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Fetus Tree posted:Was that lyman to the cop?  It was Agent Coulson to Donna. quote:CUT TO: INT. WHITE HOUSE LOBBY - DAY Josh Lyman fucked around with this message at 14:25 on Dec 26, 2014 |
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Dec 26, 2014 14:23
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JohnSherman posted:There's a difference between not recommending a show, and recommending a show but telling someone to skip the introductory season. The first one makes sense, the latter is dumb as gently caress. As already mentioned: Parks and Recreation is the obvious exception and there are other shows with weird recommendations like how you should really watch Twin Peaks by starting with the pilot, then watch season 1 and the first half of season 2 and then you skip a bunch of episodes until the last 4 of season 2 and only then do you watch the prequel movie. Also OZ is a better show if you skip chunks of episodes, but not the start.
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Dec 26, 2014 20:45
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I didn't realise Grace Gummer (Hallie) was one of Meryl Streep's daughters. The slightly-hooked nose and resting bitch face should've been dead giveaways
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Mar 2, 2015 22:55
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Oh gently caress, I completely forgot about this. I'll post something on Wednesday maybe.
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Mar 3, 2015 00:15
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bubblelubble posted:I didn't realise Grace Gummer (Hallie) was one of Meryl Streep's daughters. Well, time to unsubscribe from this thread I guess
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Mar 3, 2015 00:21
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bubblelubble posted:I didn't realise Grace Gummer (Hallie) was one of Meryl Streep's daughters. 
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Mar 3, 2015 00:28
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uh yeah what the gently caress
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Mar 3, 2015 00:37
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bubblelubble posted:I didn't realise Grace Gummer (Hallie) was one of Meryl Streep's daughters. gently caress. 
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Mar 3, 2015 00:49
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I AM OFFENDED TOO.
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Mar 3, 2015 03:15
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I am not because who gives a poo poo.
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Mar 3, 2015 04:13
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Fetus Tree posted:I am not because who gives a poo poo. Mr Aristocrates is on a mission to civilise.
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Mar 3, 2015 23:40
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Annnnnd we've come full circle
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Mar 4, 2015 00:22
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HorseHeadBed posted:Mr Aristocrates is on a mission to civilise. He's the greater fool 
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Mar 4, 2015 00:26
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I just started watching WW after liking all his other shows. He really has a thing about exes working together.
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Mar 4, 2015 00:54
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Nevvy Z posted:He really has a thing about exes working together. This stops being a thing like 3 minutes into the second episode.
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Mar 4, 2015 02:20
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Season 2, Episode 2: "The Genoa Tip" What can I say? I got a bad case of the flu back in December and then I completely forgot to finish this, if anyone still cares. I actually did manage to watch the next episode before I took that sabbatical, but I ended up having to rewatch it because it had been so long. In the end I was noticing a habit wIth my criticisms, mainly focused around the poor structure that plagued the show. Maybe the time away would help me to refresh, and maybe even like the show more after having gotten away from its tedium for a few months. Clearly I was a loving idiot for even considering that possibility, but it was a nice thought. I picked a nice moment to take a break, though, because oof. This is by no means the worst episode, but it’s definitely the most episode. This one was absolutely exhausting, and I just have no idea where to begin. This episode is so littered with story beats that Maggie has two separate plots this episode. Even the Genoa plot, which the episode is named after, is relegated to a side story so they can do other things, which is indicative of how busy this episode is, but also makes me wary of how much meat that story’s really going to have. The episode ends with a nice hook as Jerry Dantana finds a man who claims to have been part of Genoa and confirms the sarin gas story, but I’m still cautious. Things do happen in this one, but it’s all organized so haphazardly it was impossible to get my bearings and just makes it clear how much of the rest of the episode is moving pieces into place. The episode seems like it’s about four hours long and it feels like it introduces and focuses on a new set of plots every act. Neal’s OWS story, for one, is mentioned once in the first act and then pops back up out of nowhere in the last fifteen minutes. Because it’s all so busy I ended up taking an ungodly amount of notes just to keep track of what the gently caress was going on. Here’s a list of all the plots in this episode that I managed to keep track of:
I’m sure I’m missing something, but it doesn’t matter. I’m not even consulting my notes any more because a while in I realized it was pointless, there were just too many and so little actually mattered. The least involved are probably the Jim plot and the one with the 9/11 coverage, followed shortly by Neal’s OWS story, the best scene of which involves Will yelling at Officer John DiMaggio about drone strikes. The two I’ll actually bother to go into are Don’s and Maggie’s, one of which because it has some good character work surrounded by some issues I’d like to discuss in-depth and the other because it’s goddamn absurd in every way. See, for seven years Don has been covering the case of Troy Davis, a black man convicted of killing a police officer and sentenced to death. Time’s running out for clemency and the case is looking grim despite the fact that nearly every witness has recanted (some of whom admitted to outright lying). One of the voters on the parole board switched their vote after lobbying (which is illegal for the lobbyist), resulting in a 3-2 vote against, and if it seems odd how much I’m going into detail here, it’s only because the show was even loving worse about it. The problem with the way it’s presented is that the show’s duty to inform gets in the way of its storytelling because it forces the episode to be a classroom. We have to know every detail of how this is such a terrible and grievous miscarriage of justice so we can be mad about it, and it’s a shame because the parts where I thought the parts where Don lets himself too close work really well. Upon finding out about the person who switched their vote, Don angrily makes a facetious comment about calling them and threatening to expose them, and it’s unclear if he was really joking. It went a little too far a little too fast, but the rage and desperation he felt there totally resonated with me. I was also annoyed by Will's fence-sitting and refusal to advocate not because I think that's an unreasonable stance but because Will has done so much advocating previously that not doing it in this instance seems to run counter to the entire history of News Night 2.0. And while the Maggie plot is absolutely insane, I can’t even really get mad at it. Maggie e-stalks the woman who posted the tour bus video to track her down with Sloan. The woman is absolutely terrible and Sloan is forced to shill her gross Sex and the City blog in exchange for… nothing. Lisa finds out anyway because the woman never takes the video down. Boy, does Lisa find out. The first time I watched The Lisa Scene I was livid at what I was watching but the second time I just couldn’t stop laughing. It’s incredible. Lisa’s takedown of Maggie is so brutal, so unforgiving and cold, such a perfect calm fury that it rises to one of the best moments of the show period. I’m glad at least one character on this show recognizes how stupid this all is. Even I can appreciate obvious poo poo like that every once in a while.
