WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD
I’ll cut to the chase here: It’s like 75% frustrating and 25% great. It would be more tolerable if the 25% was dispersed amongst the 75%, but they save it for the end of the show. So I had to spend the previous 50 minutes saying “What the fuck?!” at the television roughly five times.
Aaron Sorkin’s previous television shows all seemed to start the same way: Somebody launches into a tirade where they are uncharacteristically truthful, and the characters spend the pilot digging themselves out of the mess they’ve been thrown into. Josh Lyman yelled at the religious right in The West Wing, and in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Wes Mendel launches into a tirade about how television is terrible. In The Newsroom, Jeff Daniels’ Will MacAvoy has an eerily well-researched speech on how The United States is not the greatest country in the world. He rattles off stats on literacy and life expectancy like he just carries this information around all of the time. Maybe he does, I don’t know. Maybe Brian Williams can tell you where we stand on math scores without having to look it up. My beef with this moment is that it seems like he’s very emphatically reading prepared marks instead of speaking from the heart. The problem isn’t his acting. Jeff Daniels is by far the best actor in this lot. The problem is it’s written like a list rather than an actual speech. I could see people from The West Wing rattling off stats like this, because that’s their job. In this situation, it rings false.
Will promptly blames his tirade on vertigo medication and then goes on a three week vacation with Erin Andrews. It’s said where he went several times, but not in a way I could understand. People kept asking how it was “Down There,” so I’m guessing southern hemisphere. Either way, he apparently spent three weeks in a tree with no phone or iPad because he has no idea what’s going on when he gets back. His staff is leaving to run some new show, leaving him to have to find a new staff. Lucky for him, this has all been taken care of for him by Sam Waterston who plays Charlie Skinner. I can’t decide if Charlie Skinner drunkenly runs the news division at Atlantis Cable News (yes, at one point during the show, Sam Waterston very clearly says he runs the news division of a news network. I have no idea what the other divisions are), or if he’s a drunk angel. Either way he’s drunk, or he’s modeled his character after Jack Sparrow. Charlie lines up a new Executive Producer for Will, which, you know, good thing, because we learn they’re putting on a show THAT NIGHT. Charlie’s choice is Mackenzie MacHale (seriously, it’s like Sorkin looked at the first three letters of his laptop and named everyone after that), who used to date Will. In one of many scenes where people sit around drinking, Charlie says that Mackenzie is tired of filing stories from caves in Afghanistan and wants to come home and live a normal life. Only, there isn’t room for her in Atlanta, and ABC doesn’t want her either. He says this while getting choked up, in another “What the fuck?!” moment for me. Why is this guy getting choked up over the fact that someone is having trouble finding work? The show takes place in 2010. Lots of people are having trouble finding work. If she turns out to be his daughter or something, I’m throwing a brick at my TV.
This moment was a triple “What the fuck?!”-er for me because his pitch for Mackenzie is basically, “She’s physically and mentally exhausted.” Oh, ok. Then producing 60 minutes of live television five days a week is perfect for her. That’s a relaxing job. Good sell there, drunky. Turns out, Will has no choice because he finds out that he doesn’t have hiring and firing power over his staff. HOW THE FUCK DO YOU NOT KNOW THAT? It seems like at some point he would have run up against that in the previous three years he’s had his contract.
Will runs off to yell at his agent, and Emily Mortimer shows up. One minute in, and you can tell she’s a Sorkin woman. Sorkin has two overall types of characters: People who are fantastic at their job, and people who are terrible at their job. Of the people who are fantastic at their job, the men are charming and dickish, and the women are fucking loony when it comes to their private lives. Mackenzie meets Will’s assistant, Maggie Jordan (played by Alison Pill), who is in a relationship with Will’s outgoing EP, Don Keefer (played by Thomas Sadowski). Don is a dick. He belittles Maggie professionally and personally in the middle of the newsroom because she had the audacity to want him to meet her parents. Instead of telling him to shove it up his ass, she takes it (there’s the loony) and sits down and cries in full view of her new executive producer, who promptly promotes her to associate producer. Because that’s how you do things. You give people promotions to cheer them up. Mackenzie brings her senior producer, Jim Harper (John Gallagher, Jr.), who she seems more interested in helping get laid with Maggie than actually running a show. All of this is going on while nobody is doing anything to get ready for the HOUR OF TELEVISION THEY HAVE TO FILL UP WITH STUFF IN A FEW HOURS. Will comes back from his agent’s, he and Mackenzie have a conversation where it’s implied that she broke his heart and he hates her, and then people are suddenly reminded that they have jobs to do because Deepwater Horizion blows up.
