for. What jingoism there is, though, doesn’t usually come from Will. At least, not as straightforwardly as that. In a ripper of a series-opening scene, Will comes out swinging against the assertion that America is the only great and free country in the known universe. I won’t lie. I liked that scene. And in articulating what he thinks went wrong for a great and proud democracy, Will/Sorkin also lays out a path back to the light/top of the heap, which is effectively the heart of both these shows - The Newsroom, and the fictional News Night. It’s beautifully done, it’s vintage Sorkin, and it’s a cracker start. I lapped it up.
The first episode’s other flag-waving moment comes from the aforementioned and appallingly-named MacKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer). She’s been brought in as the new EP (executive producer) of Will’s show after his old EP, Don, goes to work on the new 10pm show and takes the staff with him, essentially because Will’s a prick and he can. Ouch. MacKenzie and her senior producer/protege Jim Harper (more on him later) are just back from more than a year reporting in Afghanistan and Pakistan and have been hired by Charlie Skinner without Will’s knowledge, which is controversial because, just in case you couldn’t see it coming, Mac is Will’s ex-girlfriend.
Will is furious. Mac gives an impassioned speech to try to convince him that they can work together in spite of their history, and they can do a real news program, to “speak truth to stupid”. This includes her pronouncement that she’d rather do a great show for a hundred people than a bad show for a million (if that’s true, commercial news is probably not your natural home, Mac. Maybe try PBS. But I digress...).
I was sold on her Very Important Speech and idealistic attitude in spite of myself, though, not least because her patriotism is tied up in her journalistic passion for giving people the news they need, not the crap they’ll click on. And god help me, I love her for believing that if you broadcast it, the audience will come. There’s all evidence to the contrary, sadly, but in a newscape that includes such luminaries as FoxNews... man, I wish someone would try. Or try harder, anyway. Mac’s got a great line about why she doesn’t want to do the same old crap about new iPhones and Casey Anthony and Anthony Weiner: because she doesn’t believe that the American people are “preternaturally stupid.” And I love her for that, because they’re not, just like no other country’s population is wholesale stupid. But increasingly, the way serious things are covered is. And that is not only the fault of journalists.
Certainly the trend towards dumber and dumber news isn’t just an American problem, it’s a global phenomenon that’s more pronounced in the States because, for one thing, they got 24-hour cable news first. Give it time and an uninterrupted trajectory and the rest of the world’s English-language broadcast media will be there too. It’s already on its way. Non-English-language media may be the same, I don’t know. And it’s because the partisan and the ridiculous get the ratings and the web clicks. You headline a story ‘Shark attack victim caught in kinky sex romp: video’ and it’ll top your most-viewed stories. Journalism costs money and most media organisations are businesses that need to make money, and advertisers follow the ratings. It’s a vicious cycle and it’s not all the fault of the media, is my point.
So, you know what, I have all the time in the world for Mac making the case in defence of real news and smart audiences. I just wish she were right.
The crackpots and these women - oh no, wait. The crackpots ARE these women
Sadly, my love affair with Mac is over pretty quickly. Like, from the second episode, quickly. And that brings me to Sorkin and his crackpot women. Ironically, while I love Big Block of Cheese Day, I think one of my most shuddery, patronising Sorkin moments was the end of the Season 1 West Wing episode called ‘The Crackpots and These Women’ (The title alone shits me. Add to that the atmosphere of ‘Oh look at these women who are really good at their job. How about that! Let us look paternalistically at them and smile indulgently at their foibles over scotch’ and....ugh. But maybe that’s just me...).
MacKenzie McHale, I’m sorry, is a crackpot. The woman certainly doesn’t have the temperament to be a war correspondent and there’s precious little evidence that she could possibly be ‘the best EP’ in this fictional business. If she’s truly the best (and just back from a warzone - huge journo cred there), why is it that the only person willing to hire her is the drunk cable news exec? There are moments, sadly only really in that first episode, when she’s great. Those taper off pretty quickly as the season progresses. She’s too frazzled, too prone to losing it, and there’s a whiny, whinging, wheedling sensibility about her that truly offends my sensibilities.