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Mar 11, 2015 18:19
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I don't have anything to say about your review other than I enjoyed it and I'm glad you're back 
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Mar 13, 2015 11:55
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Season 2, Episode 3: “Willie Pete” This might be the “best” episode I've seen. It's at least one of the most cohesive. If I squint hard enough there's a common throughline to most of the plots, it all flows pretty nicely, and aside from one scene in particular it wasn't an actively terrible show. I was even willing to give the romance stuff a pass despite it, upon reflection, being pretty goddamn bad, which just shows that I've lowered my standards to a frightening degree and is also probably a sign that this show is slowly killing me. The show's not actually getting any better, I'm just beginning to appreciate its rough edges. The other side of all that, though, is that it's helped me to articulate some issues I've been having. The main thing I came to realize is that the show is just too long. It's completely unable to sustain itself for an hour and the characters don't have enough to do. It also regularly commits a bizarre sin I've almost never seen before in the medium: Every act there's a new set of plots. There's typically a main plot that spans the length of the episode, but even that's subject to weird shifts in tone and purpose every twenty minutes or so, and the subplots all shuffle in and out with little regard for pacing. Sometimes it pops up in the middle of the episode and it's gone by the third act, sometimes it starts the episode then disappears until the last ten minutes, and sometimes they just shove it into the last quarter because gently caress it, we have all this footage, put it somewhere. And the worst part is that these issues all combine to make episodes feel tedious and overlong. Episodes of the Newsroom feel almost twice their length, and I say this as someone who saw the new Avengers twice. The episode that's best managed to escape that “trap” is “5/1,” but as I wrote there, it managed to gently caress up, ironically enough, by making the plots more or less equal in prominence despite them in no way deserving it. This episode manages to minimize most of those issues but it doesn't avoid them entirely. The main plot still splits into weird chunks but it's not as egregious as it is at its worst, there are still too many plots but they're not quite as hard to follow and actually get updates regularly throughout instead of being shoved to one end of the episode or the other. I'm shocked how forgiving I ended up being with this one, considering that the main plot (which is really always just whatever the gently caress Will is doing, because he always gets the most focus) involves all the worst and most bizarre plot points from his character last season. Nina Howard the tabloid reporter and his mission to civilize? Back! The message Will left Mac while completely out of his poo poo on pot brownies? Back! And it's a romance plot, too! Of all the weird, bizarre poo poo to come back, I didn't expect I'd be seeing more of Will's inane “mission to civilize.” What's more, parts of it almost work this time; while it's still hilariously misguided and the decisions made incomprehensible, it seems to be rooted less in complete cynicism. It doesn't seem like Will is doing this just to prove his own moral superiority this time, instead due to his belief that humans are fundamentally good and are capable and willing of doing better. Well, it's still Will, so there's a tinge of the former, but it's still a decent thought. The problem is that Will's honestly never felt all that well-defined to me, so even within the rather broad context of everything else I still barely understand what he's doing here. The plot's start is basically that Nina Howard somehow knows Will didn't have the flu on 9/11 and that he was told not to go on the air, and instead of saying nothing or sticking with the original story, Will decides to meet with Nina under incredibly creepy circumstances and admit to everything on the record, then tell her even more, and then appeal to her better nature and the sanctity of 9/11 (not making that up) to convince her to reveal none of it. And it works. Nina appreciates the irony and doesn't run the story. And then Will asks her on a date! And she only refuses because she illegally hacked his phone and heard the pot voicemail he left Mac and knows he's still in love with her! And then she tells him Mac hasn't moved on, and he would have been absolutely insane to have ever thought otherwise, because during this series of events, Mac has been relentlessly pestering Will for two goddamn months about the contents of the voicemail. This is all some of Mac at her worst, insisting that Will's not really mad at her and he should forgive her, and blah blah blah. I don't buy it. She's the one who hosed up, and I don't believe that Mac's not emotionally mature enough to not realize she doesn't get to set those terms. And it's not that it's inconsistent with what we've seen of her, it's that when I put the pieces together, they don't add up to a whole person. She's an incomprehensible caricature. She's fearsome and driven and powerful when producing but when it comes to Will she acts like a child. She's a complete mess, and not in a funny way like Sloan. However, it turns out Sloan accidentally gave a date, who turned out to be Nina Howard's book agent, information that could have revealed that Will didn't have the flu, making her think she was the one who leaked the information. However, Charlie and Will realize that Sloan couldn't have been the leak because she didn't have all of the information, leading them to realize the person who told Nina was actually Reese Lansing. Outraged, they confront him with the tape of him admitting to the hacking, but he doesn't give a poo poo. He calls their bluff and knows they'll never let anyone see it, and he just wants Will gone. And in the end the recording is blank, because gently caress everything and gently caress me for ever caring at all what would happen. Mac eventually calls Nina to ask what was on the voicemail, and is lied to, told that the message was a simple congratulations. And then we find out she's taking the call from Will's apartment, ugh. I'd really prefer we just get on with this, show. Jerry Dantana continues investigating Genoa, this time interviewing Eric Sweeney, who claims to have been a member of the team that used sarin, as well as white phosphorus. Charlie and Mac poke all sorts of holes in the story but nevertheless tell Jerry to follow up. He does this by getting a bunch of the crew to help him use Topsy to search Twitter to find tweets from the area at that time period, which have to be translated into English from Urdu, getting a bunch of irrelevant bullshit with no way to sort or expedite the process. In the end, they do manage to find a bunch of relevant tweets (right before Mac shuts them down, naturally), and knowing how this all ends I'm actually somewhat intrigued. Please don't gently caress it up. Another brief plot that I wanted to spend some time on is the continuation of Neal's Occupy Wall Street plot, which is just terrible. Despite his having been arrested in the last episode in the pursuit of this story, Mac proceeds to mock him, express anger at the movement because one idiot hosed up a cab ride for her, and say some typical Sorkin poo poo about the leaderlessness and the disorganization and the “pajama people,” while in the same breath criticizing Fox News' coverage. She eventually agrees to let a supporter on the show, but it's still an awful scene, and while I don't have any great love for Occupy Wall Street Neal's requests for basic coverage were in no way unreasonable. I'm not looking forward to the scene where Will tears apart the OWS supporter live on air, either. I am 100% convinced that scene will happen, by the way. All this, and I haven't even mentioned the Jim plot. When I say I liked this episode, it may just be because it's all a breath of fresh air compared to the Jim plot. You see, Jim is still being an rear end, asking questions to the campaign staff that he knows he can't possibly get answers for, and trying to push others into doing the same. He's just being annoying. Hallie even calls him out for it. “We live here, and you're visiting.” Jim tries to play it off, saying that they've grown complacent and don't know how to ask tough questions, but I really don't understand why the show expects us to side with him. Hallie is right. Jim's far, far above doing grunt work like early campaign coverage and everyone there knows it. His refusal to play by everyone else's rules comes off less as some kind defiance and more as an imposition of his own superior values. The others aren't under the pretension that their election coverage is all that important, they're just doing it because someone needs to do it. They have no reason to care, and Jim's just there to be loud and obnoxious. The final speech on the bus that Jim gives to try to win over the rest of the press is a terrible, terrible scene. The end punchline of Jim standing on the side of the road is visible from orbit it's so telegraphed with the only surprise being his convincing of Hallie to join in on his bullshit (by the way, making Hallie's question be about abortion after she'd expressed her annoyance with the perception of abortion as the only major women's issue earlier in this very episode is incomprehensible to me). It took me about twenty minutes to get through that scene I was rolling my eyes so hard. Recounting this all, most of it sounds pretty goddamn bad, but I mostly enjoyed it anyway. I even managed to gin up a weak throughline while watching about people pushing and pushing and refusing to compromise their values beyond the point of reason, which seems especially weak now that I realize that's probably something like 60% of all Sorkin plots, with the other 40% being “I hate women and young people.” I guess I'm just giving this show too much credit, in which case: gently caress. Grade: F
