Sorkin being Sorkin

Abbreviated final season will conclude uneven run for ‘The Newsroom’

Since its first season, “The Newsroom” creator Aaron Sorkin has flirted with self-parody, presenting his characters—the staff of a 24-hour cable news network—as walking-and-talking mouthpieces for his own blustery opinions on the world. What once was endearing, even exciting, about Sorkin in network shows like “The West Wing”—the impassioned arguments, the political idealism, the screwball comedy—has in “The Newsroom” devolved into cloying self-righteousness. 

Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) is no Jed Bartlet. The cantankerous host of ACN’s “Newsnight” is written as a prickly Keith Olbermann type prone to glib speechifying in front of the camera and grandstanding tantrums behind it. McAvoy is meant to be both the hero of the show and an avatar for Sorkin’s fantasy of uncompromising liberal principle (this despite the fact that McAvoy is a registered Republican, a RINO if there ever was one). 

It’s hard to pinpoint why “The Newsroom” falters where shows like “The West Wing” and “Sports Night” flourished.  Maybe it’s the format—rather than create fictional news stories for McAvoy to report on, Sorkin sets the show 18 months in the past so he can revisit and deconstruct recent real-world events. It’s an enticing premise on paper, but there’s something lazy and disingenuous about the way the show utilizes this conceit as a weekly formula. Sorkin has the benefit of hindsight perspective and uses it to criticize the failings of cable news; the staff of ACN always falls on the right side of history.

Or maybe it’s that, after two consecutive Oscar nominations for writing two nearly perfect films—“The Social Network” (for which he won) and “Moneyball”—expectations for a new Sorkin series, especially one that found the scribe playing for the first time in the unrestricted sandbox of HBO, were unreasonably high. 

Whatever the reason, “The Newsroom” didn’t quite work out of the gate, and Sorkin didn’t do himself any favors by responding so petulantly to the first wave of criticism. He was so disturbed by the negative reaction to season one that he fired his whole writing staff (except for his girlfriend) and took to engaging in petty verbal fisticuffs with any journalist who dared to question him directly about the show’s failings. 

Season two showed remarkable improvement. Sorkin and his new staff addressed every major criticism in some way, fleshing out the female characters, clarifying McAvoy’s more nuanced political stances and generally toning down the Sorkinisms (if you don’t know what that means, Google “Seth Meyers Sorkin parody” immediately). He even overhauled the opening credits and score to be more modern (read: more becoming of an HBO series) and less nostalgic, and he ditched the goofy, antiquated mid-episode montages set to Top 40 treacle. Most importantly, he developed an overarching plot involving a fictional scandal that undermines ACN’s integrity.

He didn’t stick the landing, though. Season two’s regressive finale is unbearably awful, packed with sappy declarations of love, perfunctory turns of plot that too quickly resolve the built-up conflicts and a god-awful wrap-up montage inexplicably set to a maudlin Christian pop song. Sorkin undermined his own atonement by delivering the worst episode of “The Newsroom” yet. 

The series finally putters to an end next month with a brief six-episode third season that premiered Nov. 9. The first two episodes, “Boston” and “Run,” are solid and engaging. “Boston” starts off predictably, tackling the Boston Marathon bombing and revisiting the chaos of assumptions and misinformation perpetuated by The New York Post, Fox News and amateur sleuths on Reddit. ACN, fresh off season two’s public humiliation, reports the story with extra caution, and avoids the embarrassment of retractions that befell CNN and others. The episode takes an intriguing turn as it moves into a subplot involving ACN’s social media guru, Neel (Dev Patel), and a mysterious government whistleblower modeled after Edward Snowden. “Run” then ups the ante as the feds raid ACN and Neel goes on the run with the help of McAvoy. By the end of the episode it seems as if Sorkin might actually let his hair down and venture into thriller territory for this final season. An eleventh hour turn into genre storytelling would be a welcome swan song for a show that’s been so mired in its own high-mindedness it has often mistook reading yesterday’s newspaper out loud for compelling storytelling.  

But this is Aaron Sorkin we’re talking about. Love him or hate him, he’s rarely unpredictable, and he loves to be himself. With only four episodes left, he’s not likely to surprise us. Brace yourself for the final montage.