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Season 3, Episode 2: “Run” A pretty good episode. Not perfect, but solid through-and-through. That's about as much as I can ask for at this point, right? I still have serious reservations about the direction this is all heading, but the individual parts, at least for now, are hitting hard enough that I can't care. It's weird that I can start out having so little interest in the plot turns but the scenes themselves become compelling enough to redeem them. The episode even manages a solid little running theme in how absolutely hosed everything is for everyone. Hallie gets fired, Neal's on the run, Leona needs $4 billion in a matter of days or ACN is gone, and the FBI is bearing down on the newsroom, preparing to confiscate all the hard drives. Even the lighter sidestories don't escape the merciless pull of oblivion. Sloan and Don have a fun little story anchored by the fact that Don accidentally committed insider trading, as if he wasn't in enough trouble with Jerry already. Maggie's story, on the other hand, ends with a moral and personal victory to continue her upward arc, as well as the reward of an EPA report showing that the planet's absolutely screwed. Nothing is safe. Which isn't to say this episode is bleak, necessarily, because it's actually pretty goddamn funny. Usually when this show goes deep into comedy I end up laughing mostly because it seems so weird and out of place tonally, but this episode actually managed to get some solid, genuine laughs out of me. The standout for this, as always, was Sloan. Don and Sloan fumbling awkwardly over the status of their relationship should be awful but ends up probably being the standout of the episode due to how much fun it all is. Don realizing Sloan is unconsciously imitating him and Sloan's ultimate test were both amazing and easy reminders of why those are hands down the two best characters. Hallie's story, on the other hand, isn't fun at all. After posting and deleting a boneheaded tweet from the ACN twitter account, she comes into work, furiously refreshing several sites waiting for one of them to pick it up so she can get fired. It eventually does get found and she does get fired, which I was legitimately shocked by because she's only been with ACN for one episode. So I have to wonder what this is building towards, because I haven't got a clue. This seems like one of the more obvious casualties of an abridged season. With more time Hallie's termination might have felt a little less strange, even if setting her up just to have her fired is still kinda lame. Nevertheless, Hallie's complete and total realization of the inevitability of someone finding it was portrayed really well, and she handles it well, owning up immediately. Maggie's plot ends up being probably the weakest. After recording (through duplicitous but legal means) a conversation by an EPA staffer trash-talking Obama, she eventually decides not to print it due to the employee's anger and her own moral code. For this, she ends up rewarded with the aforementioned doomsday report, an exclusive interview with the employee, and the phone number of an ethics professor. It's good to see Maggie continue to succeed after the show's mistreated her for so long but the plot itself is a bit stale. It does have perhaps the best line of the episode though, where Maggie acknowledges the show's love of monologues. The two major threads this time around are the debate over whether or not to let Neal do the story and Charlie, Reese, and Leona's attempts to get Reese's siblings not to sell ACN's parent company. The ACN plot takes up a lot of time, but the antagonism between Reese/Leona and Reese's sister carry the whole thing. Chris Messina hasn't gotten a lot to do in this show so an episode like this that really gives him the chance to let loose is much appreciated. Reese's sister herself is a bit of a one-note rear end in a top hat but she's played well by Kat Dennings and gets enough good lines that she still ends up being fun to watch. Anyway, by the end Leona offers to pay $2 more per share than the capital firm who would be buying from Reese's sister in order to keep all of the company... which amounts to $4 billion. I didn't really care about it before, but any possible resolution to this plot at this point will have to be absolutely loving crazy, so I'm actually kinda interested in it now. And then Neal's plot, which is really the centerpiece of the whole thing. The entire episode features Will, Mac, and Rebecca, the lawyer from last season, debating whether or not to let Neal do the story. Will and Rebecca say no, arguing that there's no way to confirm the story without giving Neal up and that it's not worth it anyway. Neal and Mac say yes, arguing that the news is important, and that no journalist has ever been charged with espionage, so he'll likely only go to jail for about 10 days for contempt. Unfortunately, Neal decides to force the issue by calling to confirm the story during a trip to the bathroom, sending the FBI down to raid the newsroom and confiscate all the hard drives. Will figures this out before the FBI arrives, however, and cleverly sneaks out a message telling Neal to run when told that unless Neal gives up the source they're going to give him the full charge of espionage. Despite my already-voiced distaste for the direction of that plot, it's pretty well-executed. The characterization all makes sense (for once), I understand the points of view clearly, and it never once seems preachy, which is a minor miracle on this show. I guess my reservations are just that I know that the show can't keep it up, and this seems like an excellent place for the show to get really loving stupid. But still, two good episodes in a row is probably a new record, right? It's almost certainly all downhill from here, though.
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Nov 12, 2015 18:38
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Paul Lieberstein (EPA guy) became a showrunner for season 3, so I'd like to believe that might have reigned in some of Sorkin's worse tendencies. I'm also assuming you're now looking into buying a Bloomberg Terminal? I hear it knows everything... Weirdest product placement.