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May 18, 2015 17:19
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Season 2, Episode 4: “Unintended Consequences” I thought we had an understanding, show. I grouse ineffectually about a show that ended months ago on a “regular schedule” and you produce shallow, infuriating holier-than-thou bullshit and bad romance plots. I kept up my end, but this episode is some white bread, milquetoast poo poo. It's like Diet Newsroom. It makes a child getting fatally shot in the spine boring. An episode mostly free of the things that annoy me should theoretically be good, but the show doesn't replace it with anything. Despite containing the least bad parts of any episode yet, it's probably the worst one I've seen just because it got nothing out of me. How bad is an episode of The Newsroom when I can't even be bothered to get angry at it? And believe me, it's bad. Jerry's plot, for instance, revolves around an unbelievable loving coincidence in the first 10 minutes that completely poisons the well for the entire episode, and the entire main plot revolves around nearly every single person involved acting like a petty child. Of course, the main source of the nothing comes from the Maggie plot, which sees a return to the framing device of the season's first episode. Of course, aside from an implication that Jerry's throwing her under the bus, her plot is only loosely related to Genoa, instead covering her and Gary's trip to Uganda as they visit an orphanage, and until poo poo hits the fan. The kids mistake Gary's camera for a gun because he's a moron, but other than that it's all just padding. Maggie befriends a child named Daniel, and Maggie and Gary realize too late they waited too long to leave and will have to stay for the night. Of course Daniel dies. Even before you know his name, you know he's going to die. The show puts too much effort into singling him out and having him bond with Maggie. He's not an actual resident of the orphanage, for one, he's just staying with his teacher, a family friend, to be safe. At this point the dramatic irony is so thick you can see his death coming from low orbit, and then when he gets left behind when the cattle thieves show up there just isn't a question what will happen. The sole interesting thing that's done with it is having their filming be the actual cause of the attack, but all of it is just so overwrought I actually came out of it feeling nothing. And the worst part is, you could have fixed a lot of this by cutting most of the Maggie narration. Really only one or two bits are needed other than the ending, which is related to the issue of trying to prove Maggie competent to stand trial (which, unless I completely misread that ending, she almost certainly will not be, considering she's off her psychotropic meds). Even the intro scene has almost no purpose other than being really loving weird with the lawyer trying to get Maggie to laugh. I'm starting to think this show is some genius loving study of incongruent tone because every episode I'm counting at least one bizarre, out-of-place comedic scene in the middle of something that should be pretty serious. Cutting the Maggie narration would let the material stand on its own, at the very loving least. It wouldn't fix the entire huge problem of this African child dying just to trigger character growth for a privileged white woman, but at least every part of it wouldn't come off as a foregone conclusion. Maybe I could at least try to care then. Although part of the reason I'm upset with the Maggie narration is that it gives us a moment near the beginning where she describes Will as having “murderlized” Shelly, the OWS woman Neil found to represent the cause on News Night. Now, I was prepared to be infuriated by this, especially because I loving called it, but I wasn't, namely because I didn't find it to be accurate. She tanks, of course, because Sorkin has a clear and absolute disdain for her, but Will's really not all that harsh. He's cutting, but even his hardest jabs land completely flat, and could be easily rebutted by someone who knows what they're doing (He asks dumb poo poo like “Which system would you replace capitalism with?” and goes on about how the free market means his pay is fair). Shelly's problem is just that she falls into obvious semantic traps and lets Will control the conversation while not properly rebutting his points. She's clearly just unprepared, and seeing multiple characters, including Will himself, describe him as “smug” is a little weird. I mean, he's Will, of course he was, and he does try to gently caress with her before the segment because he's an rear end in a top hat, but that doesn't mean Shelly didn't have more than enough of an opportunity to do well in there. But that's not the end there. See, Jerry can't find the Twitter user who posted about Genoa, which makes that plot somewhat pointless, and that story's hit a dead end, until Shelly, just before heading into the studio, offhandedly mentions a friend who has information on a black op involving chemical warfare. Yes, loving really. Now, unfortunately, after Shelly bombs she decides to be incredibly petty and not tell Neal who this friend is, and because this show loves contrived stakes, the separate attempts of Neal, Sloan, and Don to convince her to tell them each end with them laying into her because she's just so annoying. And then at the end it doesn't even matter because Will shows up, apologizes for being smug, and then tells her they already found the guy without her help so none of this mattered at all. I was going to say something about this show's bizarre, constant belittlement of Shelly, a character with clear, strong convictions who instead comes off as a shrill harpy who eventually realizes Will was right, until I realized that's every minor female character on this show and now I'm just depressed. And then there's the Jim plot, which is almost not even worth bringing up except for one actually good scene. Hallie's in trouble with her boss for the bus stunt, so when Jim gets a campaign staffer to chew him out he manages to get her 30 minutes with Mitt Romney, which gets Hallie angry with him for feeling like he needed to do that for her, and gets Mac to take him off the campaign. Hallie's indignation with Jim, and their subsequent argument about whatever he meant when he was doing it, really worked for me in a way that none of the rest of that plot has. Unfortunately, the show kind of ruins Hallie's part in it by having them make out by the pool right after, but this episode seems dedicated to a perfect balance of “eh” and “meh,” so it's not really surprising. Unfortunately, this means that Jim and Maggie are back at work together, god. I've considered that I've just built up a tolerance to whatever this show exudes but no, this was just the most weak, nothing episode of television I've ever seen. I don't really know else to describe it. Even when this show is boring it manages to piss me off, usually, so I don't really know what the hell to make of this. I mean, it's clear that this episode was necessary, as it closes off some plots and transitions deeper into others, but there's just nothing to this episode on any deeper level, and it's bizarre. If this show can't even work me up anymore, I'm in trouble. Grade: Beige
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May 18, 2015 17:19
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How much do you miss Terry Crewes right now?
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May 18, 2015 18:01
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Toshimo posted:How much do you miss Terry Crewes right now? Considering he should be in literally everything im not sure thats a fair question
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May 18, 2015 18:09
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This was a bad show and I'm happy you are still working towards finishing it.
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May 19, 2015 06:12
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When the finale first aired I fast forwarded the part in the garage when they play "How I got to Memphis" cause I felt embarassed for the show, but having seen it recently on Youtube I have to admit I like it. Still hate the scene, thoguh.
