The Newsroom Series Finale Review: A Wake for Don Quixote
The Newsroom S03E06: "What Kind of Day Has It Been"
In the spirit of The Newsroom's mission to uphold decency and ethics in journalism, let's begin with some facts:
1. The Newsroom was not a good show.
2. The final season of The Newsroom has been largely dull and pointless.
3. Aaron Sorkin is, by all accounts, a pompous, privileged, and out-of-touch idealist who would rather lecture than tell stories, and who presumes that everyone enjoys watching television shows about white men—Sorkin's proxies—doing that lecturing to young people, women, or ghosts.
4. Despite all of those things, the cast of The Newsroom, was consistently on their A-games, trying to elevate the troubled storytelling and cringe-inducing lines with a real zeal that shouldn't go underappreciated.
Now, before you Sorkin truthers call for my head—or sit me down to monologue for 11 minutes about the intellectual drought caused by millennials—let me say that I watched every single episode of The Newsroom, and to be honest, I probably enjoyed the experience more often than I didn't. There's a lot to dislike about the series, and about Sorkin himself, but it would be disingenuous of me to say that the rousing speeches and banter didn't work on me.
But The Newsroom has been fighting off disaster since its first season (the choice to "redo" the news after the fact was a fatal mistake), and now having seen the final six episodes, it's pretty clear that Sorkin didn't really have a story to tell; rather, he simply had a few things he wanted to opine about. The first five episodes of Season 3 featured a grab bag of all the elements The Newsroom never really figured out how to use to its benefit—ex post facto portrayals of the Boston Marathon bombing, a half-hearted attempt to engage with Edward Snowden and the NSA surveillance program, additional screeds against web journalism, and Jim Harper acting like the biggest douche on the planet. Last week's penultimate episode was the apex of the show's poor taste, and it was rightfully eviscerated for how it bungled a campus rape plot and dipped way too far into victim-shaming disguised as the moral high ground. Yet, the big time jump and heated debates about Pruitt's (B.J. Novak) vision for ACN, culminating in Charlie literally dying because he was so fired up about protecting the sanctity of journalism, was pretty bad in its own right.
These six episodes were, at best, an extended epilogue, a fact only made more apparent by "What Kind of Day Has It Been." Nonetheless, I'm happy to say that The Newsroom went out on a relatively high-ish note, thanks to a concluding episode that didn't really bother with some of Sorkin's hang-ups and simply spent a little more time with each of the show's key contributors (except Reese, who completely disappeared over the last few weeks; miss you, Chris Messina). The episode functioned as a particularly nice send-off for Sam Waterston's Charlie, as it was revealed in flashbacks that he nearly singlehandedly rebooted News Night after growing tired of Will's populist schtick, days before the infamous tirade at Northwestern that kicked off the show's primary narrative.
Waterston was quite the delight throughout the duration of The Newsroom, and for the series to return to some well-trodden territory but still pull good material out of it was a testament to the goodwill that I (and likely most of the audience) feel toward Charlie. There wasn't a whole lot in the flashbacks that we didn't know—Will was an uninspired prick, Mac was lost, Maggie lacked confidence, Jim was a putz (at least some things never change), etc.—but watching Charlie's enthusiasm to do the news spread to Mac and then to Will, Jim, and so on made for a fun trip down memory lane.
In the "present-day" (read: summer 2013) story, the epilogue nature of Season 3 really took hold, as everyone seemed to get the happy ending we of course knew was coming to them. Will and Mac learned they were having a baby, Leona cunningly bullied Pruitt into giving Mac Charlie's old job, Jim took over for Mac, Maggie landed an interview for a field producer job in D.C., Don stuck it out at 10pm because he and Elliot are doing good things there, he and Sloan were able to let go of their guilt over Charlie's heart attack, and Neal returned from exile to deliver a lecture of his own about Brie's destruction of the website. Everybody wins!
