The Newsroom: “The Greater Fool” Review

Will walks out for the season on The Newsroom

A season finale of a show usually serves to not only wrap up the season and its themes, but also to represent what the season has been, the ways it has waxed and waned and where the series will be going. For example the season finale of this year’s season of Mad Men was frustrating because it represented the biggest problems that the season had throughout its run (being too obvious with the themes it tried to convey mostly) while not representing all the amazing things that the season, and the series in general does. In other words it didn’t do an adequate job of showing us what the show does well at the end of the season leaving many people with a more negative view of the season.

In many ways the finale of the Aaron Sorkin drama “The Newsroom” is a perfect representation of the first season. Why? Because it’s an absolute mess from beginning to end, and the same thing is true for the rest of this season. It fumbles into the same traps that the rest of the season managed to stumble into, whether it be poor romantic comedy, terrible female characters, and ultimate Will McAvoy worship. It worked in some ways, namely the dialogue and reporting of the news, but ultimately it fell into frustrating mess territory, the same territory that unfortunately the series has been wallowing in all season.

Anyways on with “The Greater Fool” which, as previously mentioned, was a mess of an episode that wrapped up a mess of a season. On the positive side though the episode kept up the Sorkin tradition of great dialogue (something that I need to pay respect to despite all of the horrible problems the series has) and while it’s frustrating it manages to be good fun throughout. It also, again despite the many problems manages to have some satisfying moments (the great reaction from Charlie when he finds out about Hancok’s suicide and the execution of many scenes, despite their issues) that keep me semi invested in the series and its characters.

Now onto the problems, first off why would the girl that got verbally beet down by Will in the “Mad as Hell” rant at the beginning of the season all of a sudden want to be the new intern of News Night? Because Will is the greatest man on earth and his cause is the most noble and amazing thing ever, that’s why! Wow was that ever stupid, seriously! Well the series has had a knack of making Will the greatest man in the world according to his peers this just takes the cake. While Sorkin tries to redeem the scene with a cool speech by Will it just ends up falling flat on its face because of the sheer stupidity of it all. The scene is also frustrating in the way that again a male character is amazing and all females should follow his lead and hope that they can learn valuable lessons from him. So frustrating!

Then there is Maggie, poor, stupid, infuriating Maggie who this week got the wonderful job of parodying a Sex in the City character for no reason at all. I mean common! While we know Sex and the City isn’t by any means an accurate representation of the average working woman, we also don’t need the Newsroom, an equally inaccurate and naïve show, to tell us this. On top of this we have to sit through the excruciating romantic comedy that continues to be very painful. Speaking of that, all of a sudden Sloan has a crush on Don. What?!!!! Why?!!! Sloan is a character that I have liked and now they are going to put her into the terrible romantic comedy plot… Goodness…

We then move on to the TMI subplot that, worked at times, but at others it was a complete mess. Will, Mac and Charlie did do a great bluff to get our wonderful executive to admit to phone hacking to his mother and owner of the station (again Joan Rivers is great here). The sequence was well executed save for the fact that the characters are continuously naïve in regards to gossip columnists in general. So, mixed bag indeed.

“The Greater Fool” was a mess, plain and simple. It was frustrating, at times awful, and constantly naïve to a point of complete annoyance. Despite that the Newsroom still has great dialogue and some fine moments that, despite my many frustrations, will keep me watching when it comes back next summer. Because even if it still has very frustrating moments they’re like a train wreck, it’s hard not to watch it.

That’s just me. What did everyone else think?