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

Mackenzie’s about to go into what “News Night 2.0” is but Maggie reminds her she has to ethnic stereotype Neal read a memo from IT about Outlook but she’s just a girl so she doesn’t understand what it means. The whole room turns to Neal because he’s Indian so, of course, he can explain it. Wow.

I hate you all right now.

Sadly, Neal does explain that their Outlook was upgraded to Windows ‘95 and they now have such cutting edge features as aliases and auto complete. Will continues down his obnoxious path to recite Neal’s full name before preening about it. For her part, Mackenzie, the “brilliant” and intrepid field producer, still doesn’t grasp the most basic features of Outlook. Rather than facepalm, Neal tells her to send an email, which she does…to the entire staff, calling Will racist, because I guess she’s also illiterate and didn’t realize she sent it to “Staff” instead of “Will.” Will pompously informs the staff that no one will lose his or her job to an undocumented worker while Mackenzie “adorably” knocks her white board off the easel.

Meanwhile, upstairs Charlie is forgoing drinking in favor of playing online poker with some 12-year-old. Ah, it’s good to be the king. Some snake slithers up to his office door. Charlie doesn’t even pretend he wasn’t just dicking around corrupting a minor, who still beats him. Heh. Charlie wants to meet with the snake, Reese, to discuss his daily “private” meetings with Will. Reese initially denies but course-corrects with each tidbit Charlie throws out.

Meetings? What meetings? Oh those meetings. They’re great, except they’re not.

Although good in theory, Charlie needs for the meetings to stop because they’re trying something new with News Night and Will’s such a pampered, spoiled baby that if he doesn’t get the exact news he wants to hear, he’ll hold his breath until he turns blue and run out of Charlie’s office screaming “You’re not my real dad,” and no one wants that to happen again.

Reese keeps arguing his point while customizing it to Charlie’s concerns, agreeing that they don’t want ratings to drive content, but what about telling Will that he’s seen a 10% increase since breaking the BP story, let alone how his ratings spiked after he lost his shit on Jenny the sorority girl. This gets Charlie’s back up but Reese is on a roll explaining all the ways the higher ratings are beneficial to ACN, including charging more for advertising, but Charlie just wants him to stop meeting with Will.

Reese throws out one more pitch that Will would hunt him down wherever he hid because Will’s the biggest ratings whore in ever. Charlie’s had it and just demands the meeting stop and not to call Will a whore again (well…) or he’ll punch out all of Reese’s teeth. Then he smiles which is even scarier because he looks deranged. Which might explain why he’s so irrationally loyal to Will.

Don’t let the bow tie fool you, Mister.

Mackenzie’s still fumbling through the pitch meeting which hints at why she values inexperience. She gives the staff three questions to ask themselves when developing a story that should be obvious to any first year communications major then “cleverly” suggests a mnemonic device that makes no sense. Oh, I see. It’s to, once again, establish Don’s asshole bona fides.

Gary then asks about the oil spill so Will can pad his own jerk CV by pitting the two African American staffers against each other to explain their animosity then pats himself on the back for knowing this information. How does this guy not get punched on a daily basis? Jim runs down what SB 1070 is so Maggie can get righteously indignant about how jacked up conservative Arizona politics are and Will can smarm at her condescendingly.

Mackenzie continues that they have Gov. Brewer for nine minutes while Jim pats her on the back about the interview being an exclusive, because Sorkin has never seen Brewer in action. Mackenzie speechifies via a tortured and utterly wrong analogy, that the governor was persuaded to appear on the new News Night because it will function like a courtroom, with Will presiding as the attorney for both sides, and they’ll only call expert witnesses. She does understand attorneys are not objective bystanders in court, right? Whatever, she’s preening that it’s so revolutionary in its common sense and she’s just so awesome for implementing it.

Who is more awesome than me?

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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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