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May 19, 2015 15:57
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Season 2, Episode 5: “News Night With Will McAvoy” I'd been wondering when we'd get this episode. From the very beginning it seemed almost obligatory that the show would do an episode that took place more-or-less in real time, covering the entire length of a broadcast of News Night. I'm honestly just impressed the show had enough restraint to wait until Season 2. I'm a sucker for shifts in format, and the episode's easily the best of the season so far. The gimmick gives a more solid sense of purpose than this show has felt in a long time. The format is just naturally propulsive, and it really can't be overstated how much better it all suits the show. There's still a few scenes that fall flat, of course, but that's as much as you can hope for with an episode of this show. What makes it surprising that it works is that most of the drama doesn't come from the circumstances of putting together a broadcast. Maggie, Mac, and Will all deal with those issues, but the show's never the main factor there. They've got their own problems (or in Mac's case, Will's) to deal with, and the news is not presented as some massive important life-altering thing, but as their jobs, and jobs they are perfectly capable of loving up (especially Maggie) when they're distracted. Despite how weird and important the events going on in these peoples' lives are, it's just an average Sunday, and they have to put on a show. I loved everything about that. I've complained so much before about how the show portrays news events as profoundly affecting these peoples' lives, but by pushing all of it as far into the background as possible, it allows the characters to actually come first for once. When Maggie, stressed as hell, mistakenly edits the George Zimmerman 911 tape to cut out a key bit of context, I actually buy the mistake as something more than making GBS threads on Maggie. When Will fucks up a question because he's distracted by his estranged father calling, I'm thinking, “yeah, that's a bit soap opera-y, but I'll buy it!” And while I'm not going to say it's the (or even a major) factor in the episode's success, it's not lost on me that this episode contains absolutely no overt romance. Sure, the scenes with Mac and Will or Don and Sloan don't even try to hide that the characters will get together, the scenes have other purposes. There's no dumb pining, no incessant asking about the contents of a loving voicemail, no goddamn Sex and the City tour buses, it's all gone, and it all works, for the most part. Will's plot is pretty decent this episode, and not just because he's trapped in his chair for most of it with no one to interact with but Mac, Neal, and his guests, who we barely see. Will gets a call from his father at the beginning of the show, and it turns out he's in the hospital. Mac keeps pressuring him to leave a message, but by the time he does, his father has died. Will then comes out of the last break, wordless, motionless for a full forty seconds before continuing. It's genuinely affecting even if the story is somewhat predictable. I especially enjoyed Jeff Daniel's performance when Will tells Mac his father died, a moment that—god help me—actually made me care about Will for a minute. Genoa doesn't get much focus this time around, with Charlie talking to a government press agent who knows they're investigating Genoa and comes in to defend it without ever saying as much, then gives them a manifest from the operation. This story is ramping up and I don't know how to reconcile what I know from the framing device with what the show is telling me in the present. I'm intrigued, but I feel like I'm being set up for disappointment. The story seems almost too plausible at this point, and I'm going to be annoyed if it does turn out to be true and they get hung up on a technicality or something. My main issue with this scene is that it's rather transparently crowbarred in because it's needed for the rest of the season and doesn't really match with the format. This one-hour period was already a bit stuffed even without this happening, and it's a bit of a stretch. Maggie's small subplot also managed to be not terrible, which I think is a first for her. Despite how much I rolled my eyes at her Uganda plot I don't hate the way she's reacting to it. Taking bitter potshots at Jim (which I'd love no matter who was doing it) is great, and her mistake with the audio cut was also totally believable. Don and Sloan are mostly in the background but they spend most of the episode together, and it's probably the best part of the whole thing. Sloan's ex, a colossal douchebag, posted nude pictures of her after their breakup, and she spends most of the episode hiding in an empty office while Don tries to comfort her. Don, meanwhile, is trying to find someone to retract a conservative news site's story, their source being... him, having made a sarcastic comment that was taken literally. It goes for the easy jokes about the disreputable nature of conservative news outlets, but in the end it goes far enough with it that I didn't really mind. In the end, Sloan figures out how to fix Don's problem, kicks her ex in the nuts, and goes on the air anyway, so a great plot all around. My main issue is that Sloan's recovery from her humiliation is a bit too reliant on Don, but the whole story is handled about as well as one could expect. It's a good episode, but on another level this is all immensely disappointing, because I know this doesn't mark the start of some trend. What made this episode good will be gone by the next one. This format is probably unworkable for the rest of the show, I'm aware, but it's still that we're just going to go right back to the exact same issues of overbearing romance and historical revisionism that the show loves so much. This episode proves there's a good show somewhere locked in the mess that is The Newsroom. I just wonder if I'm ever going to see it again.
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Jul 15, 2015 22:32
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The Sloan story in that episode is a weird one because it was written right after Munn had nude photographs leaked in real life (I believe she may have denied they were her). The timing of that sub-plot always made me feel uncomfortable. Like Sorkin was exploiting something lovely that happened to one of his own cast. But, obviously, I have no idea what the actress thought of it.
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Jul 15, 2015 22:54
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YES KEEP GOING
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Jul 17, 2015 03:54
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Sub Rosa posted:YES KEEP GOING This. Also I found it interesting that you found Maggie's mistake reasonable given everyone at the time was insistent that Sorkin was making GBS threads all over her for the sake of it. Season 3 continues the drift away from real stories to fiction. Not that it really gets any better.
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Jul 17, 2015 04:19
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Season 2, Episode 6: “One Step Too Many” Coming out of this last episode, my main thought is: this show should really be half an hour. So much time, not just in this episode but every episode, gets completely wasted to pointless tangents in dialogue and entire scenes and subplots that end up being complete wastes of time. Just in this episode there's bizarre conversations about Santa's reindeer and misunderstandings about Disney movies. Despite them doing nothing but talk Aaron Sorkin consistently writes characters who have no idea how to communicate with each other. If we could cut so much of the fluff filling this episode it still wouldn't be great but at least it wouldn't feel like I'm wasting my time. Of every episode I've yet done this is the one I most dreaded rewatching because it's so boring. I so often complain about this show's tendency to stuff a million plots into an episode but it's better than this, where almost nothing happens at all. There is one plot that's somewhat interesting but it gets sidelined for half the episode while we watch the boring adventures of Jim and Will, consistently my least favorite part of this show. The Genoa plot finally gets to be the focus after loitering in the background for the last several episodes. Through intensive cross-referencing the team finally finds a retired three star general played by Stephen Root who is in a position to speak as to the veracity of Genoa. When they go down to talk to him, he slips up and gets defensive about sarin gas despite no one actually bringing it up. Charlie insists that he, as a defender of the use of chemical weapons, should talk about this, logic that I don't quite understand. The entire point of the story is that the use was on civilians, and the general presumably knows this if he knows anything about Genoa, so how would this make a good case for him? Shouldn't he just refuse? They decide to send Jerry down to interview him the next day, but before that happens, we have to get to the rest of this episode. See, the main Genoa stuff comes at the beginning and end, leaving the entire middle a huge dead zone serving to fill time and nudge forward the ongoing romance arcs. Will continues his never-ending fear of his audience leaving him and has been conducting a focus group and taking advice from his girlfriend Nina Howard, who has been feeding this anxiety of his. I appreciate the vulnerability this fear gives Will, but the entire thing is so low-stakes it's impossible to care, especially in comparison to Genoa, and even worse we've already seen this. Will's already lost his nerve before and had to be brought back over. He's already commited himself to News Night 2.0, so making us watch him gently caress it u again is agonizing. Making Nina the catalyst for it also seems pretty weird, turning her from a character with at least a hint of nuance into kind of a weird parasite serving to corrupt Will. Thankfully, it seems like we're at least moving past this. Nina urges Will to go on ACN's morning show as a boost, but he realizes he's making a fool of himself, ending with him sabotaging the appearance by intentionally spiraling a football into a light tree, a scene that barely makes more sense in context. While I'm on the subject of Will, though, it's a good chance to talk about this episode's News Night segments, which are utterly baffling, not just because they're more political cheerleading, but because they're redundant political cheerleading. For whatever reason, we're tearing into the 2012 Republican nominees again. Yes, show, I remember the last time we did this. The real reason I wanted to talk about this, though, is because I realized something: News Night's trying to be a serious version of the Daily Show (in some respects Last Week Tonight would be a better comparison, but that show didn't exist yet when this episode aired). Aside from the occasional token conservative comment by Will it's all spot-on. The way they structure their segments is pretty much exactly the same. It just makes the way News Night seems revolutionary that much funnier, considering Jon Stewart's been doing a non-pretentious version of