After watching the first four episodes of The Newsroom’s second season, Marc Tracy concludes that creator Aaron Sorkin has become more self-aware:
[T]he most important change Sorkin has made is to the show’s structure, using its episodes to tell one ongoing story. And so the story—and the season—is told in flashback, as network lawyers interview various staffers at a gigantic conference-room table in preparation for a wrongful termination lawsuit surrounding a blockbuster story that the show-within-the-show, “News Night,” has had to retract. (The device would remind you of The Social Network even if you didn’t know Sorkin had written it.) The result is a cross between one of those six-hour BBC series—an association further suggested by the new, slicker opening credits—and a sitcom. The overarching storyline gradually unfolds, while the episode-specific subplots come fast and furious, and with a discipline that didn’t exist on the one actual sitcom Sorkin did, ABC’s “Sports Night.”
Making the season-long arc about a faked news story solves another of the haters’ complaints. It no longer seems so absurd to watch a show intimately tied to two-year-old current events when the dramatic weight is placed overwhelmingly on a fabrication and the actual news pegs are relegated to comedy or, at least, decidedly minor drama.
Nevertheless, Alyssa thinks the show remains flawed:
The problem with The Newsroom, I think, is that no one comes across as particularly competent, both by design and by accident. Women on the show tend to be dippy, impulsive, prone to attacks on their technology, rants on the street, or attacks of principle that are bad for ratings. But men can be high-handed, obsessive about conspiracy theories, stories without ratings draws, or their ex-girlfirends, or oddly naive, as is the case with Jim’s (or the show’s) lack of awareness that since outlets pay for seats on campaign buses, the Romney staff can’t actually kick him off. What the show identifies as moments of journalistic bravery are significantly driven by the fact that Will McAvoy is based on Keith Olbermann, and so a ranting answer to a question, or a special comment during a broadcast get more points than actual reporting, or driving new subjects into the news stream the way Rachel Maddow did with national security.
Alison Agosti hated the first season but feels compelled to see the show through:
In general, if a show starts to drag or if a character gets amnesia or something, I’m out. Yet Sorkin has created something perfectly infuriating, where I’m not sure that I’m enjoying it, but I am completely engrossed. I want to see what he going to do next, what new inanimate objects Maggie will trip over. Quite frankly, I’m really looking forward to rolling my eyes so hard I’m worried they’ll fall out of my head when Will and Mackenzie inevitably get back together.
Previous Dish coverage of The Newsroom here, here, here and here.
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