Sorkin has his characters spend a lot of time telling us how good Mac is at her job, but the evidence we are shown constantly undermines that. There are silly, little things like her being incapable of sending an email and knocking over her whiteboard. And one scene that’s quite sinister, really, that shows how she counts on her fingers. She’s publicly humiliated for it, too, when Will calls her out in front of the whole newsroom. But what really stuck the final nail in her coffin for me? She let her anchor, stoned to high heaven, go on the air to tell America that Bin Laden had been killed. But that’s ok, because he really, really wanted to report that news, and we’re told later that Will knocked it out of the park... whoopee for Will. Fictional or not, no EP in history would ever have allowed that to happen. If they had, they’d have been following that anchor out the door.
The telling-me-not-showing-me-that-she’s-capable deal continues with our second female character, Maggie Jordan, the intern who was promoted to be Will’s assistant because... he thought she was already his assistant. And who Mac promotes to AP (assistant producer) because she loyally did not go with the rest of the staff and Don the departing EP (who is, incidentally, Maggie’s boyfriend)... OK, but Mac LITERALLY just met this girl. She doesn’t even know if she can spell or use a telephone, let alone ask a question or write a script.
Anyway. Maggie? Also nutty. Again, there are the casual suggestions that she can’t quite cut it (she gets up on her high horse about how she’s perfectly capable thankyou very much and then loses them the crucial interview by being unprofessional, she doesn’t know how to put people on hold, she mixes up Georgia the country and Georgia the state).
But all those things pale in comparison to her astonishing lack of awareness about herself, and her own feelings toward Don (the boyfriend) and Jim (Mac’s producer, who’s clearly supposed to be Maggie’s OTP partner), and about their feelings toward her. She also has an almost pathological ability to be a doormat. This is a character, we discover, who once hid under the bed while the guy she was dating ‘got back together’ with his former girlfriend. As she herself points out, she was literally cheated on. Heads up, Aaron... that joke’s not so much funny as horrifying.
Her capacity to sabotage her own happiness knows no bounds, particularly in her pushing Jim to date Lisa, her flatmate and best friend. At first, I thought maybe she’d just inherited Donna’s talent for misdirection, but it’s much more sinister than that. Donna had good reason for misdirecting and not pursuing Josh until the very end, not least the boss/employee thing, but also because she had no evidence for almost as long as the show ran that Josh was actually consciously and seriously interested in her and therefore a chance worth taking (I mean, we knew that he was, but.... y’know what, THAT is another conversation entirely.) Maggie does not have that excuse. She can patently see Jim’s in love with her (or else the actress didn’t get the ‘she’s clueless’ memo and is telegraphing all the wrong emotions as a result.) And given that she and Don break up constantly, and she’s clearly self-aware enough to have admitted to her Lisa (yes, who later dates Jim) that she likes Jim, it makes precisely NO sense that she and Don stay together. None. And that’s without Don and his seeing other people when ‘they were on a break’ thing. It’s bewildering. This character’s motivations make no sense.
There were only really two times when I started to warm to Maggie before the thaw was abruptly thwarted: firstly when she was having her panic attack, and then, in the final episode when she tells Lisa the truth, then screams her feelings to a bus full of women (and Jim, as it happens) on a Sex and The City tour (I know. I don’t know either. I can only explain this scene by assuming it’s because Kristin Davis was dating Aaron Sorkin until, like a couple of days ago. Because otherwise, wtf?). In both those moments, Maggie felt real. She was actually having a real, honest reaction to something. And that moment when it looked like air might actually get cleared between her and Jim? That we might actually get a genuine interaction with Jim from her? Agh!!! Shipper wonderfulness!!! But then.... no. She (or rather Sorkin) sabotages it, again, and she chooses to move in with Don (who had been a booty-calling bastard not five minutes before, with whom she is clearly not in love, and who is clearly not in love with her either) instead of actually following through with Jim. She has no backbone. If she had more to lose by gambling on Jim, I’d get it. But she has nothing to lose. She knows how he feels about her, she’s already lost Lisa, the best friend/flatmate who is dating Jim (and if she hasn’t lost Lisa, then I hate Lisa too, because she shouldn’t be staying friends with someone who seems so determined to sabotage not only her own relationships but Lisa’s as well) and her relationship with Don sucks like a turbo-charged vacuum cleaner. She literally has nothing to lose by choosing Jim. And yet she doesn’t.