the same thing for the last decade. Unless Jon Stewart somehow doesn't exist in this bleak alternate timeline, in which case this show is much worse than I originally thought. Jim's plot involves him constantly getting cockblocked. I'm not kidding. Hallie is in town for Romney's campaign and she and Jim are going out. However, she decides to bring along an associate, another campaign reporter from MTVU who is the exact stereotype of a Ron Paul supporter right down to shouting RON PAUL 2012 and ranting incoherently about how we don't need clear air or water regulations because freedom. She tells him to bring Neal so they can double date but really because Sorkin wants someone to rip into her philosophy, which happens, instead of the realistic response of saying nothing because unlike an Aaron Sorkin character your entire life does not revolve around politics and you're capable of letting stupid poo poo go unacknowledged if it'll ruin dinner. But that's not all! Hallie also decides to bring along Taylor, a Romney campaign staffer that was effectively Jim's nemesis on the bus, resulting in every scene of dinner having constant political arguments, because that sounds like a great time. Taylor, being not a human but some sort of vengeful she-beast, decides to come along because News Night spent six minutes and twenty seconds on Romney's “Etch-a-Sketch” moment, because what the hell. All this is even weirder, because we find out later that Taylor just lost her job for being too moderate and making similar suggestions to Jim's to improve the campaign. First, her decision to keep needling Jim right after getting fired is bizarre, and second, the attempt to humanize a conservative voice here completely fails, because she got fired for not being conservative enough and agreeing with the protagonists, which makes the villains here the Republican party, again. The attempt to express nuance just made everything feel even more black-and-white. The best of the non-Genoa stuff is a few brief scenes between Mac and Don in a bar, though most of it is Don pining over Sloan. I'm honestly just starting to want Don to get together with Sloan (same with Mac and Will) just so we can move the hell on from all this. There's a decent scene, though, where Don expresses that even if Genoa is true they should consider not reporting it due to the inevitable retaliation. Anyway, when we get back to Jerry, Stephen Root gets on camera but refuses to speak with anyone except Jerry in the room (because he's the one he researched), then dances around the question of the use of sarin, refusing to talk in anything but hypotheticals, frustrating Jerry. And then Jerry Dantana was a loving moron. Jerry, fixated doing right and fixing wrongs through his job, he edits the file to make it sound like a confirmation, then presents it at the team's meeting. When Mac and Charlie still don't think it's enough, expressing doubts in the general's memory, Jerry flies into a rage, ranting about how they all love Obama and something stupid about Pearl Harbor that has nothing to do with anything. The months go by and they eventually find another source, someone they'd originally thought was dead, and they decide to run the story. However, we cut back to the framing device, where months in the future Charlie is talking to the lawyers and tells them that five minutes after the show ended, he knew that none of it was true. I thought it was going to be half-true or something, or a key detail would be inaccurate and the whole thing would fail on a technicality, but this is just hilariously insane. I can't wait to see how this all makes sense. Or better yet, how it doesn't.
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Jul 20, 2015 20:01
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I remember way back when this episode aired, I really thought that the final cut to Charlie being deposed should have been the first mention of their legal troubles, as that would have added some suspense to the season. Starting the season off by telling us the Genoa story was fake had done a disservice to the storyline since every single scene involving it was dramatically flat.
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Jul 20, 2015 20:58
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Max posted:I remember way back when this episode aired, I really thought that the final cut to Charlie being deposed should have been the first mention of their legal troubles, as that would have added some suspense to the season. Starting the season off by telling us the Genoa story was fake had done a disservice to the storyline since every single scene involving it was dramatically flat. There are still interesting ways in which they could have sold it, like "how does the respected journalist come to the point of faking news", "how does he cunningly sneak it past the team", or "what intense stuff is happening that the team fails to figure it out until it's too late". That kind of idea, however, is saved for a better written show.
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Jul 20, 2015 22:23
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Season 2, Episode 7: “Red Team III” Well, that was about as good as an episode of this show has any right to be. One hilariously contrived moment and the usual pompousness aside, it manages to pretty effectively tie up the at times tedious but generally compelling enough Genoa story. Now, at least, we finally know what these lawyer scenes are about : Jerry's suing for wrongful termination based on the premise that he's a scapegoat for the story making it to air at all, which he describes as an “institutional failure.” It's the biggest dick move possible, but the issue is that he's technically right about that last part. Jerry doctored the tapes, yes, but there's a lot more to it than that. One of the things I appreciate is that with one exception most of the discovery of falsehood doesn't actually feel all that contrived, instead holes making themselves apparent and then the discovery of their mistakes, spiraling outwards until the entire story is consumed by it. I also kind of enjoyed how much of a fight it was to get the team to agree to tel the story in the first place. Nobody trusts Jerry's original source, and some don't trust Jerry himself, which is fair because he's clearly trying to tell this story in part to push a narrative and seek some kind of vengeance. Given this show's stance on trying to use the position to right wrongs (particularly those in relation to torture), it's an immediate red flag, though not much that wasn't covered by Jerry's bizarre rant last episode that covered similar grounds. Looming over all that, though, is the fear that maybe the story shouldn't be told, as it will only inspire retaliation. In the end, they decide to run it. The story gets absolutely stellar ratings, and then it all falls apart. The general's footage was doctored, but they chalk his reaction up to sudden cold feet. The Department of Defense fails to respond for a startling amount of time and when they finally do release a statement it's harsher and more confident than anyone could have predicted. Their first witness lied about his brain damage and Mac unwittingly led the second one, who then lied to help him. The manifest was falsified. Their missing Twitter user's prepaid cell plan ran out. Together these all seem like a bit much (and I'll get to the manifest), but most of these feel like believable mistakes to make, particularly Mac's. I especially love the way she comes to realize her witness offered no new information. Her obsession over those details was probably the best moment with that character in a good while, and the way it all leads to her uncovering Jerry's fraud works wonderfully, even if the double foreshadowing of the visible shot clock in the edited footage via the new segment clock as well as Will's basketball game is a bit heavy-handed. It doesn't all work, though. Part of the reason the team becomes confident enough to move on the story is because it turns out Will heard the same story. Later, it turns out that the manifest that Charlie received two episodes ago was falsified. His source was the father of a recovering drug addict who used to intern at ACN before being fired for a series of tweets who then committed suicide, the father then faking the manifest as revenge. This is all contrived as hell and no part of it really makes any sense. I pegged pretty much immediately that Charlie and Will's source were the same person (though the show reveals this moments later in a flashforward to the lawyers so they weren't even really trying to hide it), but I feel like Will and Charlie are too close for me to buy that will Will would have not at least discussed it with him at some point following this meeting. The big problem, though, is that the falsification of the manifest turns a series of mistakes into willful sabotage, the kind of grandiose external threat that I always hated in this show. For gently caress's sake, the man even says he thought about having Charlie killed, but that this would be a worse consequence than death. At some point during all this I realized this was all taking place in the early September of 2012 and let out some sort of guttural death moan. I will admit, there was a part of me that legitimately feared this show would let the reaction to Genoa be part of the story in this universe's version of Benghazi. How grateful I was, then, that not only did this show not do that (which is honestly almost a disappointment because it seemed kind of like the show was building to it), the show decides to pretty much just skip the subject altogether by making it the background to the episode's main story much like it did back in “News Night With Will McAvoy” with Trayvon Martin, another news item I really didn't want this show to focus on. However, much like that episode included the devil's advocate poo poo of Will validating the claims that Martin was “acting suspicious.” this episode uses the loss of credibility from the Genoa story to force News Night to act against its better judgment and run the same story as everyone else: Benghazi was a protest of a movie, not a terrorist attack. Once again, News Night could have been the best, but the circumstances prevented them. In the end, Will admits that despite Jerry's fraud, it was, in fact, an institutional failure that allowed that fraud to make it to air in the first place. He'll call the election the next day and then he, Mac, and Charlie will resign for the sake of the network. Leona, though, has other plans. Despite all her griping she's legitimately proud of ACN and isn't going to let Jerry gently caress it all up, telling them to win back the audience. I should hate this scene, I know I should, but Jane Fonda sells the entire thing so well that I can't. She carries that final scene, to the point where I actually got excited at the end when she yells at Charlie to get the trust of the public back, and declares that they're not leaving and Jerry's not getting a settlement because they're going to win. It's too easy. I know it is. But there's some part of me that really appreciates the schlock, and I always prefer when this show tries to be hopeful and inspiring rather than cynical. It's not hard to win me over, I'll admit. I'm just a sucker for earnest poo poo like this.