So you know how you’ve got two types of people in Sorkin shows? Most of the people we’ve met are the Amazingly Good At Their Job ones. The outgoing EP? He’s the other one.
SIDEBAR: On 9/11, the morning DJ who works at the radio station that owns my place of business heard about the first plane. He went into the newsroom and told the news director about it, and the news director brushed him off. The news director was – I swear to God – browsing Asian porn. Once it came in on the wire, the news director finally realized some shit was going down and put together a report. Now I’m going to tie this into what happened on this show.
Deepwater Horizon blows up, and it shows up as a yellow news alert. I guess that’s the low priority news alert, because the outgoing EP dismisses it. Jim Harper suspects that an oil platform shooting flames 150 feet in the air might be of some importance, and he tries to convince the old EP that they need to research it. He gets shut down because it’s only a yellow alert, and the outgoing EP can’t figure out what is a Big Deal and what isn’t. On his own, he gets sources at BP and Haliburton to let him know that this is, in fact, a Very Big Deal. Neal Sampat (Dev Patel), the guy who writes the blog for the show, starts telling everybody exactly what will happen, which makes me believe that this guy is grossly overqualified for his job. Jim breaks into the meeting between Will and Mackenzie to tell them what’s going on, and they suddenly realize they have a show that night. I’m leaving most of the Will/Mackenzie meeting out of this because it’s terrible. At one point, she quotes Man of La Mancha. I’m completely fucking serious.
This is almost the part where it gets good. Instead, this is the part where everyone starts looking on Wikipedia and spouts stats and little bits of information about the spill, you know, in case you forgot how bad it was. This part read like Aaron Sorkin liked how every episode of CSI was people telling facts to one another instead of having conversations. When it finally picks up is when they actually start the show, after Mackenzie blackmails Will into doing what she says for the hour they’re on the air by doing something so ridiculous, I’m surprised she wasn’t fired on the spot.
When they’re doing the show, everything is humming. You get a sense of the adrenaline everybody’s running on in times like this. You really see that Will can hold his own and go after people when they’re not giving him the answers he wants. It’s almost enough to forgive the moment minutes before when he realizes that the Indian guy isn’t IT, but rather the guy who writes his blog. Also, right afterwards, when he finds out he has a blog. I mean, really, how fucking inattentive to your show are you? Also, in a nice bit of character work, Will calls Neal “Punjab,” because casual racism is always charming.
Sam Waterston shows back up and has a “Golly Gee, They’re Putting On A News Program” moment like he’s fucking new here, and walks off. At the end of the program where they cover everything from the amount of oil that is leaking into the Gulf to the time it’s going to hit the coast to the failure of the cement in the well to the fact that it’s a mechanical failure that can’t be stopped to the fact that it’s going to take months to drill relief wells, Will asks his outgoing EP what the other news shows covered. Are you ready for the answer? Get ready for this because it’s awesome:
The goddamned iPhone 4 prototype that was left in the bar
Now, in another ridiculous development, the reason this team knew about the Haliburton cement compound and the fact that the blowout preventer failed is because the new senior producer’s college roommate is a VP at BP, and his sister is some engineer at Haliburton. He keeps these sources very very secret, because nobody is going to realize that one of the few people who knew about the cement is the sister of someone who works on this show? And that he knows a guy at BP? I’m far from the smartest guy in the room, and it would take me two minutes to figure that out.
That aside, a fucking oil platform blew up and people died. You’re really going to run the iPhone story before that? The outgoing EP says that everybody closed with the spill, but focused on the search and rescue operation. The end of the news is when you cover things like potato chips that look like The Last Supper, not a massive fire in the middle of the ocean.
This show strikes me as Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip 2: Electric Boogaloo. Sorkin takes a high-minded theme and fucks it up by not knowing how to introduce character development. It ping-pongs between people working and people having wildly inappropriate conversations about the last time they were madly in love with a woman (really – this actually happens in this show). Whereas Studio 60’s pilot was fantastic, this isn’t. This takes the rest of the Studio 60 season, where they tried to do too much, and shoves it into the pilot. It’s a mess. Unfortunately, all 10 episodes have already been produced, so unless Sorkin wised up on his own, we’re screwed.
