The Newsroom Recap: The Password is…Illegals

The Newsroom

By vallegirl | Wednesday, July 4, 2012 | 12:00 am | 6 Comments
Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in: Recaps, The Newsroom

Before we get into the meat of the recap, there were two interesting coincidences this past Sunday. First, the informative, if ridiculously titled, Up with Chris Hayes devoted its second hour to SB 1070, now that the Supreme Court deemed several major elements of it unconstitutional, with one of the panelists being Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State who crafted the law. Second, the second season of Episodes premiered where several staffers involved in the fictional show explain American ratings to the British show creators, and let them know that a good first week is just that, one good week. It’s the second effort that makes or breaks new shows. So, yeah. Omens, omens everywhere.

Murrow! Cronkite! Huntley! McAvoy! What?

Since this episode was a mish mash of yelling, preening, arguing, bloviating and general pontificating, I’ll do my best to recap it like something actually happened. I can’t guarantee I’ll succeed.

Anyway, The self-satisfied opening credits finish and the lingering “Written by Aaron Sorkin” fades to a shot of a high-rise apartment building. It’s Will’s spare and modern apartment. How can so few items so perfectly express “I’m a douchebag having a midlife crisis”? I don’t know but that designer deserves an HGTV series because that is some deep tissue personality being channeled.

Will’s reviewing the CVs of his staff, testing himself to see how much he remembers, and we learn that there’s a Gary Cooper? Really, Sorkin? The actor’s real name, Chris Chalk, is already Sorkiny so you needed to up its Sorkin factor? The ceiling in his apartment agrees with me and starts falling in on him. Oh wait, no. His housekeeper informs him that his overpriced downtown high rise is so shoddily built that his new neighbors’ renovations are making his ceiling crumble.

It’s karma for your Iroc-Z level of douchiness.

With that bit of pleasantry out of the way, Will’s off to work. He beelines it to Mackenzie’s office. Since she’s in a good mood about starting the new show, he ruins it by barraging her with unrelated topics such are their woefully young and inexperienced staff and leading with the BP spill. For her part, Mackenzie makes us question her intelligence and judgment when she says inexperience is an asset since they don’t know how to do the news wrong (or at all) and, no, they won’t lead with BP.

That was just set up because Will wants to make sure Mackenzie doesn’t tell the staff why they broke up. Because they give a rat’s ass. But if you’re going to base a character on Keith Olbermann you have to make him think extra, super high of himself. She agrees about 150 times that she will not, in fact, tell anyone, guaranteeing that she will, at some point, tell everyone why they broke up.

During Walk & Talk © Time Mackenzie briefs Will that he has nine minutes with Gov. Jan Brewer and nine with La Raza. He still thinks the oil rig sinking makes “good television.” Mackenzie gets all inadvertently meta saying they “don’t make good television.” Wait. She adds they do the news, and that the only reason anyone cares about the spill is because “they’re” talking about it. Oh, important white people. Where would I be without you?

In the rundown meeting, Mackenzie tries to explain their daily protocol but Will interrupts to announce that he’s a big boy now and is using the potty all by himself. Or that he finally bothered to learn his staff’s names. Then he makes this face:

To which Don makes this face:

Don’t make him the voice of reason if I’m supposed to think he’s the asshole.

It’s April 23, 2010…or three days after the last episode and the chaos of the spill is quieting down? Really? The oil hadn’t made landfall and there wasn’t even a photo of an oil-covered pelican, yet.

Whatever. They’ve moved on to SB 1070 so Will can establish his conservative bona fides. Mackenzie tells the staff he supports the bill because he’s a closet moron. He claims he isn’t a closet anything, then proves he’s quite the overt moron by proudly talking about staffers who’ve left the show. Don’s there to point it out and remind him he’s still a dick. A couple of meta jokes at Sorkin’s name fetish, a shot across the bow of Fox and Mackenzie ends it by encouraging the staff to applaud Will for being an asshole.

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vallegirl
About

Vallegirl has never actually lived in a valley, has a lot of time on her hands and likes to yell at kids about how things were in her day.  Currently in LA, she's also spent a lot of time in the great states of  New York and Florida so she's not crazy, it's just a cultural thing.

