The Newsroom: “The Blackout” Part 1 and 2 review

Maggie and Lisa looking defeated in The Newsroom

Brief note, I was going to do a recap of the three episodes before these episodes as well, but the season finale is next week and I will be doing a season review afterwards so I thought that would be redundant. I thought two of the first episode of the three was bad and the other two were quite good. This review from this point in will solely contain very brief reviews of the two part storyline called “The Blackout”. So here goes…

So after a bit of a role “The Newsroom” presented us with the “The Blackout” an interesting set of episodes because they were close to polar opposites quality wise. The first part continued the streak of goodness and was the best episode since the pilot while part 2 was a mess featuring all of what Aaron Sorkin and this series does worse, providing one frustrating hour of television. Overall there is a mixed feeling going into the finale that can either go so right or very, very wrong.

Let’s start with the good; “The Blackout part 1” was one of the best Newsroom episodes this season, perhaps the best since the pilot. It was well paced, presenting non preachy political commentary, eliminated the clumsy romantic comedy, and didn’t make the female characters do dumb and inferior. Mac was in control the entire episode as she attempted to keep with the path as Will and Charlie wanted to cover dumb stories, those being Casey Anthony and Anthony Weiner, for the sake of ratings. Meanwhile Will was being a jerk, and finally acknowledged for being a jerk, because he got the person Mac cheated on him with to write the story about their new style of news. Soon, right as the crew was pre tapping a stupid Weiner interview, the power goes out, setting up part 2…

Part 2 was an atrocious mess of an episode of which most of the episode fell completely flat. Mac went from seeming really right to downright crazy as she, at least a couple of times, broke down into insane shouting sessions. Will was back to being the greatest guy on earth according to the show as he again was a jerk with no real consequence. Then there were the romantic comedy portions that were just downright cringe worthy and absolutely awful. Case and point I like Jim, but at this point why must Sorkin drag on the whole stupid love square (Jim, Don, Maggie, Lisa) any longer. I even liked the Jim and Lisa exchange from a few weeks ago (good short and actually kind of sweet) but man do we need to get pelted in the face by Lisa that Maggie and Jim should be together. The other problem is that at this point (despite being a little better throughout these two episodes) Maggie is the most annoying character on the show making it near impossible for me to root for Jim to end up with her (it’s all so heavy handed and poorly done I don’t care about it anyways). The bad relationship syndrome also carried over to Will and Mac again as Will after all this time (apparently due to his father’s betrayal at an early age) still can’t forgive Mac and so the monotony continues…

Then there was the debate which was one of the preachiest moments on the Newsroom (even if I agree with what Sorkin is trying to convey). Will doesn’t get the debate because the dirt bag young assistant to Will’s longtime friend in the republican party won’t settle for the type of questioning being thrown out in Will’s mock debate. It goes back to the whole Newsroom problem of ramming stuff down our throats in a very preachy manner. This is the kind of political commentary that the show fails at and should stop trying to do; but it’s Sorkin so you never know…

Some other thoughts:

• The well done version of commentary on the show was in Part 1 when Don breaks down how Nancy Grace keeps modern day ADD audiences glued to larger than life sensationalized stories. Good stuff there.

• Why is a group of internet trolls such an interesting story again? It’s about as bad as Bigfoot and is being pegged as a legit story. While my question was answered this week and it’s a BAM PLOT DEVICE! Sigh…

Slightly shorter review this week but don’t panic next week is the finale so we’ll have plenty to talk about then (for better or for worse).

That’s just me though… What did everyone else think?