The good thing about all those generally expected developments was that their simplicity allowed for The Newsroom's cast members to showcase how good they've been in their roles, even if the writing wasn't always there to support them. Jeff Daniels has been saddled with some frustrating speechifying over the course of The Newsroom's 25 episodes, but when asked to play the more comedic side of Will, he's been tremendous, as he was again here. Will's flustered and manic response to Mac's pregnancy news prevented the funeral service and wake scenes from feeling too saccharine, and he was ready to deliver some of the heavier stuff as well. Emily Mortimer was similarly strong as Mac tried to corral her husband's escalating mania and amusingly aloof in the scenes between Mac, Leona, and Pruitt.
It starts at the top, but man, everyone on this show is so good. Thomas Sadoski did his damnedest to try to make that gross campus rape story work, and Olivia Munn has been nothing short of a revelation since the beginning of the show. Their ability to transition from full-on banter to more emotionally prickly territory was on full display in "What Kind of Day Has It Been," as they each spent the first part of the episode trying to explain to Will why the other one was more responsible for Charlie's death and ended it comforting each other over how much they missed the man who made them better journalists, and presumably better people. Meanwhile, Dev Patel got to deliver a journalism rant of his own, and it worked well enough given that we've actually seen Neal scratch and claw his way into legitimizing the website. Alison Pill and John Gallagher Jr. had been stuck with a messy (and sometimes flat-out bad) story arc seemingly since the midpoint of Season 1, but even their two characters found some kind of balance between ambition at work and romantic success. I certainly didn't care whether the two of them ended up together, mostly because Jim was an absolute asshole for the better part of this final season, but at least their last bit of romantic strife was relatively low-key.
And by the end, the episode went to great lengths to display just how effective Charlie's Don Quixote-esque crusade to save News Night and restore order and decency to journalism really was. The concluding scene wasn't about any major character drama or significant resolution—people were just doing the news. For Sorkin, that was the only fitting ending, because he takes pride in characters who take pride in their Important Jobs, and sure, some viewers will roll their eyes at that thought, given everything that transpired on The Newsroom throughout its run, but it was successful enough nonetheless. "What Kind of Day Has It Been" laid it on thick by using the flashback structure to contrast a group of extremely unhappy people with the loving, cohesive, and happy cohort that put together that last newscast, but that's the story Sorkin was always going to tell. Sure, it makes Charlie both a savior and a bushy-eyebrowed Cupid of sorts, but I'm willing to forgive that minor overreach for a character and an actor I enjoyed so much.
In the end, Charlie's mission was much more successful than Will's (as Sorkin's stand-in), which speaks to the two shows running concurrently across The Newsroom. News Night made the necessary adjustments and will go on to fight the balance between "real journalism" and nonsense, while everyone found some kind of happiness. Yet The Newsroom's larger influence in the real world is ultimately pretty negligible, because the ranting and raving about everything that's wrong with that world was far too off-putting to convince anyone to listen. Though Will seemed to have learned not to always talk down to those around him, Sorkin still hasn't quite learned that lesson regarding his audience, and if this truly is his last TV show, I certainly don't think he's going out on top. But in the end, at least he was smart enough to get out of his actors' way in the finale, because it'll be better to at least remember The Newsroom for some of its great acting than to simply linger on some of the nonsense that surrounded it.
NOTES
– It was a total Sorkin move to have Will's speech about Charlie at the wake deal almost exclusively with ACN and News Night, as if the man had no friends or family there who might just want to remember Charlie as someone whom they loved, as opposed to a journalistic crusader. I also appreciated that Will's capper was that Charlie was "A man. A great, big man," as if that's the best compliment anyone could ever receive. Oh, and that he announced Mac's promotion at Charlie's wake, to everyone, couldn't have been more dumb.
– Dev Patel made Neal's return worthwhile, but how did we not get a scene between Neal and Will, or really anyone else? Season 3's big arc involved Neal's work with the government leak, and he just snuck back into the newsroom like nothing happened? Okay.
– The performance of "How I Got To Memphis" wasn't as triumphant as the show seemed to think it was, but it was fun enough. Jeff Daniels is just a cool dude.
– Turns out Sloan was interested in Don from the jump! They're the best. They're like the anti-Jim and Maggie.
– Flashback Mac was drunkenly bowling at 11am, in sweatpants. That's some dark #treatyoself stuff.
Well, what'd you think of the series finale? A fitting end, or one last gasp from a mess of a show?
