MiniCap: The Newsroom

Welcome back to the continuation of The Passion of the Sorkin The Newsroom. This week Will goes to his therapist to get his 18 anti-anxiety scrips refilled and to discover he’s a bully. The rest of us discovered it within the first five minutes of the pilot when he berated a 20-year-old college student, called her “sorority girl” and implied she was too stupid to live let alone vote but in case she ever does, he wants her to know just how stupid she is.

But see, he doesn’t want to be a big narcissistic yet thin-skinned prick and he’s having problems sleeping because people are askeered of him. Of course, before he has his epiphany he spends the better part of the hour berating, belittling and lying to everyone who crosses his path. Then he decides to secure his page on the ACN website, lest he ever have to read a single negative comment about himself from people who aren’t paid to kiss his ass. But he’s doing it to fix the internet and not because he’s a big baby. Annie Savoy wasn’t kidding when she said the world was not made for those of us blessed with the gift of self awareness.

Sloan gets a career-making opportunity, which freaks her the hell out, while Olivia Munn gets to show us her linguistic skills and only one of those goes well. Despite getting terrible advice from Will, she continues to seek it out and it only gets worse. I’m beginning to wonder exactly where she got those two PhD’s.

Over with Don, he’s still stealthily taking over the show with his big, over-emotive, Anne Hathaway eyes, pouty Angelina Jolie lips and perfectly disinterested timing. But lest his bonding with Sloan get confused with him finally having an epiphany of his own and realizing “Holy schnikes, I’m a catch and Maggie’s a vortex of idiocy and awful,” he just mewls over her bonding with Jim to Sloan, guaranteeing that he will forever be in Sloan’s friend zone.

Meanwhile, Charlie, Mackenzie, Jim and Maggie are just kind of there. But Charlie does get one scene with Sloan and Don where I see what this show could have been but never will be, Mackenzie lets us know that she’s lived “a good and pure life,” I hurl at how treacly that is, and Jim and Maggie do “opposition research” on Will and discover that he is truly a saint who lives among us. A rude, obnoxious, up-his-own-ass saint, but a saint all the same.

David Krumholtz shows up as Will’s therapist and audience proxy where he gets to call Will on his shit, Terry Crews is a body guard who gets sexually harassed by Sloan but sexually harasses Mackenzie in a way that literally left me slack-jawed, then Charlie comes up with the most unethical way possible to clean up the weekly mess The Newsroom finds itself in, and Will cosigns because everyone’s horrible and doesn’t really know the meaning of the word “integrity.”