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Nov 13, 2015 02:21
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this threads not falling into archives on my watch
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Jan 17, 2016 07:38
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I feel quite alone in liking this show. Perhaps it was beneficial to go into this when I knew the full run length and could binge through it, but nonetheless I found a lot of it charming. I fundamentally don't buy "Sorkin hates the internet", I remember that sharp peak of tweets becoming news (basically just before this show aired), and it was completely bullshit. I think he's relatively balanced in having reservations about the trend of citizen journalists, whilst also seeing their value, i.e. the man on the ground in Egypt, Neal's various stories. Too much scepticism and trying to change it's nature ("I'm going to fix the internet") is played up as absurd on its face. Sorkin really can't write women though, and I think the main difference here is he doesn't have someone with Allison Janney's chops to carry it. MacKenzie is insufferably twee. Maggie has two or three episodes of being competent before the show ends. The emotional punches in S2 don't happen in the episodes where the events themselves do, which is the weirdest decision I have ever seen in writing, and must have been a desperate attempt to keep people watching for the next week. Lines like "If you'd seen what she had, you'd do nothing but sit and cry" were delivered brilliantly, but by the time you see what actually happened its a let down. Like burn every child to death or deliver that line after, or people will just feel relieved only one kid dies.
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Jan 17, 2016 13:06
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Thaddius the Large posted:I decided Newsroom is best viewed via YouTube, when you can pick out a few nice moments to enjoy utterly void of context, because drat that context tends to be terrible. Like most shows it's best when you watch it in its entirety, instead of picking and choosing. Unless you treat TV like religion.
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Jan 17, 2016 13:10
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Season 3, Episode 3: “Main Justice” I keep expecting this show to completely go to poo poo any episode now, but to my endless surprise keeps being surprisingly watchable. Even the weirder digressions from the main plot seem less like obvious gently caress-ups and more like genuine attempts to build upon a central theme. It's not perfect (I'm finally becoming wise to the fact that most of these non-Olivia Munn actors just cannot sell Sorkin's dialogue), but there seems to be something there, at least. Take the opening, for instance. The resolution to the FBI cliffhanger actually manages to be somewhat compelling. The FBI starts raiding hard drives and getting in everyone's face asking about Neal's location, while the newsroom pushes back on their own end with hostility and suspicion while Will of all people tries to mediate. This goes on until Charlie bluffs the FBI into thinking they're going to broadcast the raid on live television, buying everyone a week. It's an obvious gambit that even the FBI sees through, but the whole thing is put together well enough that I can't care. The show even manages to pepper in a few actually effective comedic moments, something I feel they've been a lot better about this season. In the past the comedy has felt more jarring than funny (and sometimes only been funny because it's such an out-of-place failure), but there are some decent bits like Maggie repeatedly misspelling “Breaking News” or Mac's pestering of her FBI friend for her failure to RSVP, and I know I'm making this sound kind of horrible but it actually kind of works, somehow. And all that, in a nutshell, is why this show in its current form might still not be something that I would seek out but why it's definitely something I could imagine watching at all. It's capable of actually being somewhat fun or interesting or funny without having to be so goddamn serious and important that it ruins itself. I mean, this is the same show that did a self-serious and miraculously tone-deaf storyline about a Sex and the City tour bus ruining multiple relationships, and if I never bring that up again it'll be too soon. It's just that the show has finally found a way to make the self-seriousness and the weird humor work symbiotically instead of constantly undercutting each other through tonal whiplash. That it's made this effective a shift in the first place is kind of miraculous. I do have a major complaint with this episode. It's Jim. gently caress Jim. Jim loving sucks. Jim's gotten so bad that I'm having a hard time ever imagining a point where I hated Maggie more, though going back through these I know I must have at one point. Right now, Maggie is a confident person who fucks up occasionally, and that's fine. The mistakes make her seem more human instead of just being the walking pile of user error she was previously. But Jim? Jim's just a smug piece of poo poo. He belittles Maggie by being a willfully dense asshat during her request for input on the EPA report, but at least Maggie hits right back (literally). Worse, he acts massively self-righteous about Hallie's new job, sparking a massive fight because he fundamentally has no trust in her to write on anything other than click count. The EPA storyline itself was almost silly in how dramatic it was but something about it really clicked for me. The Deputy Assistant Administrator of the EPA comes on News Night and it turns into an utter disaster as he does nothing but doomsay the entire time. It's a nice twist from the established expectation of Will being his typical conservative self and ripping into the guy, as Will is forced into the unusual role of having to try to bring the guy down and find even the smallest possibility of hope in what he's saying. But it fails, and Will eventually just gives up. No matter what we do, the man says, it's beyond hopeless. Precipitous change is coming no matter what we do. It's overdramatic, sure. But maybe I just find that underlying question of how the hell you report on something like the end of the world really fascinating. It ends up probably being my favorite scene of the episode. And if this episode is about anything it's about that precipitous change the EPA staffer warns about. What do you do when you don't have the power to fix things you thought you had? What do you do when it's already too late? The way of things is changing, and no one is ready. To protect the entirety of Atlantis World Media from being bought out Reese and Leona are forced to sell off ACN to Lucas Pruitt, a truly bizarre man (played almost endearingly by B.J. Novak) who wants to run an entire channel devoted to people stalking Danny Glover. And Will? Will's hit with it worse than anyone. He's big enough that the new VP of Human Resources ignores his relationship with Mac while Don and Sloan are forced to hide their own (Don's madcap dash to Sloan's office is a magnificent comic moment, by the way), but not big enough to avoid the real consequences. He proclaims himself “too big to jail” and proudly gloats to the Justice Department that he engineered the entire situation so that it would all fall on his own head. But he had no real power to protect himself. He overestimates his own influence, assuming they won't put a news anchor in jail for contempt, and is rewarded with a subpeona for all his trouble. It's one of the only times a plot revolving around Will has completely worked for me, especially considering I was completely uninterested in where this plot was going when it started. I'm more interested in this show than I've ever been, which means any episode now I'm going to get burned hard. It's still the same show, even if it is actually somewhat compelling now. Even if it does get bad again I'm willing to see this through to the end. And I promise it will end. I will finish this show by the end of the month. 
