In season one, The Newsroom was the most insufferable good show on TV: so expertly acted, shot, directed, and edited that its flaws were all the more maddening. My colleague Tim Goodman put it nicely in his Hollywood Reporter review, arguing that the term “hate-watching” was the wrong one to apply to Aaron Sorkin's TV journalism drama. “Don’t kid yourself – you were ‘disappointment-watching.’”
The cutesy sexism that The Newsroom displayed towards its women would have been irritating in any context, but it was doubly so on a show with screwball comedy rhythms. (In true screwball, men and women are equally matched; that's what makes their banter exciting.) Head anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) was a blowhard and prone to petty behavior and self-pity, but he and the show's other men were never made to seem like trivial people, as the women sometimes were. The show's main female character, producer MacKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer), was so clumsy and technically inept that her backstory as a veteran of international hot spots was hard to swallow. The other women were borderline hysterical a lot of the time, or at least less reliable in a crisis than their male colleagues. And the ratio of scenes of men explaining things to women versus women explaining things to men was, by my count, 5 to 1. I kept waiting for this to get better during season one, and it really never did.
Less bothersome, to me anyway, was the spectacle of the show's creator and main writer Aaron Sorkin appearing to lecture the press corps on how they should have covered recent stories, while writing plots that were hugely dependent upon hindsight and coincidence. He used to do pretty much the same thing on Sports Night and The West Wing, but this time he was writing about a business that TV critics knew well, or at somewhat better than they knew cable sports coverage or White House politics, and I think that's why my peers hauled out the mallet when rapping his knuckles for implausibility. There were other charges lodged against Sorkin, too, including overall smugness and condescension, and a tendency to needlessly stack the deck when tweaking right-wingers, a group whose national leaders make Tom Tomorrow's cartoons seem like finely nuanced portraits. And there were complaints that while much was made of Will being a lone Republican in an otherwise liberal newsroom, he was a Republican in Name Only, his affiliation merely an unconvincing fig leaf for Sorkin's continual attacks on the American right, using the show's hero as his mouthpiece.
But here, too, Sorkin was just being Sorkin. There was always more David E. Kelley (The Practice, Ally McBeal) in the guy's writing than his fans cared to admit: the grandstanding left-wing monologues that were eloquent fact-dumps, the ping-pong arguments that were sometimes more speedy than truly witty, the relationships that amounted to little conclaves of adolescent pathology. Have you re-watched episodes of Sports Night or The West Wing recently? They're both altogether finer entertainments than The Newsroom, but they have a lot of the same flaws. Sorkin didn't suddenly "lose it" when he started working for HBO. More likely, the creative power concentrated exclusively in his hands made flaws that had always been present loom larger.
I wouldn't say season two of The Newsroom is a big improvement over season one, but the show's definitely more measured and confident—and now that we've accepted that certain tics, such as setting the stories in a recent, real past, aren't going away, it's easier to appreciate what Sorkin and company do well.
Read the rest @ the source
I'm fucking ready for this tbh. I need some light entertainment before the final BB episodes