The Newsroom Recap: The Password is…Illegals

The Newsroom

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

Okay, now here’s the thing. Off the top of my head, I can name two people who at least look like they have some authority on the subject: Sheriff Joe Arpaio and State Senator Russell Pearce were both big proponents of the bill with Pearce being credited as the bill’s author. And Pearce’s ties to white supremacists weren’t common knowledge, yet. Not to mention there were numerous state legislators who voted for the bill that could have sat in as well. Lord knows a news camera is like manna from heaven to all politicians and Olbermann was regularly able to book state reps. Hell, Kyrsten Sinema regularly got glammed up and down to a studio at a moment’s notice while Sen. Kyl probably travels with his own crew. If they’re going to do the news better in hindsight they need to at least understand it better two years later.  Jim pulled two critical sources out of his ass last week to break the BP spill but this week they can’t get a state senator?

Anyway, while Mackenzie moves to tell Will, Maggie “nobly” suggests she go because someone’s getting fired for this. Even though she’s right, Mackenzie says no one will get fired. When everyone in the room is like “Have you MET Will?” she insists that no, he won’t fire anyone and they’re all wrong for thinking he’s a dick. He’d throw himself in front of a train for anyone on the staff…that he couldn’t even recognize the day before. Yes, he’d die for them, or throw them in front of the train to save his own ass. Potato, potahto.

Regardless, she’s decided to quash this by first sending Will an email then explaining as much as possible to get them to like him except, oops, she’s still a girl who can’t send an email with these newfangled group lists and sends the private email to the entire staff. She bolts from the conference room, smashing Gary’s Blackberry and dousing it in coffee before telling the entire staff to delete it without reading the email, honor system. And then someone has to go and delete it from Will’s computer, smashing it to bits if necessary.  I’ll leave it to Neal to explain servers to her.

Oops.

Where’s Don when you need him? Probably in some corner on the phone with his college roommate or best friend reading the email and laughing over how his old show has devolved into a Benny Hill skit in record time.

In the newsroom, however, Will comes out of his office to berate and demean Mackenzie and pitching a profane fit in front of the whole staff. Yes, that’s the angel of mercy who’d die for them. To make him look better by comparison, Mackenzie turns into a gum-cracking high schooler explaining that Sloan said it but she was totally wrong and thinks Will is a liar and a jerk so Mackenzie told her “Nuh, uh…he’s the best.” Will’s had it with her and demands they take this to his office, and she slinks off behind him. Man, that was gross.

It doesn’t get much better in his office, no matter what the schmaltzy piano music tells me so in brief: she tells him they lost Governor Brewer but got a bunch of wackjobs and that she realized she loved him when she cheated on him but he wishes she never told him and shoot me now. Couldn’t it have been something less pedestrian than cheating? Whatever, Jim’s moving the plot along by calling them in to the 6:00pm rundown.

Quite possibly the only time I haven’t wanted to punch him this episode.

It’s SHOWTIME! Will’s reading his notes and…oh noes…Reese got to him. He’s asking Tess to line up the Palin clip and not to run it past Mackenzie. While Jim needles Mackenzie about the email Maggie tells Will she was cheated on and that she’s responsible for the fuck up and will resign, but only because Don wants her on Elliott’s show. Otherwise Jim would be shit out of luck. Continuing the “she must never face the consequences of her inexcusable actions,” Will tells Maggie he hopes she doesn’t leave. Really? Because if there’s a staff member who has written her firing about five times in three days, it’s Maggie. Let her leave.

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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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