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Jan 17, 2016 20:21
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For better or worse, you only have three episodes left. It's a shame it bowed out when it did, I think it finally found a tone for itself after it dropped being solely based on real news, and instead peppered based on real things into the mix to add drama. It gave it a much needed gravitas that "do we report this news yet x 10" was completely failing to achieve. I get that Hailey's whole persona was just a stand-in for the trend of respectable media institutions to fall to click-baiting (Huff post, etc) but as an actual person, and not an industry, Jim's distaste for her trying to make rent just felt cruel.
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Jan 18, 2016 01:41
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Yeah i liked parts of s2 but it was s3 is when the show was pretty alright. I mean there is still some classic newsroom coming up but I was generally surprised at the quality.
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Jan 18, 2016 01:51
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MrAristocrates posted:He's big enough that the new VP of Human Resources ignores his relationship with Mac while Don and Sloan are forced to hide their own (Don's madcap dash to Sloan's office is a magnificent comic moment, by the way) For what it's worth, I think this is due to Don and Sloan having a much more defined supervisor/supervisee relationship than Will and Mac.
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Jan 18, 2016 04:36
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Season 3, Episode 4: “Contempt” I'm so close. And the worst part is, so was the show. It could have just held on for three lousy episodes, but no. It chooses to dive headfirst straight back into the absolute worst aspects of itself. It succeeds only in the sense that it managed to trick me into getting my hopes up. I might be an idiot for toxxing over this, but I'm a double idiot for doing it again, because it's episodes like this that remind me how much I'd rather be doing literally anything else. The worst part is that this episode probably isn't even the worst one I've watched, I just lack perspective now. For the last several episodes, I've been able to legitimately (or in at least one case, ironically) enjoy what I'm watching on some level. There's none of that here, but I was able to deal with it before. I don't have that anymore. I've lost my tolerance to overbearing melodrama and new media hate. The brief bit of followup on Don and Sloan's running cat-and-mouse game with HR ends up being a giant waste of time (the HR guy was screwing with them because he's leaving when Pruit buys the company) that I can't even get mad about because the resolution is the sole moment of actual goddamn joy in this miserable episode. And I'm not just using “miserable” as a pejorative, because on some level this episode is actually about plumbing the depths of human misery. This episode doesn't just seem to say “Nothing good can ever happen to anyone,” it tries to explicitly argue that. Based on everything else about this episode, the audience is left to infer that “anyone” also includes themselves. And if I seem like I'm mad about this episode, it's really just a reflection of what I watched. This is an outright angry episode of television, taking pleasure in lashing out at various targets, while placing its characters into awful scenarios and then having them explicitly ask why they can't ever catch a break. Well, gently caress you, Newsroom, the two are connected. Your characters keep suffering because you keep victimizing them by way of whatever has you hot and bothered this week. I feel like this show is yelling at me. To dive right into it, even right at the start Will's possibly going to jail for contempt for refusing to give up his source and Mac has four days to get her story to air before Neal's source, who she met at the Correspondent's Dinner, leaks it herself, and it only gets worse from there. Even if the team is able to make the deadline, the original writer of the story isn't out of the country yet and needs more time. Mac is forced to go down to Virginia and have a secret meeting with Neal's source in the pouring rain (because this wasn't enough of a joke) and beg for more time, succeeding only by threatening to reveal the source because it will help Will and Neal. In the end, the team manages to get the writer out and finish the story in time... until Lucas Pruit, who in disposition and intent for ACN is so diametrically opposed to Charlie that he may as well be a villain twirling his goddamn mustache (labeled “NEW MEDIA” because this show takes place in a loving political cartoon) during their scenes together, decides to put the kibosh on that story because of the inevitable fines for airing it. Pruit's astounding because Sorkin's soapbox is both blatant and not enough. Pruit's plan to get the audience to become their own field reporters, submitting content for broadcast is ridiculous, yes, but the show offers no real counterargument, letting the characters take shots at a self-evidently absurd plan without offering anything in return. You plan to get the attention of young people by doing the news well? That's great, but ACN is in fourth. It's not working. In this sense, Pruit's cartoonish views actually almost seem reasonable because at least it's a plan, you know? And just when it looks like there's hope that they might find another buyer in time, that rug gets ripped out from under them in the most pointlessly cruel fashion possible when their other buyer turns out to have been using them for leverage in a different deal. Oh yeah, and we get more Jim. Jim still sucks. Jim compares Hallie's personal writing to a Penthouse letter and even when Hallie violates his privacy by writing an article about their relationship only gets mad that she gave herself a platform, going on a rant about the digital revolution and amateurs vs. professionals and phony outrage and blah blah blah. What Hallie did wasn't right but I can't bring myself to give even the smallest care about Jim's feelings in all this. It's totally disgusting how Jim's completely unfounded fear (my girlfriend is going to turn into a bad person by working at a clickbait website) ends up being proven right. I do find it kind of hilarious that it's his own inability to stop being a massive dick to her that ends up causing it all, though. And Maggie's side of it isn't much better. When she defends Hallie, her boyfriend accuses her of still having a thing for Jim and oh my god we're still loving doing this, huh? We still haven't gotten past Jim/Maggie, a truly toxic pairing if ever there was one. Also, Will gets charged with contempt of court and sentenced to jail time, leading Mac to push up their wedding date to that very moment so their conversations about Neal's source are privileged. The wedding ending is the most miserable part of the whole goddamn thing, and the worst part is that it's supposed to be uplifting. Instead, it ends up being almost depressing in just how stale and lifeless it feels. The impromptu wedding is so pointless and tonally inconsistent that I should have been laughing my rear end off, but there's no energy outside of rage to anything in this trainwreck, so I'm left just wishing for it to be over. Which leads into my next point, which is that it's goddamn interminable. We spend something like seven full minutes listening to Ave Maria and watching the various members of the cast cast shop for a dress, buy rings, purchase flowers, get a cake, and talk to a priest, and even by then it's only half loving over. For god's sake, Charlie just walks into Juilliard off the drat street and hires a full class of musicians. The entire thing is so saccharine it makes me want to gag. And then Will marches off in handcuffs and the whole thing finally ends. I barely even know how to deal with episodes like this anymore. If the rest are gonna be like this I'm in serious trouble. Up next is the episode some of you have been waiting for. Oh dear.
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Jan 21, 2016 14:50
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MrAristocrates posted:this show takes place in a loving political cartoon Yeah, this pretty much nails the show for me. I enjoyed it while I watched it because Sorkin's florid banter is a guilty pleasure even through in the back of my mind I know a lot of the messaging and subtext sucks, but in the front of my mind I knew there were a lot of stereotypes and tropes in this show that it wasn't even trying to be subtle with. Even that Ave Maria bit is a recycled West Wing greatest hit. MrAristocrates posted:Charlie just walks into Juilliard off the drat street and hires a full class of musicians. Super minor nitpick, but it's my recollection that Charlie's daughter is studying there, which is why he has an in.
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Jan 21, 2016 15:00
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Most of the show is a West Wing recycle.
Max fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Jan 21, 2016 |
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Jan 21, 2016 15:10
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I'm happy I bookmarked this thread. It was worth the wait. 