Honestly? I think I hate this character. And it’s frustrating, because I really want to be on board the Jim/Maggie ship. Sorkin apparently really wants me to earn it, though, given the obstacles he throws at me to prevent me from signing up. Maggie’s character flaws are just the start. For example, this: in Maggie, we have a girl in a dysfunctional relationship with a guy at her work, who is actually in love with another guy at her work, and that same guy is totally pining after her... Sound familiar?
It should. Because Maggie is a dodgy Pam (/Dawn) from The Office, basically. She’s a far less sympathetic Pam, with less gumption and inexplicably more promising career prospects.
...and it’s funny, that. Because who is Maggie’s shipper interest? Well, as I mentioned, it’s Jim! Whose surname, as I said, is Halpert. Oh wait, no, I’m sorry - Harper. Jim Harper is his name. Harper. See? It’s different.
What’s in a name? Quite a bit when the names are this dumb...
It may be nitpicky, but some of these names are just stupid. ‘Jim Harper/Halpert’ is careless. The improbably alliterative ‘MacKenzie McHale’ is downright ridiculous. Quite apart from everything else, Emily Mortimer’s English accent is ‘explained’ by Mac being the New York-born daughter of Margaret Thatcher’s ambassador to the UN. Now I’m sure there are many people who have called their daughter ‘MacKenzie’, but I’m reasonably confident there is no way in hell an ambassador favoured by the arch-conservative Thatcher would be one of them.
Oh, and then there’s ‘Sloan Sabbith’, the sexy economics and finance reporter played brilliantly by Olivia Munn. Did Sorkin feel the need to saddle her with that name to make up for the pretty and the smarts? We’ll never know. What we do know is that Sloan is also... DING DING DING!! You guessed it! Nutty! She lacks emotional intelligence (although she’s got the other kind in spades) and is massively insecure about her body despite the fact that she is quite clearly smokin’. I don’t know why Sorkin decided to inflict body issues on poor old PhD-holding, fluent-Japanese-speaking, dryly funny and beautiful Sloan, but I gotta be honest, it shits me. Can one of these women not be this degree of insecure? Just one? It’s like we’re on some kind of scale where ‘confident’ and ‘likeable’ are mutually exclusive: the more insecure a woman is, the more sympathetic we’re supposed to find her character. The more confident, the more bitchy. Is this really necessary? Sloan’s self-acknowledged lack of emotional intelligence is actually really interesting. I have no problem with that. Does she have to have something as cliched as body issues as well? I am taking particular exception to this because I actually really, really like Sloan. She’s my favourite female character by a country mile and possibly my favourite character overall. She’s interesting, and she has some journalistically interesting storylines. She, too, cops the patronising writerly gaze, but Sloan (largely thanks to the sensational Olivia Munn, I think) manages to shrug it off better than the others do.
Shipper index rating: yeeeah? Sort of?
There’s obviously the Will/Mac thing, but meh. So. Returning to Jim. Because despite my issues with his name and the other half of his ship, I actually really like the character of Jim. … OK, there is a very small chance that I might be developing a bit of a crush on Jim. … Oh fine. FINE. I have a crush on Jim, alright? Are you happy?
(And there, Clintasha-people-who’ve-made-it-this-far ((congratulations, by the way, that’s a slog)) is the other end of my ‘Boys I Find Spunky’ spectrum. Because let’s be honest, he is at the opposite end of the spectrum to Renner. My fangirl love is a broad church, what can I say?)
Now Jim, incidentally, is a believable journo (as is Maggie’s boyfriend, the dastardly Don, actually. He is a very believeable EP and the show’s embodiment of The Dark Side of populist broadcast news. He’s a pretty good character, actually, but I don’t love him, so, meh. Moving on...). I’m fine with Jim’s big scoop on Deepwater Horizon being a total fluke because it’s acknowledged as such and because flukes do happen. He’s also got the right temperament, he’s smart and he’s a sweetheart. This does things to me.
