Monsters of Television

“Do you want to play golf or do you want to fuck around?”

It’s really all Charlie’s plan to check “ruin a show with principles” off his bucket list.

Swashbuckling. That was the word Aaron Sorkin used to describe the show to Piers Morgan in a stuttering explanation for his fiction in an excuse laced with so many ums it makes you feel better that someone so famously eloquent has just as many issues with elocution as the rest of us. But the terms he threw out there for The Newsroom were important, particularly while he looked at one of the most recognizable faces of CNN, a network his show could be accused of lambasting. It’s a romantic comedy, he says. Sorkin only operates in fiction! Jeff Daniels helps him by emphasizing The Newsroom is over-the-top idealistic! Swashbuckling, however, is the word that struck me the most.

It is the most apt in a couple different contexts. For one, the denotation would have this cast on a romantic adventure and no one could argue with that. But the connotation reminds us of pirates or some similar rogue and manly profession with a heart of gold and charged with saving damsels in distress. Why does every damsel on this show need so much saving?

Swashbuckling aside, the episode is interesting since we fast-forward through months of news in tandem with an inevitable meeting with the money side of the idealism, creating an Inception-level of metaphors. But how do you put a price on a dream?

The same way you put a price on a unicorn: you catch one and cut it up in purchasable chunks. It’s slightly refreshing to see that there’s some pushback to the unrealistic dreams of the News Night staff. With Jane Fonda acting as head of the corporation that keeps Will employed, there’s not a subtle nod to Ted Turner here, she being in charge of a cable news station in the middle of polarized networks while also trying to maintain a media empire. It’s not surprising that the antagonism comes from here (Sorkin has always likened ratings hacks and standard and practices robots to villains) but it feels so much more evil in this boardroom. The suits are dark, the language is threatening, and the disdain is palpable with the intensity of expression only HBO’s loose censorship can allow.

The story of Will’s increasing ire with the Tea Party over the summer and fall leading up to the 2010 elections is intercut with Charlie being cross-examined by the evil empire post elections. Ratings are tumbling in a troubling trend and there is a threat of Will being fired but, ultimately, all the network wants is for Will to lay off the Tea Party candidates. Which should be fine since there must be other news to follow.

But a swashbuckler can’t compromise his ideals lest he sell out. Heroic pirates don’t back down. Charlie, as far as we know, never lets on to Will that they’re in troub with corporate so the News Night staff can forge ahead with their romantic ideals, one where they report news that matters while being fair and balanced. Which is actually just telling the audience that Will is a Republican while filling his mouth with more-left near-soliloquies.

The swashbuckling doesn’t end there, however. There are two damsels in distress here that are in need of saving. Mac suffers a serial onslaught of beautiful women Will invites to the station before going out on dates with them. I’m no broadcaster so I have to assume this is normal practice since this was just as common on Sports Night. I know that Will and Mac’s relationship is complicated but I was hoping Mac would keep it together a little better. Her nervous and betrayed reaction to Will’s first invitee marks the last hope I had for Mac to be more composed and calculated than Dana Whitaker but, essentially, they’re going with her being the same character: boastful, idealistic, clumsy. The only saving grace for her this episode is her keeping a man on the sly but that can also be seen as (a) purposely gaining moral high ground on Will and/or (b) needing a man to put her back on equal footing with her colleague.

Maggie might as well be wearing a hoop skirt and swooning into Jim’s arms for all the distress she’s in. The high-pressure lifestyle of being on the News Night staff means anti-anxiety medication is especially important and, when her roommate’s many paramours steal her Xanax, it leads to weeks of panic attacks. You’d think she’d eventually learn to hide it or maybe just not keep her prescriptions in a public space. But I suppose none of that would lead to an opportunity for Jim to use his magic calming exercises, which is couched in an intimate knowledge of how to deal with panic attacks from being embedded but, to be honest, it’s really just talking to distraction. A continued phone conversation after Jim helps Maggie with her mini-meltdown reveals that she and her roommate at least talk about him to the point that she doesn’t even have to provide a name for them to know who she’s talking about.

The troubling aspect is not that Maggie is boy-crazy enough to want two men simultaneously (which is not crazy, especially for television) but that we could immediately perish the thought that any of the men on this show would demonstrate a debilitating weakness that forced them to the sidelines. Men are always in the thick of things. They are leaders. Nothing on the prompter is where they eat.

That’s not to say I don’t believe in strong female characters having weaknesses. As I’ve pointed out before (particularly in respect to Sarah Walker on Chuck), I feel a strong female character needs complicated flaws (just like male characters often have) so that they don’t fall into that unrelateable mold of perfection. I just wish that the female characters on this show didn’t fall into same old trappings of man-trouble and hysteria in order to humanize beautiful women.

Sorkin said something else similarly striking in his interview with Piers Morgan. He mentioned that there are multiple references to Camelot within the show and that the parent company is called Atlantis. They are references to romantic utopias, thus emphasizing this as a work of fiction, where characters all coalesce around an idea rather than arguing, belaboring, and/or rejecting it. It seems like he really does wants us to read this show as fantasy instead of a “reality-based drama.” I think Amanda Ann Klein hit it on the nose: “NEWSROOM is about journalists who travel 2 the future then use this knowledge 2 make folks in the past feel stupid 4 not knowing the future.”

Other things:

• I wanted a Sam Waterston/Jane Fonda sex scene so bad.
• I really thought Sorkin was going to cop out with Leona’s joke/metaphor by saying sometimes you have to think outside the box to win, meaning Will, Mac, and Charlie’s approach to news may look disastrous in the short-term but will eventually lead to something spectacular. But, instead, Leona thinks with the constraints of reality and makes the point that you have to play the game by the rules (particularly the unwritten but well-known rules) to win. I think. That was her point, right?
• Neal is still the only winner on this show.
• I just realized that News Night and Sports Night are only off in title by subject.
• Maggie has a fivehead that gets way larger when she’s sad. I think that’s where her tears are stored.
• Possibly the best line Will has of the night is toasting to the 112th Congress. You get the feeling that, with all the attacking and gotcha reporting he’s done to the candidates, to him it’s his responsibility as part of the fourth estate and nothing here is (necessarily) personal. Clearly, his reasons for attacking are personal (a party that has betrayed him) but, in the end, there are no hard feelings, no residual grumpiness that seems to color the perspective of certain news networks in light of their homers losing powerful posts.
• When it aired last night, I missed the first ten minutes. I didn’t know it was all one speech. My take on the editorial: like Don Draper’s letter about quitting tobacco with none of the cunning.