mom and dad fight a lot fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Jan 21, 2016 |
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Jan 21, 2016 21:04
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Season 3, Episode 5: “Oh Shenandoah” What the hell do I do about this? I have no goddamn clue how to respond to what I just watched. How does an episode of television just completely fail on every conceivable level? I found nothing to engage with in this abomination, no saving grace, nothing whatsoever to salvage from it. There's no angle here for me, it's all just awful, lovely noise without anything to help me make sense of any of it. This episode is a loving black hole from which no sensible characterization or narrative throughline can escape. This plague, this dark loving miasma that spreads to consume all joy in the goddamn universe achieves unthinkable feats in its own badness, and the worst part is that by going this far to insult it I'm actually overselling it. It's not watchably bad, it's not funny-bad, it's this awful goddamn haze that's only even interesting when it's actively offensive to my sensibilities. Looking back, I almost can't believe this is a real episode of this show. Everything about it reads like a parody of an episode of The Newsroom. I'm using a lot of hyperbolic language here but I'm not even really mad at it. It's just... why? Why does this exist? How was this allowed to exist in its current form? How did something like this even get out of the scripting stage? So at the beginning of the episode the most friendly and talkative prison guard in the world leads Will into jail, and then 52 days later (despite us already having been told no journalist has ever served more than eleven days for a contempt charge), Will's stuck hanging out with a wifebeater who rants about the entire courtroom for his trial all being women, loves George Bush Sr., and complains about Jews controlling the banks, media and Hollywood. Their first scene together ends with Will saying “Raise your hands above your hips and I'll knock you the gently caress into next week,” which is hilarious for multiple reasons, one of which being that Jeff Daniels was 59 when this aired. The relationship between Will and his cellmate isn't terribly compelling, but worse, it's repetitive. Will spends most of his time subtly acting smug, consciously or otherwise, while his new “friend” calls him on it. It feels like the writers could only come up with a few story beats and had to stretch them to cover multiple scenes. I really just wonder why they even bothered, though, because these scenes feel pointless and totally disconnected from the main plotlines. Not that those stories are really any better than this one, it's just that I can't find anything to take from this. It ends with Will bringing back up his own “mission to civilize” yet again, revealing it to be a reference to Don Quixote, a story about a crazy person who leads a charge against perceived evils in the world and, in the show's own words, “gets his rear end kicked.” Now, while this is clearly meant to be a reference to News Night being forced to sell out to succeed, I can't help taking it one step further and making it about the show. It makes sense doesn't it? News Night and the show The Newsroom did the same thing, constantly railing against “injustices” and getting attacked by the critics. I guess my question here would be if Sorkin is actually self-aware enough to make that intentional or not. Either way, it kind of undermines your show to have the lead character admit the entire thesis statement of your show was all a huge waste of energy in the penultimate episode. The issue with the Don Quixote reference is that it portrays them as in the wrong, with no indication that any of their sacrifices have been worth it. Not that I actually care whether or not News Night succeeds, but it feels like one last kick in the teeth. We're not quite done with Will yet, though. See, in a remarkably stupid and convenient plot twist, Neal's source kills herself on the footsteps of the Department of Justice building. However, despite there being no one left to protect and the DoJ already knowing everything, Will refuses to give up the source's name in yet another scene of choosing ideals over reason, long after the former stopped making sense in the first place. I have a lot of problems with everything about this. For one, the deus ex machina that is the source's death is completely out of nowhere and kills any tension this story might have had. And even if there was tension, stalling Will's exit doesn't actually add any, it just pads the episode out, because Will's lawyer and the DoJ guy eventually just say “gently caress it” and let him out at the end of the episode anyway. Plus, later we have the Don Quixote scene where Will establishes that for all his ideals he's in jail and News Night is... well, we'll get to that. So, what? What is this episode even trying to say about Will that he'd make that choice and then immediately turn around and contradict himself? And then, when Will leaves... I didn't dream the part where it turns out Will's cellmate is the ghost of his father, right? That happened? Because holy poo poo, that's one more for this absolute mess of an episode. I actually had to go back and watch that part again because it was so bizarre I had no idea what was going on. Even if that's what those scenes were building towards I don't take back what I said about them feeling pointless because why on Earth would you have Will spend an entire episode talking to his ghost dad, dear lord. I want to laugh at that, I feel like I should, but I can't, because there's something actively oppressive about this episode's badness and it's slowly killing me inside. Back on the subject of News Night, Pruit's put up Twitter monitors and is directing News Night to cover social media. Fine, whatever. If this is supposed to be some massive injustice I can't care. He's also poking his fingers in how stories get covered and approving celebrity stalking apps, which is where it gets bad. Mac and Don are still trying to fight, but Charlie seems to have completely given in, accepting any request made of him. Pruit's involvement in stories leads us to the infamous rape subplot. See, Pruit wants a victim of rape at Princeton who set up a website where victims can name their attackers to go on the air with the man she accused. I assumed this was bad because maybe it's a story worth covering, but not in a way that makes a victim face off with her rapist. Instead, she seems up for it while Don tries to talk her down. Yes, Don. Not even a female character. loving Don, who for that matter does an insane and frankly rather creepy amount of work to track this girl down. It's all awful, of course, because what other possibility was even there? At the very beginning, the girl accuses Don of being afraid of being alone with her because she'll cry rape. Gross. It becomes very clear very immediately that this show, by way of its very choice in perspective, is completely incapable of treating this issue with any real nuance. Don says that, as a journalist, he is obligated to believe the accused is innocent even after acknowledging him as sketchy and his story as laughable. Sorkin wants us to