Arist fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Sep 12, 2015 |
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Sep 12, 2015 18:56
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Season 2, Episode 8: “Election Night, Part I” Man, this is a nothing episode. And I mean “nothing,” because that's exactly how much happens. It's really interesting seeing everything about the format, not only of the medium but the episode itself, work against Sorkin here. Not only is the episode mercilessly padded and almost entirely devoid of real conflict in order to fill out the first half of this two-parter, but the episode's gimmick leaves it trapped in the ACN building for a night with no way move the ongoing plot forward or build tension. The episode builds to its “cliffhanger” and then ends unceremoniously with a completely normal moment that carries no inherent tension. I thought at first that both parts aired on the same night because there's absolutely no way that was it, right? When I found out I was wrong, I had to wonder if maybe it was supposed to. The problem is that there's clearly too much of what does matter to make it possible to cut out the parts that don't. This is a story that doesn't work as a two-parter because it's too back-heavy (I'm giving the episode some massive benefit of the doubt in assuming the second part has more going on than this one), and the conceit of the episode makes it impossible to compress time in an effective way. But there's clearly too much to resolve, not just in terms of this main story but in relation to seasonlong character beats—at least, I hope, for all that to just peter out quietly would be really goddamn lame—to work into a regular-length episode. It's fair for the show to do an episode about the election, but it probably shouldn't have been this episode. Unless the show takes a hard left turn in the next episode trapping the show in the ACN building and not letting time pass leaves no way to resolve some of the central threads and already has me pretty worried about how much the second half will actually resolve. I briefly considered watching the second episode before writing about this one so I'd have more perspective here, but gently caress it. Let's maintain some purity in this trainwreck. All those problems are exacerbated by them literally being the central themes of the episode. The main conflict in the episode is that Leona won't let Charlie, Will, and Mac resign, so Charlie is trying desperately to get Reese to convince his mother to change her mind before Jerry's lawsuit goes through the next day, which will air a bunch of horrifying dirty laundry, including all the godawful romantic quadrangle poo poo that infuriates me. Meanwhile, the election is happening, and ACN is just trying desperately to not gently caress up. The entire episode is about feeling uneasy, and not knowing what's going to happen tomorrow, which is perfect for an episode about covering an election, but in this case just points out that nothing interesting is going to happen tonight. We know who wins the election. What we don't know is what will happen with the story or characters the day after that. There's really nothing more interesting that can happen to these people than what we know is waiting just over the hill. And we kind of know they won't actually have to resign, just like we know Will's promise to fire Mac at the end of the night is a blatant lie to make her feel better, like we know Jim isn't actually going to get fired for being the first idiot of the night to make a mistake and call a district early, and like we know Obama is going to beat Romney. They're all going to happen because that's how this works, and while it would be really interesting if they completely flipped the script and had Romney win in the next episode, the show won't do that because it's not willing to break itself in any of the ways making any of those decisions would require. It'd be a far more interesting show, but it wouldn't be this one. Going that route might even be easier, considering how little mileage the show actually gets out of the election premise. This episode is only 48 minutes long. Even with all the padding for time, that's a full ten minutes shorter than the previous episode. All the scenes of actual coverage, plus the aftermath of Genoa, plus all the ridiculous side stories couldn't even get the show to 50, though to be fair the show does painfully little to actually show us the election coverage. The most interesting things that happen are Sloan inexplicably bringing up Genoa live on the air and Taylor, Jim's nemesis from the Romney campaign bus who was presumably invited on because she was literally their only choice, going on a tear about the liberal media. The rest of the episode is full of stories like Mac's struggles with her Wikipedia article, Sloan's attempt to find the person who bought a signed copy of her book so she can actually sign it, Don and Maggie getting the lead on a breaking scandal, Don learning that Jerry is also suing him because Jerry is a massive loving prick, Will and Mac trying to hash out their issues, and the previously-mentioned fuckup where Jim makes a call way too early and has to get it removed surreptitiously lest he get fired as Charlie has promised. The Wikipedia story goes absolutely nowhere and serves only to highlight Mac's tensions... I guess? I feel like giving it even that much credit is too much. The Sloan plot, at least, is more substantial, but it's completely undermined for me by the fact that it's Don. The person who bought her book is so loving obviously Don. I don't know why they're even bothering to hide it, and I'm not editing this out of the final draft if it somehow turns out I'm wrong, because I won't be. They've been building to this for a while, and it's exactly the kind of schmaltzy poo poo this show loves. The stuff with Mac and Will is probably the most important of all of it, though, and it's probably the worst handled. Mac's worried Will is going to completely lose his poo poo at some random time, which sounds kind of like projection on her part since she's clearly in much worse shape, but it also seems like it's always a risk knowing Will. No, the main issue comes when Mac brings it back around to their relationship for some reason, because Sorkin feels some incomprehensible need to drag out these romantic woes as far as humanly loving possible. I wouldn't even hate this plot if we could just cut to the loving chase and not have to get refresher courses every two episodes. Anyway, Mac feels like Will is “punishing” her, something he has the gall to somehow deny he's ever done despite the fact that he bought a diamond ring just to convince her he was going to propose before she cheated on him. My issue with most of the romantic plots in this show is that they feel like they take place in a separate universe outside of any sort of reason. They are confusing, inconsistent messes and Mac's by far gotten the worst of it since the very start. In the end, Mac begs Will to fire her because he's the only one who can. Will complies, secretly firing her once the show ends, which I've already called out as a completely transparent lie for her benefit. And then the episode just ends. ACN comes back from a break in a moment that feels like it's expected to have tension but doesn't, at all. The big cliffhanger is that Mac is fired, except she's obviously not because why would they do that? It all builds to nothing. All setup, no payoff. I really hope I see why they thought it would be worth it to save all that for the next episode.
