Catch up on Newsroom
The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin’s wildly uneven, oddly disorienting fictionalized drama of a 24-hour news channel that taps real-life news events for stories, returns in two weeks with a new season, but the same strange, off-putting tone.
HBO is repeating the first season in sequence, as a primer for first-time viewers, perhaps, and to give returning viewers a more accurate fix on what The Newsroom is supposed to be, and trying to do.
Saturday’s episode, The Blackout, Part 2: Mock Debate, touches on the Casey Anthony trial – as George Stroumboulopoulos noted recently, while talking up his late-night CNN summer talk show, American cablenews channels have an inordinate obsession with salacious criminal court trials – and on the Republican primary debates for the U.S. presidency.
The story revolves around a proposed GOP debate on The Newsroom’s liberal-leaning (fictional) news channel, and how the candidates’ handlers want to control the line of questioning before agreeing to terms.
The proposed debate ends predictably. Right and left are not going to see eye to eye, even in the best of circumstances, and this allows some of The Newsroom’s characters to sound off about how no one could have seriously expected the debate to happen in the first place.
Somewhere in all the speech-making is a commentary on the divide separating U.S. politics, and how the TV news audience deserves better than all-day coverage of maybe-murderer moms, and it’s food for thought, to a point.
The Newsroom wants to be a romantic comedy, though, in addition to lampooning the 24-hour news channels, and it isn’t long before the love triangles, quadrangles and every-other-which-way angles get in the way of the story.
The Newsroom can be maddening to watch. The discerning viewer is constantly reminded of what it could have been – The West Wing, set in a national-news TV newsroom – only to be reminded of what it really is, a silly TV rom-com played out against a backdrop of real-life news events.
It has its moments, though, especially on an otherwise threadbare Saturday when there’s no hockey.
The Newsroom may swerve uncertainly between comedy and drama, but at least it tries to be something more than the norm. It’s a little as (fictional) news producer MacKenzie (Mac) McHale (Emily Mortimer) says of noteworthy (fictional) news anchor and ex-boyfriend Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) in Saturday’s episode, by way of Sorkin: “You know what I like about Will? He’s not absolutely sure about anything. He struggles with things. He’s never certain he’s right, and sometimes he’s not, but he tries hard to be.” Back after this. (HBO Canada – 7:30 p.m. Season 2 of The Newsroom begins July 14).