feel empathy for the people who might be wrongfully accused as revenge via this website. Fine. But he wants us to feel empathy for them over this girl, right in front of us, who's been hurt unimaginably and will more than likely never find justice. And Don continually acts like he knows best for her down to the very end. When he tells her she's just going to bring more heat and slut-shaming down on her own head, it doesn't come off as an empathetic warning. It comes off as yet another patronizing white guy trying to protect a woman by denying her agency, a feeling redoubled when she doesn't change her mind in the end. Instead of respecting her wishes, Don doesn't even respect it as her decision to make, telling Charlie he couldn't find her. Anyway, Sloan plans her own small rebellion against Pruit by taking on an app Neal's current replacement made that allows for quick and simple e-stalking of celebrities. Sloan, with Mac's approval, tears the guy apart on the air, but it's the easiest target in the goddamn world on a show that already had a serious problem with going after issues no one is on the other side of. That's one of the weird things about this show. When it's not going after pretty-cut-and-dry Bad poo poo and expecting us to cheer, it tilts at windmills constantly. Anyway, that ends with Charlie going on a tear and shouting his goddamn head off before Pruit comes down and demands that Mac and Sloan both be fired. We need to talk about Charlie. His transformation into this new version of himself, this total concession to ratings and social media and everything Pruit wants would be really fascinating... if we had any idea how he got from A to B, especially in only 52 days. Like, the main problem we see with ACN with Pruit at the helm is the suggestions to stories that Pruit makes personally, but Charlie just goes along with whatever, offering no resistance. That might work if we had any kind of perspective on this change, but we don't get that. In the last episode Charlie nearly physically assaulted Pruit, and in this one he's completely subservient and dead-eyed and we don't learn anything about it. We don't even get the satisfaction of watching him return to his old self at the end. It's honestly the biggest missed opportunity of the entire episode. Instead, at the end of the episode, Charlie seems like he might be about to talk Pruit down from wanting Mac and Sloan fired... and then he just loving falls over and dies of a heart attack. We gain no insight into his character transition and his death serves no dramatic purpose. Unless Pruit now has firing power, but firing two characters in the final episode after killing one in the episode prior seems way too bleak to be where they're actually going with this. Shockingly, the part of this episode that really killed me wasn't the one that heavily involved Aaron Sorkin's views on what a rape victim should and should not do. No, it was what I always knew it would be: Jim and Maggie. I'm beyond caring about either of these two anymore, I just wish they would loving go away whenever they're onscreen because this insipid romance plot is acidic. How have we not moved past this yet? If there's one single thing that clearly did not work from past seasons it was these two. The plot involves Jim and Maggie flying to Russia to get on a flight Edward Snowden is taking to Cuba (spoilers: it's the one he eventually ended up not being on, because I actually remember that dumb bit of non-news) and Maggie implores Jim to call Hallie to make up. Instead, Jim realizes he likes Maggie and they kiss and it's super romantic, ugh. I was hoping beyond hope that at the very least if they were heading in that direction they wouldn't get together even in the final episode because actively rooting against the nightmare that is those two characters, together, has been something I've done since the very start of all this. This is probably the hardest one I've ever written. There's just so much bullshit leaking from every pore that trying to cover it all leads me into a rambling mess. When I said this felt like a parody, I meant it. It's got all the worst elements of this show turned up to eleven with absolutely no self-awareness, tact, or narrative flow. It's melodramatic while simultaneously failing to dramatize the moments that are important. No part of this episode works. And to me, all any given part of a show needs to do is work. It just needs to do its job satisfactorily. I love the hell out of Jessica Jones (a show that actually manages to handle rape well), which is, make no mistakes, a deeply flawed show. But even the weaker parts work well enough for me that I'm able to look past them for that show's great performances and thematic richness. But this doesn't have anything that works. This episode is a clock that's so broken it runs sideways, Nothing does its job right, nothing is as it needs to be. There's no baseline of quality. It's all terrible. Worst episode I've seen? Yes. Maybe of anything. At least I can rest easy knowing that the worst is behind me. Probably.
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Jan 25, 2016 20:29
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Fantastic work.
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Jan 25, 2016 20:41
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I really really really can't wait for you to watch the final episode. I really need to read that post. Really.
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Jan 25, 2016 20:41
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The Don thing gets worse when you remember that earlier this season, Don was a coward and didn't want to tell one of the reporters on staff that he doesn't like her writing, so instead he just has her supervisor (who has slept with her) to give her some bullshit excuse. Then he gets mad at her when she blows up in his office (with the HR rep present.)
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Jan 25, 2016 20:43
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They've been bringing up Will's alcoholic dad since the first season, but it always ends up being a b-plot footnote that never becomes noteworthy. Sorkin must have had an abusive father or something. MrA, you've written 32,612 words about The Newsroom. That's 47 pages loosely pasted into Microsoft Word. Feel good when you wrap this up.
mom and dad fight a lot fucked around with this message at 15:52 on Jan 26, 2016 |
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Jan 26, 2016 03:15
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MrAristocrates posted:Up next is the episode some of you have been waiting for. Oh dear. MrAristocrates posted:And then, when Will leaves... I didn't dream the part where it turns out Will's cellmate is the ghost of his father, right? That happened? Because holy poo poo, that's one more for this absolute mess of an episode.
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Jan 26, 2016 11:28
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MrAristocrates posted:I will finish this show by the end of the month. I'm rooting for you MrA.
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Jan 31, 2016 11:38
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Oh, he's watched it. He's trying to form words.
