The Newsroom Recap: Girls Drool

While Wade hands over the story about Congress cutting the DOJ’s budget to prosecute financial crime, and promptly tells Will to “Say hello to Lehman” (oops), Mackenzie makes the grievous error of calling her boyfriend “Honey” in front of Will who just blurts out “Don’t call him ‘honey.’ It makes me crazy,” then excuses it as just words that came out of his mouth. I’ll let Wade’s expression speak for me.

You’re like an asshole supernova.

Will thanks Wade but asks to speak to Mackenzie privately.  Once alone he acts like a right prick to her for having her “boyfriends” lobby him to go easier on the DOJ. Like he does the reporting. He continues to demean Mackenzie, but before she can get comfortable on the high ground, she refers to Will’s “Netflix queue of crazy divorced women with digitally remastered breasts,” and…wasn’t one of them a brain surgeon? Just because you put the awful words in a woman’s mouth doesn’t make them less sexist, Sorkin.

Will gets in a few more slams on Mackenzie who just backs down and repitches Wade’s story then asks Will to join the party. With his ego-stroked and Mackenzie’s broken, he agrees. Once she leaves he makes a smurfy face because he still feels so many feels and isn’t he precious.

Having taken down one woman’s ego, Will joins the party to slam a few more, starting with Sloan, the woman with two PhD’s. She tries to make small talk with Will, who actually says, and I quote, “This is my thing we’re talking about.” Dick. But rather than just walk away, since this is Coddle the Middle-Aged White Man’s Ego The Newsroom, Sloan suggests Will talk to someone, but makes this face:

You and me both, Sloan.

She tells him to just go talk to someone at the party, but Mr. Different Woman Every Night, doesn’t know how. Really, Sorkin? Hope Davis walks in and Sloan suggests he talk to her. They banter back-and-forth where she cutely tells him he’s still standing there and he sucks the oxygen out of the room with his dourness and ego before he finally walks over.

Will acts like a jackass, asking Hope, whose name is Nina Howard, how she got into their party and they “banter” some West Side Story references before Mackenzie exposits to Sloan that Nina Howard is a gossip columnist for a magazine called TMI. Sloan briefly registers why that was a bad thing then goes back to drinking her champagne because she could not care less and Mackenzie interrupts Will.

You and me both, Sloan.

Nina tells Will she wants to warn him she’s a gossip columnist, but rather than be a grown up and say yes, Mackenzie still pulls him aside to tell him…she’s a gossip columnist. Will disagrees and says she writes “features” even though she JUST said herself she’s a gossip columnist (Sorkin’s back on the pipe, right?) but Mackenzie explains what TMI is so she and Sloan, who has two PhD’s, can bond over going to a nail salon called “Cutie-cles.” Shoot me.