The Newsroom
“So … we’re all landing on our feet.”
Sloan Sabbith says this as she stands in an ACN conference room talking to her boyfriend, Don Keefer. Don has just turned down a promotion to be the new executive producer of News Night with Will McAvoy, a post that had been vacated by Mackenzie McHale after she was named news director. She, of course, will be replacing Charlie Skinner, who died at the end of last episode. In fact, it was earlier that day at Charlie’s funeral when Leona Lansing convinced Lucas Pruit, new owner of ACN, that Mac was the woman for the job and set all of these loose-end-tying dominoes in motion. After a very grim final season, The Newsroom ends with a happy song.
The song is a cover of Tom T. Hall’s “That’s How I Got to Memphis” done by none other than Will McAvoy, Jim Harper and Charlie Skinner’s grandson. They are all gathered, wearing their suits and ties, to celebrate the life of Charlie. “What Kind of Day Has it Been” flashes between the funeral itself and scenes of the beginning of it all — Charlie recruiting Mac to come to ACN, Don’s first interaction with Sloan, Mac at the Northwestern panel, etc. The episode style is reminiscent of the season two premiere of Aaron Sorkin’s masterpiece, The West Wing. “In the Shadow of Two Gunmen” also wove the origin stories of its characters in with a big event, providing a double dosage of character depth through the past and present. Even the title of this episode should be familiar to Sorkin fans, as it was also the name of the Season 1 The West Wing finale.
In the modern half of “Day,” the big news outside of work is that Mac is pregnant. That’s right, Will McAvoy is going to be a father — or at least, there’s a five in nine chance he’s going to be a father, according to Mac. Will takes the news with child-like giddiness, a nice change from the somber mood set forth by his imaginary run-in last week with his father. The whole episode is marked by that same kind of brand-new optimism and happiness. While it may have seemed like a quick, cheap move by Sorkin to use this episode as a love-filled erasure of everything that has gone wrong with ACN, it’s definitely the right one. In only 25 episodes, the show didn’t build the kind of consistent reality that a finale would have to stay true to; it’s all right for everyone to land on their feet.
The criticism that the show took on in its early stages and that eventually led to Sorkin ending the show presumably early prevented it from evolving into many things. What became clear in the flashbacks of this episode and the return to the noble idea of what makes a newsman and newswoman is that this whole series only ever followed one storyline: the transformation of a news show. If you took out all the exterior character stories (Jim and Maggie first, please) and any kind of event-based drama (Genoa and the docs) this show was about a news network who went from a hollow, ratings-seeking missile to a real source of real news. In that sense, it has been one big comment on what the news should be and a critique on what it actually is. Whether you agreed with that critique or comment really shaped whether you bought into everything else — whether you watched or hate-watched.
Two of the flashbacks were long conversations involving Charlie — one with Will about the direction of his show, the other with Mac about becoming EP — that showed how integral he was to that transformation and how much he cared about both of them. His conversations with them are what stand at the heart of the show, that desire to do things better than they’re being done. They show a refusal to accept a reality and the passion needed to create a new one.
The Newsroom was like any show featuring a protagonist trying to fix something. But in this case it wasn’t Batman or Superman trying to save the day — just Don Quixote on a mission to bring justice to the world.
Sidenotes:
– Unfortunately, the series ends with Maggie and Jim together, promising to stick it out even if Maggie gets a promotion in Washington. So many things are upsetting about this scenario. There has to be some kind of HR rule against recommending someone for a job (and later offering them a promotion) just because you’re sleeping together.
– And while we’re questioning this finale, why did Neal completely get shafted here? The guy comes back from months of being on the run abroad and he doesn’t get anything? Not even an excited hello from a co-worker? And why doesn’t he go to Charlie’s funeral once he gets in? He’d rather make fun of the tech department? (Never mind, that was pretty great). The whole Neal storyline became about Will too quickly and then died too quietly.
– There was a disconcerting lack of Don-Sloan comedy in this finish, but luckily Gary Cooper saved the day. “It took a lot of sparrows to make that table.”
– One the biggest lasting impacts of this show is sure to be its stellar opening song. I don’t see it leaving my head anytime soon.
– My final note is less about the show and more about the online culture it created. As I started to write these recaps, I also started to follow other sites and their recaps to compare theories the next day. It seems that one thing that this show really brought out in a lot of popular outlets was hate-recapping. I don’t really understand the appeal of hate-watching something, let alone hate-recapping something.
To write something about a show that is consistently negative and condescending really serves no purpose and adds nothing to the conversation. To me, it defeats the purpose of what these are supposed to do. In my mind, the job of a recap is to tell what happened and maybe analyze why it happened. I see a recap as a way to add another dimension to a show, and I hope I have done that this season. I just found it funny that most of the coverage of The Newsroom was representative of the kind of problem the show was really about. Overall, I’d say that it wasn’t Sorkin’s best work, but it certainly didn’t deserve the reputation it carried.