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Oct 16, 2015 17:06
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Season 2, Episode 9: “Election Night, Part II” Holy poo poo. Holy poo poo. Did I just loving dream that? Please tell me that really happened and this show actually disappeared all the way up its own rear end. I feel like I've come around on this show a lot. It's not very good, and I still don't enjoy watching it most of the time, but I've started to embrace the part of me that just wants to shovel this delicious garbage directly into my stupid loving mouth. The last twenty or so minutes of this thing have to be the hokiest poo poo I've ever seen in my goddamn life, and I loved every terrible moment of it. I was cackling through it all. If there's anything to be learned here, it's that I'm really not above any of this trash, and gently caress me for pretending I was. Because really, there's almost nothing here too different from what we've seen before countless times. It's just that there's so much of it, all over the drat place, that it becomes this truly amazing mess of hilarious contrivances and unearned sentiment that I'd normally find extremely cloying but in this case just caused me to throw up my hands and give up, because deep down I actually really love dumb, awful poo poo, and that's exactly what I got. Like, yeah, sure, just pile weak resolution for every single minor plot thread over the past two episodes right on top of each other, because who really gives a poo poo anymore? Not me, and certainly not the writers. I'm not being sarcastic when I say that I loved this, because I did, because it was goddamn incredible on levels I’m not even capable of fully appreciating. It's seriously kind of amazing to me that an episode of The Newsroom can still manage to find new ways to completely gently caress up so much essential work like pacing, characterization, defining and building upon narrative arcs, and basic structure, but by God it figured out how. Don't get me wrong, this episode is a loving disaster. Absolutely no part of it works. But like a slow-motion car crash, it's beautiful in its own way. Again, it's really not that any of this is atypical for an episode of The Newsroom, it's just that it manages to come to such an absurd, self-indulgent climax in that third act that it was simply breathtaking. I've never seen anything quite like it. Despite my renewed enthusiasm, I'm kind of disappointed there's another season, because this would be a perfect sendoff for this shitshow. Though I mostly just can't believe there's more, because it feels like even Sorkin thought this would be the end. But that's enough of me jerking off over just how loving funny this episode really is. When you get right down to it, it's all poo poo we've seen before. Mac is on some righteous quest (getting Neal to correct the Wikipedia article) when she really has more important things to do, as well as the continuation of the goddamn interminable Will/Mac and Don/Sloan stories, which I've grown past the point of hating on principle and really just wish they would move forward with. There's also more of Jim loving up the call and waiting with Maggie to find out if he's hosed out of his job if it turns out wrong, a story I was in favor of because there's no more goddamn romantic drama between them. No, Jim has his own drama when he needs to talk with his ex Lisa about getting her to reconnect with Maggie, who Hallie gets him to worry about when she notices that Maggie likely cut her own hair. Recounting it like that it's more than a little convoluted, especially because it only comes up due to the fact that Lisa is working for the company catering the upstairs election party and one of the staffers didn't hand over their phone and tweeted a picture of her. It's fine, though, because it means we're done with the Jim and Maggie poo poo, at least for now. I don't actually expect that to be completely over, but it's nice to hope. And it seems for a single brief moment like the main characters might actually be forced to resi-pfahahahahahaha, no loving chance. The series tries to play at that when it turns out Leona let Reese make the decision to fire them, but I’d be shocked if anyone actually believed it would happen for a second. The threat, while obviously fake, manages to drive a few decent scenes. Everyone in any way responsible for Genoa wants to resign with them, but Will refuses to accept it, saying that the entire reason that they’re leaving is to allow everyone else to keep their jobs. The rest, in turn, refuse to accept that. Later, in an attempt to force the others’ hand, Will and Mac both walk out during a break, leaving Don and Elliot to take over briefly. Those were okay scenes. The one Will and Mac have following that is a laughably bad one. We’re back to talking about Mac cheating on Will, and the conversation drifts back to the wedding ring, and Will admits he bought it just to gently caress with Mac and returned it the next day, which is still an unbelievably lovely thing to do to someone, oh my god. Mac, rightfully, gets incredibly upset at this like any person would, and Will leaves, still an rear end in a top hat. And then it all goes crazy. See, I really thought they would end it with another terrible, sick joke like the one at the end of last season where Neal ended up getting Will sent hundreds of death threats. That doesn't happen. The last twenty minutes happen instead. And I'm going to have to write about them all at once, as a singular event because there's really no other way to do this. Everything, every single little thing, gets resolved in the most sickeningly saccharine way possible, and I loved it because the bullshit histrionics just never stop coming. The loving Wikipedia article? After Neal gets Jim to badger Hallie, the only sane character on this loving show, into publishing an article mentioning Mac’s college so they can use it as a source, she gets angry… then writes the piece herself. gently caress it, right? Sloan also figures out that the person who bought the signed book was actually Don and kisses him in the control room. The candidate that Jim hosed up the call on wins by 27 votes. Lisa and Maggie even reconnect. Sure, there’s some poo poo they can’t possibly resolve in any kind of satisfactory fashion given the timescale, like the lawsuit. But they even manage to work around that by having Don declare his intention to countersue Jerry for intentional infliction of emotional distress by doctoring the tape, all in the middle of a truly amazing rant about how lawyers think we’re stupid because of pudding labels. Don got a bit of his own to work with but of course, it's not a true episode of The Newsroom without at least a little smug moralizing courtesy of one Will McAvoy, and we get that in spades thanks to his continuing arguments with Taylor. I know Jim probably felt bad for Taylor, but I'm not sure why the team thought bringing on someone who believes heavily in left-wing media bias and will not shut up about it was a good idea for someone to have on during the entirety of their election coverage. Will gets in some light ribbing at her expense and occasionally gets to make an actual point but it’s not until Obama has actually clinched it that he goes for the full speech against the Tea Party. Will’s speech about how modern conservative values don’t match up with his definition of himself as a Republican is nice but doesn’t have a lot of energy behind it in delivery or presentation, and honestly feels kind of weak because I’m pretty sure we’ve heard almost the exact same speech from him before. At the very least, it throws Taylor a bone as an example of a person with the right values, and it’s nice that she doesn’t end the season having come around completely to their point of view. In the end, Charlie convinces Will not to resign with some back-patting about how Genoa wasn’t really their fault, they waited eleven months, other people woulda hosed up way harder than they did! It completely takes the bite out of the mistake the entire season is built around and it’s amazingly wrong-headed. It also completely deflates Reese’s decision to not let them resign in the first place. For a twist I could have seen from space that was at least a fun way to play with it. And just when I thought it couldn’t get better, it does. Will simultaneously comes to the conclusion that Mac did everything right and he’s the one that hosed up, which, let’s be fair, she loving cheated on you. He reveals he didn’t return the ring for some goddamn reason, runs out, and proposes to her on the spot. And she says yes, because of course she does. We’ve jumped a million miles in two loving minutes after spinning our wheels for two seasons, and I don’t know if I’m stunned from anger or relief. It’s like they’d been stretching back this plotline like a rubber band the entire time and as soon as they released the tension it snapped all the way to the end. Just one more thing to celebrate. We’re all getting sued, let’s party! But let’s talk about that party. It’s so weirdly. tonally wrong to have. You just kind of can’t have the episode end on inspiring music over a montage of Good Things at a party in a newsroom immediately following the election, right? Literally the most dichotomous political event we have? There doesn’t seem to be any other way to read that than “Yay Obama.” That is actually one of the unstated things that they are celebrating, isn’t it? There’s no extra focus placed onto it, but the tone of the entire episode makes it clear. I feel like this kind of sounds crazy, but it makes total sense to me. I’m not going to say I don’t think he should have won, because I don’t believe that, and I’m also not going to sit here and criticize Obama’s policies, because that’s not what this is for. But for a show that’s trying to pretend to be impartial, about a news show that’s attempting the same, this completely taints the whole goddamn thing. Hell, this show has at least tried (occasionally, through its black mouthpiece) to weakly criticize Obama. Doesn’t it want to at least act like it’s not taking a side? In the end, the show kinda proves Taylor right. I dunno, maybe I’m just reading way, way too much into this but it comes off really goddamn weird to me. I'm going to finish this show. Not because I have to, but because at this point I want to. Like it or not, this show is interesting enough that I kind of need to see what happens next for myself. I also know that the worst episode by far is still ahead. Let’s go.
