The Newsroom

The Newsroom (2012) 

Aaron Sorkin is cool in the end, although his idea of reporting has absolutely nothing in common with our staple news, because with Sorkin the reporters actually want to inform about something meaningful (don’t confuse this with impartial reporting, because here we have tendentious news with a more Republican bias for the “white man", full of old-fashioned, lofty ideals). Simply a classic Sorkin movie with all the trimmings, this time set in a news environment. If you expect numerous nice (or nasty) characters who, despite a breakneck tempo, are not silent even for one second, but in fact aren’t rambling and really have something to say, then... Your expectations are quite right. But there’s a hitch: it isn’t easy for an actor to manage Sorkin’s moralizing machine-gun-mouth dialogs and not everyone can deliver them without sounding like a parody of themselves. And you have to accept the simple fact that although Sorkin is exceptionally talented and capable dialog/monolog writer, he is only an average storyteller and so it has become a tradition to expect both polished dialogs but also impaired storylines. And in addition to this we can expect an absence of modern guise (not meant visually) or rather this is an old-school series; especially in the superfluous, but bearable relationship part. Season two is just like the first. Of course, there are areas for improvement. It has a storyline that runs throughout the season which is refreshing and puts some excellent characters in front of the camera (and makes for a spin-off for Rebecca Halliday). Yes, in the end there is less room for relationship management escapades and when they occur, they are often dealt with more tastefully and gracefully. The final third season then incomprehensibly dumps the best and sturdiest theme in story material terms (as early as episode two!) in favor of a fan-pleasing melodramatic homage to relationships “him with her and her with him" (or: who didn’t yearn for the slowest and most painful possible death for the Jim/Maggie duo must be a saint, making Jesus look like the epitome of maliciousness in comparison). Plus it stops the interestingly kicked off theme of “the stuffy old media versus a new, predatory media with no scruples, where both sides are equally right as they are wrong" in its tracks using personal tirades that don’t even play out (Reese, Elliot and even Neal). And it’s like that pretty much the whole season/series as such. S1: 4/5 S2: 5/5 S3: 3/5 (03/09/2012)