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Jan 31, 2016 13:02
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Khablam posted:Oh, he's watched it. 
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Jan 31, 2016 17:36
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Season 3, Episode 6: “What Kind Of Day Has It Been?” You know, I'm not really sure what I wanted from this. Finales are weird. There's so much that they need to do and be to provide a satisfying conclusion and tie things up without inflating their own importance so much that a lot of series (most, even) completely botch it. What would a good finale of this show look like to me? I'm not sure I can answer that. A somber acknowledgment that the times have changed and the news are becoming irrelevant is probably too much to ask for, and god help me I'm probably too invested now to want that in the first place. What I wanted out of a finale of The Newsroom is not the same thing as what a finale of The Newsroom needed to be, however. Was the finale either of those things? No. Of course it wasn't. It makes two crucial mistakes here: First, it stages almost the entire episode at Charlie's funeral, not a terrible idea if this was a different show and the validity of the entire premise wasn't in doubt going into this, so spending all our time at a funeral watching Will sing country seems like a giant waste of time. Second, there are flashbacks. When all I want is for the show to look forward and actually give some closure to its characters, it spends maybe a third of its runtime bogged down in flashbacks. Not just any flashbacks, no. Flashbacks to that speech at Northwestern, and the events surrounding it. The continued mythologizing of Will's complete mental breakdown keeps baffling me, especially when it means we rush the plots I actually care about so we can spend time learning how pathetic Mac was before she accepted the EP job at News Night. There's even a weird bit of interaction between Don and Sloan in those flashbacks where she almost asks him out that seemingly exists for no other reason than to tie everything up with a neat bow. Of course, there's also the moment in those flashbacks where Mac pulls out the book Charlie gave her and it's Don loving Quixote, and after writing something like 500 words about how bullshit that reference was last episode that's the moment I realized this entire show was just one huge practical joke on me. It feels weird saying I care more about one set of plots than the other because neither are terribly interesting, but at least one of them are doing the job of an actual finale. But even all the funeral stuff doesn't add up to much. There's a lot to unpack here, so let's just get to it. Mac is pregnant, Don and Sloan can't stop talking about how they basically murdered Charlie, Will keeps ducking out of giving a speech about Charlie, Maggie's up for a field producer job in DC thanks to Jim, and Leona calls Mac in to talk to Pruit about some issues he's been having. Mac's pregnancy storyline is completely inoffensive and at least feels like a finale-type thing, so I can't really care too much. Will's ridiculous overprotectiveness is a cute character beat, at least, from someone I at one point started completely ignoring humanizing moments for. It ties in neatly with the ghost dad stuff too, but I really only bring that up because it's too silly to ignore. Anyway, there's a few scenes where Will accidentally reveals too much and the information immediately disseminates throughout the entire funeral, and there's really nothing more to say about that. It's a pretty nothing plot that I only even mention because it's the show actually having its heart in the right place for once, thinking about the future instead of literally getting stuck in the past with flashbacks. At least it's not the aforementioned scene of Will, Jim, and Charlie's grandson singing “How I Got To Memphis,” which happens, I guess. It's a weird scene. As for Don and Sloan, well, they're busy confessing to Charlie's closest friends and relatives that they murdered him by making him really angry on purpose. First Will, whose complete non-reaction is actually a pretty great gag, but then Don goes up to his widow, and that's where it gets bad. See, Mrs. Skinner reveals that Charlie didn't want to do the Princeton story either, and that he wanted Don to fight him on it. So he was faking being completely subservient to Pruit? Why? For whose benefit? Did Pruit install secret cameras in the newsroom? Why did he push so hard if he didn't want it? Wouldn't a better way to fight the story be to actually fight the story? Why did he get actually angry? Why the gently caress did he die? This makes no sense! There's also the bit with Leona, Mac, and Pruit, which is where pretty much all of the actual plot happens. See, Pruit's having problems with supposed sexism in his personal life and hiring policies, because he's actually kind of sexist. I'm cutting a lot of the story, none of which really matters, and cutting to the chase: Leona convinces Pruit that the best choice for the new head of ACN is someone who'll fight him on decisions, which seems like a giant spit in the face to Charlie, who very emphatically was not doing that. Leona convinces Pruit to solve both those problems at once and hire Mac. The resolution to this feels really rushed, because it totally is. It's a total deus ex machina meant to get rid of the concerns about Pruit taking over, which this episode really needed to deal more with. A real finale of The Newsroom, at least from what I would have thought, would involve that element heavily. Instead, it's glossed over. I do think it's kind of hilarious how on-the-nose it is that Mac got both pregnant and promoted. It's like she got Finale Bingo. Back to episode twenty-five of Jim and Maggie's inane bullshit, Jim got Maggie an interview for a field reporter job in D.C., and their bit of the episode is having a mini-argument over whether or not Jim is being weird by not expressing that it sucks that they won't see each other as often if she gets it, or whether Maggie is reading too much into their three-day-old relationship, and shoot me in the loving head I don't care. Anyway, when Mac gets promoted Jim gets made the new EP of News Night and he decides to promote Maggie to senior producer, which she turns down because she wants to be a field producer and the D.C. job would put her in line for the White House. It's actually a neat little resolution to that story, but then Jim professes his love for what is the first and blessedly the very last time. At some point during all this, Neal's plane lands and the first thing he does is head straight for the newsroom. See, he has the important task