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Oct 16, 2015 17:06
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MrAristocrates posted:If there's anything to be learned here, it's that I'm really not above any of this trash, and gently caress me for pretending I was. MrAristocrates posted:I'm going to finish this show. Yeeeeessssss
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Oct 16, 2015 17:25
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The good news is the third season is only six episodes and there's a lot of Don & Sloan both being awesome. The bad news is it's mostly about fake Snowden. Either way, congrats for making it this far, your recaps are awesome.
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Oct 17, 2015 00:12
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Just caught up with the last three of these and they're a bunch of fun. Excited to see how you handle s3.
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Nov 4, 2015 09:45
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I still see people share the speech from the first episode on Facebook as if they never heard of this show. 
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Nov 4, 2015 11:59
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Season 3, Episode 1: “Boston” This one's a bit of a headscratcher for me. The show seems rejuvenated, in a way. The plots are straightforward enough and character beats actually make sense, and there seems to be a willingness to follow through on some of the outstanding plot elements from the end of last season. There's still hokeyness, grandstanding, and dumb plot developments, but they feel a hell of a lot more natural now. This feels like a good episode of a decent show. The only issue with a show this willing to correct its flaws (ostensibly, anyway) is whether or not I'm willing to forgive it. Because there's really just one thing blinding me to all the good about this episode. The initial Boston Marathon coverage was a confused disaster, and yes, Reddit did gently caress up brutally in their attempts to figure out the identities of the perpetrators. But does that mean I trust this show to tell me that? With all its hatred of new media and the internet in general, can I really look past all that? When Neal says “Social media is going to solve this crime,” I'm half believing Sorkin wants me to laugh. And maybe I could ignore this, but the show hasn't earned enough goodwill from me for that. And so here I am, stuck in a position where Sorkin is unambiguously right and I'm still unwilling to admit it because he's been so lovely about it in the past. To the episode's credit, though, it makes the right choice and makes the interesting part, telling the news, into ways to develop the ongoing arcs. This show is at its best when it's about a bunch of people trying to do their jobs well, and not about some transcendent news network that gets everything right and cares way more than everyone else. Season 2's real time episode did this well, showing everyone just trying to do their jobs and occasionally loving up. Season 1's finale, on the other hand, literally introduced a character related to someone from a minor news story so the characters would be personally involved with the story and Sorkin could continue to rub it in how much better ACN was. Tying in the consequences of loving up Genoa and Maggie's frayed mental state, which I actually kinda figured they'd just completely drop after the way they handled it previously, made a lot of sense. Maggie, who's been on something of an exercise binge to get her mind off that poor African child she got killed (what a dumb loving plot point), has the rest of the team worried that she can't handle it any more. When the Boston Marathon bombing happens, Jim wants to send her with Elliot, but Will threatens to fire her if anything goes wrong. When Elliot's allergies force him off-camera (another dumb, dumb plot point that I decided was just silly enough to get a pass), she steps in and knocks it out of the park. Of course, Allison Pill is still in the opening credits so Will's ultimatum about firing her falls rather flat, and it's also a pretty basic setup, but it ultimately works well. As someone who's really just impressed they actually decided to follow up on that, I think that it's a good way to get the viewer to place trust back in that character. As for the consequences of loving up Genoa, they're all over this episode. Everyone knows they have to get it right. They can't afford another mistake. And they wait, and wait, despite the prodding and inaccurate information of the internet and other networks, and they get it right, but it's all for nothing in the end. This is a more interesting example where there isn't a choice between doing well and loving up, because their reputation is so lovely that doing well is the same as loving up. They're right, but they're also last, and since no one cares about them anyway after Genoa, their ratings suck. Reese even has to warn them that he won't be able to protect them for much longer. It also ties in pretty well to Sloan's weird side plot where she tries to figure out an economics puzzle and ends up discovering ACN is tanking and is in the middle of a hostile takeover. It's not a great plot but Sloan is always at least a pleasure, it just feels a little disconnected from the rest of the episode for most of it. I haven't even talked about the weirdest part of this episode, which is, of course, the Neal plot, because it always is. Neal gets contacted by a conspiracy nut who asks for his encryption key. Following this, he is told to buy a computer that has never been connected to the internet. Despite round mockery from Charlie and Don, Neal is given a credit card by Will and told to buy the computer and pick up a flash drive from a men's restroom in a restaurant. The flash drive contains 27,000 stolen government documents, detailing an operation that planted false stories in newspapers that ended up killing people, including Americans, in riots, though I'm not sure why this whistleblower thought sending them to a network currently suffering from a major lack of trust was a good idea. Anyway, Neal makes the boneheaded mistake of asking for more, which means he accidentally conspired to commit espionage. Despite some occasionally funky logic it actually ranks pretty high for me on Neal's list of wacky mix-ups, though I'm not exactly looking forward to the seasonal arc that will surely come out of this. At the end of all this Will yells about quitting because they dropped to fourth in the ratings, then immediately takes it back, stating that they're going to do “a good show people watch.” Fine. More episodes like this, and maybe you'll convince me you're capable of it. Because this was a good episode if nothing else, despite my reservations about the handling of anything to do with the internet. Just keep telling stories through the characters instead of making the news do it for you. At least that's a show I can tolerate.
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Nov 4, 2015 15:10
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Reading these always reminds me how much I have intentionally scrubbed from my memory
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Nov 4, 2015 16:12
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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.
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Nov 4, 2015 17:41
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