HIGH MINDS TURN FROM MURROW TO THE MOON
In Sorkin’s ‘Newsroom’, romance, scoops and a pesky libel suit make for a barely believable office during the show’s second season
Anyone who tried to follow the crisis in Egypt on CNN while the Zimmerman trial was going on knows that The Newsroom isn’t entirely wrong about what’s wrong with cable news. Aaron Sorkin’s Newsroom began its second season on HBO last July in the US when CNN seems to have fully surrendered to the ratings-first leadership of Jeff Zucker. Even as millions of Egyptians took to the streets, and the military deposed President Mohammed Morsi, CNN kept its focus stubbornly on a Sanford, Florida courtroom.
But that real-time validation alone doesn’t make the case for The Newsroom, a Brigadoon version of cable news that, among other things, looks backward. The show’s fictional reporters cover real events that are no longer current: Season 1, which began in the US in summer 2012, was caught up the first Tahrir Square uprising, which began in January 2011.
The Newsroom started as an eloquent but overwrought tutorial on politics and journalistic ethics that, for all its wit and dazzle, was labourious to watch: Insufferably high-minded characters kept interrupting their reporting to declaim the sanctity of the news.
The Newsroom is still righteous and romantic, but the characters now compete less over virtue than over virtuousity. There are new faces this season, and two of the better additions aren’t even journalists. Most important, the narrative this time around is driven by an overarching story line — a libel suit — that pulls viewers past the rocks and eddies of liberal piety.
This revamped version of The Newsroom is no less preachy, but it’s a lot more fun to watch.
The new opening is telling. The original elegiac, maudlin homage to Cronkite and Murrow has been scrapped in favour of sprightlier music and a snappy montage of clocks, newspapers, smartphones, scripts, laptops, spilled coffee, video monitors and stiletto-heeled pumps.
The story starts off with Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), the anchor of ACN, trying to explain to that cable network’s high-priced lawyer Rebecca Halliday (Marcia Gay Harden, one of the new guest stars) how his news team messed up a major report about US troops in Afghanistan. A source offered a new, ambitious producer, Jerry Dantana (Hamish Linklater), the kind of scoop ‘‘that makes careers and ends presidencies’’.
But, actually, the government’s legal case against the network could well end the careers of anchors and news division presidents. ACN had to retract the report, then hired Halliday, a top litigator, to coach Will and his team through a deposition and possibly a trial. And the mistake might never have happened had it not been for a bizarre pileup of events that are revealed in flashbacks, layer by layer, almost Citizen
Kane- style. This fresh start has the added advantage of breaking up last season’s overworked romantic impasses and putting young lovers on new trajectories.
Jim Harper (John Gallagher Jr), still mooning over Maggie (Alison Pill), decides he needs to get away and assigns himself to the pre-primary campaign of Mitt Romney. In New Hampshire he meets a beautiful but unwelcoming reporter, Hallie Shea (Grace Gummer, a daughter of Meryl Streep).
The campaign’s press-hating press secretary, Taylor Warren (Constance Zimmer), treats Jim even more icily than Hallie does. Zimmer, who played a world-weary political reporter on the Netflix series House of
Cards, here perfectly captures Republican operatives’ contempt for a press corps they view as in the tank for the enemy. When Jim tries to board the press bus, a junior campaign aide bans him and instructs him to take his car and spend his own money on gas.
There are still many disquisitions — Jim harangues the bloggers on the bus for following campaign dictates like sheep and never asking tough questions; Sloan Sabbith (Olivia Munn) is in high dudgeon over drone attacks; and Will is as smugly superior as ever about everything from the lyrics to a song by the Who to the content of Article 240-2-7 of the New York State Penal Code (on disorderly conduct).
The one-upmanship is dizzying, with characters reeling off statistics about drones, the death penalty, the credit crisis, African leaders and Willie Nelson like auctioneers at a cattle show. Will is the champion know-it-all, ordering an intern to look up all eight musicals that won a Pulitzer Prize — and list the composers, lyricists and librettists. His certitude is contagious. ‘‘Can you tell me three differences between a Sunni and a Shia?’’ Maggie asks her boss, executive producer MacKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer).
‘‘I can tell you more than three differences,’’ MacKenzie retorts. ‘‘I was shot at by both of them.’’
Sorkin introduced The Newsroom as a fantasy workplace where reporters are glib and clever but never cynical, and there is a right side to every story.
This season, he adds a more interesting layer by showing how even the best minds with the best intentions can be dead wrong.