As I’ve said, Show clearly wants me to ship Jim/Maggie, and I don’t like Maggie. But I’ll ship Jim/WhoeverJimWants no problem. And he wants Maggie, so. But now that she’s shacked up with Don, and he let himself almost get bullied into getting back together with Lisa... I don’t know. He doesn’t love Lisa, I don’t want him to stay with her (for both their sakes). But I don’t know if I reeeeeeally want him with Maggie either. But hey, there’s certainly shippage potential here, which is not going to be easy or pain-free. And you only gotta look at my ships to know that’s how I like ‘em. So, I would say at this point I have one foot on the deck, one foot on the wharf. My commitment is exactly as tenuous as that sounds. It’s actually a completely new shipper experience for me: liking one half of the ship, but not the other. I am academically, fangirlistically curious to see how that goes...you know, for science.
But here’s the real ILoveJim kicker: Jim is played by John Gallagher Jr... who was also Tyler!! That’s right West-Wingers, the love-lorn, politically-engaged teen volunteer Democrat who finally got Josh, Donna and Toby to the (wrong) train and neglected to tell Josh and Toby about the changing timezones in ‘20 Hours in America’ grew up to become a war correspondent and TV news producer!!!! I cannot tell you how much I love this casting for ridiculous fangirl reasons.
Oh - and I’d be remiss in my shipper duties if I didn’t point out that the Lisa/Jim/Maggie/Don love-square got expanded to a pentagon, out of absolutely nowhere, in the last episode. It appears that lovely Sloan wants.... Don. This completely blindsided me. It feels completely manufactured, like they realised they couldn’t wring any more out of Jim/Maggie and they needed to think of something else to keep people interested. But I don’t see in Don what Sorkin apparently would have us believe that Sloan sees in Don. So I don’t get it. God only knows where that will go...
The journo bits
I expected to hate the decision to set the show in the recent past, but I actually think it works quite well. It’s easy to see how the benefit of an omnipotent narrator can fundamentally change the way news is done, and I understand why there’s been so much criticism of this choice, particularly by American journalists who feel like he’s taking a shot at them from his privileged position of hindsight, but whatever. It works for me.
The depiction of what it’s like to be in a newsroom when news is breaking is pretty accurate - it does a good job of capturing the craziness, the excitement and the generally awesome adrenalin rush. The teamwork and tremendous sense of satisfaction when things go well, the shame and devastation when they don’t are also, I think, well realised. And most importantly, you get a sense of the relentlessness, of the turning around the next day to start from scratch and do it all again.
So, Ridiculous... why did you keep watching if so many things annoyed you this much?
Because despite the annoyances, I did find it quite compelling. Strangely so... I think I just wanted to see whether characters like Mac and Maggie would improve. And I was interested to see which stories they’d choose to feature, and how the team/Sorkin would write those.
Despite my nitpicks, I also want to give The Newsroom time to find its feet, and I’m not sure 10 episodes are enough. It’s got good bones, its pedigree is good, its cast isn’t bad either, and I love what it’s saying about what journalism can be (even if I have my pragmatic doubts). Slumdog Millionaire’s Dev Patel as the blogger-wannabe-reporter is also a character with whom so much more could be done - his promising arc was ultimately unfulfilling in the first season and I hope that changes second time around.
And of course the Jim shippiness, which I wanted to take for a test drive to see how it handled... I will lose patience and interest if it carries on in the same way for too much longer though.
So if anyone else is watching The Newsroom (and has made it this far down, in which case, I salute you :/) I’d be really interested to know what you think about it. Otherwise I’ll just play happily in my own little corner over here...
Finally, a round of West Wing Motif Bingo! (Or, Some Of The Things Aaron Sorkin Liked So Much In The West Wing He Decided to Repeat Them Here)
* The opening titles montage is exactly the same format, although the music is nowhere near as good. In fact, I really hate the title music.
* Will (a la Bartlett) doesn’t know anyone’s names. His learning everyone’s names symbolises his getting on board the team effort
* Will-and-Charlie walk-and-talk West-Wing-homage in Episode 1! Woo!
* Plaster falls from the ceiling and narrowly misses Will (aka Josh)
* And finally, one for the Josh and Donna shippers: “gather ye rosebuds” makes a prominent reappearance. Originally quoted to Josh by Donna (who was misdirecting like a champion at the time), here it’s quoted by Mac, awkwardly and at length, in an attempt to encourage Jim to go after Maggie. … I can tell you this right now, though - if Sorkin expects me to hang around for seven years of this before Jim gets his girl, he’s got another thing coming...