Indeed, one of the ironies of Hollywood is the fact movies and TV shows about it almost invariably seem to have been written by someone who’s only visited the place, which certainly wasn’t the problem here. The shame of it is there was really nothing else quite like “The Newsroom” - or for that matter, Sorkin’s previous media-centric series, “Sports Night” and “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” - in terms of providing such a smart and acerbic take on the medium’s inner workings, without resorting to all the customary cliches. Nevertheless, “The Newsroom’s” critique drew strength from Sorkin’s grasp of media, and was clearly intended to resonate by weaving together real-life events, like coverage of the Boston marathon bombing, or fictional ones that closely mirrored reality, such as a cable-news reporter being fired for an ill-considered tweet about Republicans.Īfter all of that, it’s a little too convenient - or at least, not wholly convincing - to just sprinkle fairy dust over the whole enterprise and scribble “And They All Lived Happily Ever After” across the screen. That was, in a sense, part of the romance surrounding “The West Wing,” which exhibited great knowledge about politics but not cynicism. Sorkin, of course, created this world, and has the right to make the story turn out the way he thinks things ought to go, as opposed to the way they usually do. The way everything fell into place, it was hard not to think about Woody Allen’s fantasy sequence in “Annie Hall,” when he magically producers Marshall McLuhan to shoot down the theories of an intellectual snob, breaking the fourth wall to tell the audience, “Boy, if life were only like this.” Heck, Will even got the opportunity to tell off the ghost of his dad while in prison. One suspects staff members of the New Republic, who recently resigned en masse faced with similar new management, might find the timing of that outcome particularly ironic. Novak, was finally cajoled and threatened into doing the right thing, placing the news division under the stewardship of MacKenzie (Emily Mortimer), the ethical producer he had come close to firing. It’s how he tied up those threads that left something stuck in one’s teeth.īefore it was over, all the newsroom employees dutifully paired up with each other (that early-season threat from human resources about fraternizing with colleagues really was a joke), while the jargon-spouting entrepreneur who bought news network ACN to reinvent it, played by “The Office’s” B.J. To his credit, Sorkin tied up most of the loose ends, even within a truncated run.
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