The Newsroom (Season 1)

So I watched the first season of The Newsroom not long after it originally aired. For a very short period of time, it was one of the shows that I was relatively up to date with. At a certain point though, I lost access to HBO and was never able to watch the second and third season. Furthermore, I had heard negative things about the preceding seasons and usually when that happens, even if I want to watch it to see for myself, I usually lie to myself to say I want to be able to sit with it and really digest if and why its not as good. That never happened with this show.

Now, eight years since the airing of the show, but ten years since the first real event they portray in the show, it's fascinating watching this show with a critical eye and realizing there are parts that aged really well with this show... and yet there are a lot of parts that didn't.

I'm going to try and edge away from personal political opinions I have in this review, but it should be noted that Aaron Sorkin is a pretty openly self proclaimed liberal so as good as he is at providing a political perspective from an intriguing viewpoint, he does also have a lean and while it doesn't ruin the show, it is good to note first and foremost.

The Newsroom follows a news team at a fictional news network called Atlantic Cable News (ACN), a very stupid name but that might be the reason that they really don't mention it that much. The lead anchor is a man by the name of Will McEvoy (played by Jeff Daniels). He's known as the "Jay Leno" of news anchors because he's popular because he doesn't bother anyone. But after a rant about why America is no longer the greatest country anymore (a classic Sorkin political zinger video that you probably shared a billion times over in high school), he starts down a road with his news team on a "mission to civilize" and create a news hour that informs voters rather than speculating on gossip.

Much of this is fueled by his new Executive Producer Mackenzie Mchale (played by Emily Mortimer), who Will had a relationship with that ended badly years before the show starts. The team is also made up of Senior Producer Jim Halpert, I mean Jim Harper (played by John Gallagher Jr.), an assistant turned associate producer Maggie Jordan (played by Allison Pill), the writer of Will's blog Neal Sampat (played by Dev Patel), and the President of ACN Charlie Skinner (played by Sam Waterson).

The team also includes an economic reporter by the name of Sloane Sabbith (played by Olivia Munn), and Will's former Executive Producer Don (played by Thomas Sadoski)

Together, the team produces the news with a prosecutor's lens, searching for the truth and striving to inform.

Oh and the interesting thing about this show's format is that the news they are reporting is real events that actually occurred, starting in April 2010 with the Deep Water Horizon oil spill.

And this is a really good place to start because I remember watching this in 2013 after the show had been out for a little bit and was just starting to gain traction. The fact that it was reacting to events that only happened 2-3 years ago was pretty wild. It made the show feel current and like it was commenting on something that was still relevant in the daily zeitgeist.

But upon watching this season a second time, I can't help but feel like the further you get from 2010, the more this show is going to feel of the time. Sure there are elements of the economy, political discourse, and some hot topic issues like gun control that remain relevant, but its worth noting that this entire show is all pre-Trump. While some of the political figures and the landscape still remains, there is a lot that has not become relevant anymore due to the fact that Donald Trump is the President and there is an inherent distrust of the media, especially when the media calls themselves the "media elite", which this show does in the second episode.

This is not to say the show doesn't have some really great things to say about the political landscape that was a thing in the early 2010s and yes, some of that has carried over to us in 2020. Of course there's the "America isn't the greatest country in the world" speech, but the show is full of those Sorkin speeches that while they're cheesy and kind of eye roll-y at times, they do allow you to think about the topics and discussions of the day. I would argue its a little heavy handed towards a certain political ideology, but again, it's Sorkin, what do you expect?

Something really worth noting is the cast. It doesn't seem like it since they're big actors now, but some of these actors like Olivia Munn, Dev Patel, and John Gallagher Jr were still at the starts of their careers. Oddly enough Allison Pill had been known in the industry much longer than those three and she's supposed to be playing the young inexperienced one. They all do a good job, with some notes that I'll get to later.

Emily Mortimer, Jeff Daniels, and Sam Waterson are really the stars of the show and boy do they do a good job. There are a lot of issues I still need to talk about and while some of them are related to these three, they're just in a league of their own. And to me, I think this was a career defining role for Jeff Daniels.

I know Jeff Daniels has done a lot of roles beyond Dumb and Dumber, but if you can name them without looking at Wikipedia or IMDB, you're a bigger fan of Jeff Daniels than I am. I think the role seemed to bring Jeff Daniels into 2010 with some huge credibility. Around the same time as this show there were a couple of premium TV shows following a complicated middle aged white dude who is working his way towards redemption. Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead to a certain extent. This was just another entry in those typical shows (that were kind of stealing it from The Sopranos). But Jeff Daniels kills it in this show, he's easily the best part of the show.

My problem comes with how the character is written, not how he's acted. Will McEvoy is this complicated guy who at the start of the show everyone hates for some reason, but as the show goes on, he's really only shown as this guy with immense integrity and they really play him up as this god among men, creating a self important air about the show. The show inadvertently compares McEvoy to Walter Kronkite and the "legends" of the news on top of having an insane career for someone who's supposed to be at best in his 50's.  And the funny part is, while the show tries to tell us that Will McEvoy is this amazing guy who is connected to almost everyone, because this show is set in the real world but can't affect the events of the real world, the real world never really interacts back no matter how many times McEvoy is interacting with the real world (to be fair, its mostly for funny gags). For example, when the Anthony Weiner scandal breaks, Will leaves a voicemail for Weiner telling him he needs a new publicist. But Anthony Weiner never calls him back. So while they try to prop up this anchor as the second most watched anchor on television, and he has all these connections, those connections never really seem real. With the exception of a text from Joe Biden in without a question the best episode of the show.