6 Comments

  1. 1
    hstrhth
    Posted July 4, 2012 at 1:58 pm

    that was absolutely horrible.
    you seem like quite a nasty person.

  2. 2
    Matthew S
    Posted July 5, 2012 at 12:35 am

    i thought there were times you were nasty–i’m not sure if you used the term cum one time to describe maggie or if that was for something else–either way i’m a huge sorkin, i was totally looking forward to this show and i dont know i feel empty watching it. and then i read this and its fuckin hysterical. it sort of confirms that empty feeling, and thus i can’t delude myself into thinking the show is too good (well, actually, it has promise, but its so damn unoriginal, it’s like paint-by-sorkin-numbers). and youre remarks were great and funny and there you go good sir. YOU WIN.

  3. 3
    JasonR
    Posted July 5, 2012 at 8:46 am

    I kinda liked the pilot, but this was Sorkin at his most preachy & intolerable, and couple that with characters acting in a way that professionals with brains never would in real life and it = suck. I’ll give this one more week and if it’s anything like this past episode I’m done.

    Nothwithstanding the bad episode, this was a GREAT recap!! Great job calling Sorkin & Co. on all the ridiculousness.

  4. 4
    maryedith
    Posted July 5, 2012 at 10:02 pm

    I’m still scratching my head over why this show is on HBO. People wouldn’t have such high expectations for it if it were on the networks and there’s absolutely nothing about it that isn’t network. I usually hate it when people say this, but Jeff Daniels come across as completely unlikable, and it’s a problem because I think he sees his character as someone you just can’t help but love. Which makes me think Jeff Daniels is kind of dumb. I keep thinking of William Hurt and how he would have played the guy more subtly.

  5. 5
    vallegirl vallegirl
    Posted July 7, 2012 at 9:19 am

    Yeah, this is a straight up NBC drama. Especially since Sorkin isn’t even that comfortable writing in the vulgarity.

    But I think the biggest hurdle for Daniels is the cognitive dissonance of Will being such a preeningly awful person in general with the fact that the writing suggests that we’re supposed to identify and even admire the character. He has to find a way to make something as cringeworthy as interrupting a staff meeting to throw out factoids like he’s Mr. Burns “endearing.” He’s normally quite good at finding the charisma if not the likeability in difficult characters but thus far, Will hasn’t been able to show either.

    I don’t normally place all the blame for a bad performance on the writing, and maybe it’s because I’m a big Daniels fan in general, but Sorkin’s not doing Will any favors with the flat, obnoxious he’s being written. He took a truly unlikeable character in The Squid and the Whale and managed to convince us that, at some point, someone as smart as Laura Linney would find him attractive enough to marry him. Here, I don’t understand why he doesn’t get punched, or sued, on a daily basis and I especially don’t understand Charlie’s devotion. Specifically because if he’s based on Olbermann he should have alienated everyone he’s ever worked with, since Keith never met a bridge he didn’t want to blow up.

    In a weird way, Will would be more “likeable” if they’d acknowledge how utterly unlikeable he is. Let him really embody what a jerk Will McAvoy is in “real life” behind the public Jay Leno mewling affability and that would come across as more human than a douchebag who tells us what Neal’s name means, then have Neal tell him, starry-eyed, that he didn’t know that. Really? The guy who broke down the BP oil spill in five minutes didn’t know what his name meant?

  6. 6
    maryedith
    Posted July 7, 2012 at 10:06 am

    Maybe hearing that Fresh Air interview with Daniels threw off my judgment of his acting, and intelligence. I completely agree with your idea that the character should be written as more unlikable. Because Daniels, in that interview, seemed to admire the character so much himself, I was blaming his acting. But reading what you say, I’m wondering whether the problem isn’t more that the other characters’ reactions to him just aren’t credibly written. I wonder too if Sorkin is so surrounded by people who all read and say the same things that he was figuring the HBO audience was just waiting with baited breath to see these opinions expressed on the screen and so he didn’t bother too much with details like character and dialogue?

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