Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Final notes on HBO's "The Newsroom" ... by gimleteye

The season finale of "The Newsroom" aired on Sunday night, with millions of Americans riveted to a hurricane disrupting the start of the Republican National Convention. Aaron Sorkin, creator of the HBO series, must have wondered who was upstaging him.

So now we have the series' payoff: a well-researched attack by fictional news anchor, Will McAvoy, against the Tea Party and his own party, the GOP, and stakes made ever higher by the disclosure that his own Rupert Murdoch-like boss had authorized wire-tapping of him and proof that could cost him his job (in which case the series would end!) and the suicide of a NSA official who would have been a whistleblower on the massive intrusion of surveillance on civilian Americans.

"The Newsroom" will live for at least a second season; a credit to Sorkin, lead Jeff Daniels, and a host of real Broadway stars doing their HBO star turns. So here is the bad news.

The saccharine romances linking the principal and secondary characters in a dysfunctional, happy family could scarcely be more irritating. Yet without the drama of highly intelligent people who can solve a Rubik's cube faster than holding each other's hands, the series would fall on the pedantic shoulders of despair at the decline of American political discourse.

So Sorkin cut his deal with the gods of dramatic tension to make the payoff work: a final editorial speech to the fictional TV camera on "The American Taliban", the Tea Party and radical right that hijacked his party, the GOP.

The finale was timed to match up with the Republican National Convention. It works. USA? USA?

As for the series itself, "The Newsroom" gets an A for effort and an A for execution. Still, the idea that there could ever be a "fight" for journalistic integrity within a cable news network or that "The Newsroom" opens up a window on tension between publishers focused like a laser on the bottom line (ie. advertisers who support the radical right) and editors and reporters is science fiction. Entertaining, yes. A "window" on the media elite? Noooo.

That's show business. But I don't want to spill red wine on the carpet. For a payoff that attracted millions of viewers and maybe even some independents voters who could decide the 2012 elections, HBO deserves even more accolades than Aaron Sorkin.

The best that could happen in November is for true GOP voters to stay home from the polls and watch re-runs of "The Newsroom".

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