A Father, A Fake Phone Call and Naked Pictures (Review)

Series: The Newsroom

Episode Title: "News Night With Will McAvoy"

Grade: B

Coming off one of the series' better and more eventful episodes, “Unintended Consequences,” the expectation might be that “News Night With Will McAvoy” would be a breather episode, a chance to recover and take stock of the important character developments from last week. Instead, Aaron Sorkin and company opted for an episode veritably stuffed with plot, enough of which works to make this a success. However, enough falls flat to keep “News Night...” from achieving anything genuinely memorable.

Something of a bottle episode, taking place entirely in the ACN newsroom over the course of a single show, “News  Night” is very much an episode about technology. This is dangerous ground for The Newsroom, which has too often reveled in Sorkin's oft-expressed disdain for the internet and internet culture and anything that runs on electrons.

Intriguingly, however, “News Night” takes a perspective that is, if not exactly sophisticated, then at least nuanced and understanding in a way that has not often been on display. Will is distracted by news that a Washington Post writer tweeted mean things about him. A Syrian woman calls in during the show and tells Jim that her husband is trapped under a bombed out building in Damascus. And, in the plot line that wins the award for “Most Minefields Avoided With Shocking Deftness,” Sloane has to deal with an ex-boyfriend sending out naked photos of her over the internet.

Will's mindset is also very much at the forefront of “News Night,” as he's distracted both by the Post writer's tweet and the news that his father has suffered a heart attack. Jeff Daniels does excellent work here mainly by not overplaying any given scene or emotion; he is stolid and stoic throughout, save some of the usual banter with Emily Mortimer's character, a reflection both of his professionalism and the extent to which he has submerged himself in his show. The moment where Will reveals the Post writer's final tweet (“You just lost a viewer”) is an outstanding one, both in terms of Daniels' performance and what it says about the character.

But the acting award for tonight goes to Olivia Munn, who had been somewhat sidelined in the early episodes of this season. She plays Sloane's devastation and humiliation beautifully, and Sorkin deserves credit for the writing of a plot line that could easily have been disastrous. Sloane's scenes talking things through with Don, whose character has undergone an enjoyable and much-needed evolution since the early days of the show, are beautiful; Don is understanding, but, in a wise decision by Sorkin, not perfect, and Sloane doesn't hesitate in rejecting his insinuations that she is dating obviously awful guys. And the moment where she finally break downs and says, “I wanna die,” is perfectly pitched and played.

While concerns about tweeting and other technological issues engage the staff (Neal is able to find out, off-screen, that the “Syrian” couple are actually calling from Manhattan, which nicely avoided my expectations of Jim heartbreakingly talking a trapped survivor through his final hours), the long-term storyline that propels this season is being handled in the old-style: face-to-face, journalist to source, over a drink.

Charlie receives a visit from a Navy PR guy, purportedly to discuss issues surrounding a Naval computing facility in Utah. It quickly evolves into a discussion of Operation Genoa, the black op that News Night has been sedulously looking into over the course of the season and that we know is doomed to blow up in the show's face.

The end result of this conversation? The Navy man hands Sam Waterston a piece of paper, a budget report that leaves the latter convinced Genoa is real.

I've been intrigued by the Genoa plotline since the beginning of the season, both because it is evidence that the News Night staff is capable of screwing up and the way in which it is becoming increasingly easy to see how they could screw it up. Critics, including the show's many journalist hate watchers, have argued that Sorkin's decision to set the show in the recent past makes journalism too easy; the characters always make the right calls, because Sorkin already knows the right answers.

With the Genoa plotline, however, The Newsroom seems to be showing how easy it is to screw up while chasing a story. And by making the story they're chasing all the more convincing, Sorkin shows just how difficult the practice of journalism really is.

The episode ends with a fairly standard Sorkin trope: the last-minute bombshell that one character knew for a while, then calmly explains to another character (and the audience). In this case, it's Will telling MacKenzie that his father died.

Never having met Will's father, or having heard much about him aside from a brief discussion in a psychiatrist's office (which was helpfully included in the “previously on...” vignette before the show”), this can only have so much effect on the audience. Its effect on Will is what it's interesting; we now know that Will went through a lengthy segment of the show with his father's death on his mind and never showed it. And there's a touching scene where, coming back from commercial after telling MacKenzie the news, Will stares blankly for several seconds before moving on with the final segment of the show.

“News Night With Will McAvoy” is an episode that relies heavily on its actors performances and works because of it. Ultimately, however, our read on this season is going to depend in large part on how the Genoa plotline develops. Showing the News Night staff as mortal and fallible is a good step; it would be a mistake for Sorkin to back away from it.

Notes

·         What didn't work about this episode? Maggie. Those inclined to be harsh toward the show, who have frequently complained about the alleged misuse of Allison Pill, will see her storyline, both the revelations that she's been drinking and sleeping around and her mistake editing the George Zimmerman 911 call, as further proof of Sorkin's inability to write a competent, together female character. I'm a little more charitable, in that the behavior is portrayed as an understandable reaction to a traumatic event instead of a character flaw and her explanation for the editing mistake (she had five minutes to cut a six-minute tape to 20 seconds and removed a crucial bit of context) is reasonable, but it's not a particularly compelling bit of television.

·         “The country is divided between people who like sex and people who think it’s kinda gross…” Not the most nuanced depiction of the culture wars.

·         Also falling a little bit short is the conclusion to Sloane's storyline, which has her beating up and photographing the ex-boyfriend. A nice little “Fuck, yeah!” scene for Olivia Munn, but too trite and neat by half.

·         Don lecturing Sloane on being better than her boyfriends also rings false, and is the only bad moment in their conversations.

·         “I am feeling something so intensely I don't even know what it is.” A good line, and well-delivered by Munn.

·         Comedic storyline not covered in the review: Don's sarcastic comment about a candidate for the Solicitor General position speaking to a jihad group is the source for a World Net Daily piece. This is basically just a re-hash of a real life case where a reporter joked about Chuck Hagel speaking at a benefit for “Friends of Hamas,” then watched in horror as it was reported as fact in Tucker Carlson's rancid Daily Caller. It does give Olivia Munn a funny moment, where Don tells her not to laugh while he's on a speaker phone call with a WND editor and she says, “How am I supposed to when all I've been doing is laughing for hours?”

·         Yet another plotline has a kid from Rutgers planning on using an appearance on News Night to come out. It's basically a two-scene story, but there's a nice moment at the end where the kid says it was “one way to tell my parents without being there.” 

·         Hey, Will understands the concepts of Twitter followers and re-tweets!

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