of talking to the new ACN Digital guys, none of whom were invited to Charlie's funeral (read into that however you may), who are writing clickbait pieces about the most overrated movies of all time going all the way back to The Matrix. He tells them that he's worked hard to build up ACN Digital and worked hard for respect from his peers when all he got was mockery, and that in his absence all that work has been ruined. Well, gently caress you Neal. You didn't get respect from your coworkers because you tried to push stories about Bigfoot. And gently caress you Jim and Maggie, you insufferable morons permanently stuck in your sickening teenage love fantasy. And gently caress you Don for that rape plotline. And gently caress you Mac for all your dub moralizing. And gently caress you Charlie, you dead old windbag, for having such nonsensical character motivations that you literally loving died. And gently caress you Sloan for being the only likable character. And gently caress you Will. You're the worst of them all. gently caress you for everything. gently caress you for being everything I dislike about this show. gently caress you for being a self-absorbed old man refusing to accept the changing times. gently caress you because despite everything I don't even hate you. I don't. I don't really hate Will McAvoy anymore. I don't think I really like him, but all I see now is this sad, broken old man in there. I don't think I'm supposed to, I think I'm supposed to see past that and see the man that he is despite it, but I don't. Even the “good” about him just adds to it all. In fact, I don't hate any of these characters. I don't hate this show. I can't put it into words what I feel, but I don't hate it. I feel like I've just finally come to terms with what exactly this show is. There's a line near the end where Mac expresses that it's all gonna be harder than it ever was before. Just because she has the job doesn't mean that things are over. Pruit's going to be riding them for ratings and stories. And you know what? I'd watch that show. I really would. That sounds interesting. It's kind of disappointing that it stops right there, but maybe that's one way to do a good finale. Maybe stopping right before something new and exciting is a good ending. And the way it all actually goes out, on the beginning of a regular, ordinary newscast, is almost kind of poignant. I'm not saying this is a good ending, but I'm saying maybe part of this whole disaster works. And maybe that's what this always was, for me. Trying to dig through the esoteric bullshit to find whatever bits there were that worked or were interesting. When I started this, I was really worried about running out of words. I still kind of can't believe I didn't. 34,000 words later, I'm still going. Farewell, Newsroom. You weren't always great, but you were always something.
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Feb 1, 2016 04:15
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I'm not doing Studio 60.
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Feb 1, 2016 04:17
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grats chump
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Feb 1, 2016 04:41
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Great reviews. I'd be really interested in reading your review of Sorkin's Steve Jobs movie.
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Feb 1, 2016 04:50
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GAME OVER YOU ARE FINISH GREAT JOB! Sorry you had to go back and clean up all that West Wing sick up. It was pretty good the last time we ate it... Don't do SportsNight either. Social Network was cool tho.
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Feb 1, 2016 05:08
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Nice, you finally finished. Can't believe it's been a year and a half.
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Feb 1, 2016 05:21
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MrAristocrates posted:I'm not doing Studio 60. You really should. It's more entertaining. Compared to the wet fart of The Newsroom's mediocrity it was more like an out of control bonfire at a primary school Guy Fawks night. You could also play re-used plot/character/dialogue bingo.
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Feb 1, 2016 05:35
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I enjoyed reading the results of your suffering. Thank you.
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Feb 1, 2016 06:48
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Congrats for making it to the end!
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Feb 1, 2016 07:50
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blunt posted:Congrats for making it to the end! The princess is in another castle.
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Feb 2, 2016 02:17
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It's happening! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik3JTaj21eo
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May 11, 2016 21:32
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That speech from the premiere is still popping up on my news feed as if it's the most mind-blowing thing ever. loving Facebook. Echo Chamber fucked around with this message at 01:24 on May 12, 2016 |
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May 11, 2016 21:37
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Toshimo posted:It's happening! why
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May 11, 2016 21:38
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I like how the title of that video assumes that The Newsroom was so loving culturally relevant that the name of its main character is more than enough to work as an undefined proper noun.
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May 11, 2016 21:56
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As much as I enjoyed your reviews, this is a better summary of them all.
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May 12, 2016 01:20
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| # ? Apr 24, 2024 09:18 |
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Echo Chamber posted:That speech from the premiere is still popping up on my news feed as if it's the most mind-blowing thing ever. I actually liked the show the whole way through, and yet I hate that scene because it assumes that someone saying America is not the greatest country in the world would be an absolute shock to a room of the pseudo-jaded 20-somethings who make up Northwestern's journalism school.
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May 12, 2016 02:16
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