But honestly, its not just Will who seems very impotent in our real world. The problem with a show being set in the real world is that they can't change the events of history. They can Sorkin-ize on the events, philosophize on the "current" events (they seem to do that more than reporting the facts honestly), but they can't really make any change. And honestly, watching it with 2020 retrospect, some of these topics/ political figures didn't have as much of an impact on the world as the show speculated we would. Nothing's blatantly wrong, it might just be underplayed or overplayed depending on the issue. For example, Terry Crews guest stars in a couple episodes as McEvoy's bodyguard. In without question the best episode of the season, he gets profiled by New York police officers and is detained. Now at the time, the show seemed to be saying something about race, but they never really mention it again in this season so it feels very underplayed. At the same time, Olivia Munn spends a lot of time talking about the debt ceiling and I'm no economist but we're not really talking about the debt ceiling anymore. I'm sure there are people out there that could argue the effects of that moment in 2011/2012 and its impact on today, but its just not an issue that resonates as much anymore.

Here's the other issue with integrating a fictional news team into the real world. In order to hit those Sorkin moments, they need to not only have a fictional news team, but they need to create fictional characters in the middle of real events and this becomes... problematic.

This show makes up a couple of characters and inserts them into the real events. In 2013, I mistakenly thought these were real people and to the shows credit, they do a decent job portraying them as real. But watching the show now, I realize that these might be the most problematic aspects of the show because they hyperbolize the issues to hit home Sorkin's messaging in the show. Examples include a fictional gay political aide on Rick Santorum's 2012 Presidential campaign, or a made up Republican Congressman who was primaried by a member of the Tea Party because he co-sponsored a bill with a democrat. Yes, the points they make are not all totally hyperbolic, but the show gets into some grey area when they're making up scenarios and people like this just to make a point.

The integration of these fictional characters, especially the main cast, into real events is a fascinating format and I still applaud the show for being able to do it so well, but it is still worth discussing, and that's why I have spent so much time writing about it. That and, the other elements of the show are pretty cringey.

A huge element of this show is the personal drama that occurs between the characters. It's a drama, there needs to be romance and such. And it's not all bad. The back and forth between Will and Mackenzie is actually really good, despite Mackenzie being written like a typical Sorkin female character while she's strong but still neurotic and dependent on men.

But dear lord I never realized how much this show wanted to capitalize off of the will they won't they of the Office that everyone was trying to recapture in the early 2010s. John Gallagher Jr's character is Jim Halpert from the office. A snarky white guy who's good looking, but not too good looking, falling for the young woman who is trying to prove herself, oh and also she's in a committed relationship that you know from the beginning is not going to last. But what's more, these characters are just the worst in this season.

Jim is the stereotypical nice guy who would never hurt anyone, except the fact that he's so nice keeps him from actually being honest with anybody and kind of makes him an asshole. Maggie is another example of why Aaron Sorkin doesn't know how to write female characters because as strong as she is, she's incredibly flawed and neurotic. But what's the worst about it is when these characters become the voices of the messaging of an episode and they don't sound like reporters, they sound like self righteous privileged white people spewing out what they think is best while not really letting the character of color say anything really meaningful.

Oh and did I mention that Aaron Sorkin isn't very good at writing any characters that aren't self righteous privileged white people?

This was still early Dev Patel where he was still calibrating his career and making both great and horrible choices like going from Slumdog Millionaire to The Last Airbender. I would say this was still probably one of the better choices in that calibrating phase, but any problems weren't Dev Patel, it was that Sorkin didn't know what to do with this character for the majority of the show, so he made him the bigfoot alien tech nerd.

I would hope that he gets better in the later seasons, but if you've only watched the first season of this show, you know that Dev Patel is not the strongest written character. The other actors of color in the show are used for jokes and random political commentary and aren't real characters.

Last few notes, Olivia Munn is good in this despite being miscast. Thomas Sadoski is fine but his character has the potential to be the best character ever because he starts as a stereotypical asshole but you really end up loving him in the end. David Harbour is in a very small role in this show and it makes me happy that he's gone on to bigger things than a lot of the people in this show. And the pacing of this show is weird, spanning a year and a half in 10 episodes with episodes where months have past and others where only a couple days have. Also, the second episode is without question the worst episode of the season while the episode where they cover the killing of Bin Laden is by far the best episode.

So where do I fall with The Newsroom. There is a lot to love about this show. The format, despite some flaws, is brilliant. The cast, despite some being written much better than others, is really good. The commentary, while biased and becoming dated every year, is interesting discourse.

I think the show's biggest strength, Sorkin, is also its greatest weakness. At the end of the day, The Newsroom was able to capture that same political discourse that Sorkin was able to capture with shows like The West Wing, but after watching The West Wing, I realize a lot of the topics are simplified for television and the writing is just cheesy because its not how people really talk. Whats more, the show is very heady and often time portrays itself as self important. At the beginning, Will and Mackenzie set off to present the facts of the day but they become commentators and justify it by saying they have the facts on their side. And watching it in 2020, as much as I hate the distrust of institutions and the news media, I will say there is a condescending high horsing going on in this show that might turn some people off. And the thing I also hate about this show is just the culture it created of people, on both sides of the aisle saying that facts don't care about your feelings and yada yada and in the words of The Dude...

Overall, if you haven't seen The Newsroom, I do recommend it, there are great characters, great discourse, and its a great unique formatted show. I would just say expect some grand standing, expect some high horsing, and expect some cheesy white people love triangle drama. 

But those are my thoughts on The Newsroom. What do you think? Did you watch it when it first came out? Do you think it has aged well? Comment and Discuss below! You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @MovieSymposium as well as send me your requests for films and tv shows I should watch in the future. If you follow me on Twitter, you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog. 

Thanks for reading!