The Newsroom: “News Night 2.0” Review

Olivia Munn makes an appearance in the Newsroom

 Spoilers ahead for this weeks episode

I shall preface this week’s review by saying that I didn’t feel that I gave enough props to last week’s episode in last week’s review. The episode worked on so many great levels and was the best pilot of the year so far. That being said let’s move on to this week.

“News Night 2.0” was plain and simply a frustrating hour of television. The episode relied on barley established relationships and poorly handled political commentaries to move the episode forward. It also mangled characters that could have been way stronger.

Speaking of, let’s start with Mackenzie, who made the jump from being strong powerful woman to bumbling idiot this week. The first problem was that she was going around telling the entire newsroom that Will was the nice guy even after he threw things at her and blew two segments of the newscast on her on purpose just to spite her. Yet she feels so bad for cheating on him in their past relationship that she is delusional to the fact that he’s a total jerk. That and Sorkin made her so inapt with technology that she can’t even send a private email without sending it to absolutely everyone (which wasn’t funny by the way). 

Which leads right into the main problem of the episode; the plot is moved forward through underdeveloped relationships. Will and Mackenzie and Maggie, Jim, and Don took center stage in what was a frustrating way to move the plot forward. The Will/Mac relationship feels so recycled from so many different shows (even from Sorkin’s past) so when a whole episode moves in relation to their relationship, while not really making it deep and complex, it's just frustrating. While the banter between Jim and Maggie was great the screw up of not getting the Governor on the show felt just like a way for Sorkin to make some really obvious and bad political commentary (more on that in a second). The characters didn’t get stronger thought and despite the big screw up on the newscast felt more like a chance for Sorkin to jab right wing extremists instead of move forward the plot.

So now to the political commentary; the episode had two very clumsy ways of calling out Republican extremists, the Arizona immigration law and Sarah Palin. Instead of getting the Goviner of Arizona to comment on the issue (due to a past relationship of Maggie’s getting in the way), we got a militia member a University of Pheonix professor and a pagant second runner up. This started off as a way of showing the characters screwing up and then eventually turned into a clumsy comment on right wing extremists. Same thing with Will trying to lamely defend Sarah Palin’s ridicules screw up regarding the oil spill at the end of the show. This magnified the main problem of the pilot – setting the show in the very near past – to really frustrating levels that detracted from the enjoyment of the episode. The show has to find out how to balance its political commentary and its drama without them clashing. That sure didn’t happen this week.

Even so the Sorkin banter is still a ton of fun featuring again a number of great descriptions and conversations (including Maggie describing how she hid under the bed while her then boyfriend was cheating on her with his ex). Also we got to see Olivia Munn this week as the economist who I’m assuming will become more important throughout the season.

“News Night 2.0” was a messy and frustrating hour of television that magnified the show’s problems (politics and relationships). Hopefully a bounce back to the quality of the pilot is an order next week as it would be sad for a show with such a great look and sound to go down this road.

That’s just me though, what did everyone else think?