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Five things we want to see from ‘The Newsroom’

Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom returns to Showcase on Monday night, hours after its US return on HBO. This final season of six episodes is all that is left to turn it all around or land the perfect finish – depending upon your view of the series’ two seasons to date, and possibly your world view.

For one of the prime divisions between lovers and loathers of the fictional drama set in the ACN 24-hour cable newsroom dealing with real-world news stories seems to be whether you feel lectured at or lectured for. From A Few Good Men through The West Wing to The Social Network, Sorkin has demonstrated his ability as one of the greatest dialogue writers on the planet so when his characters are on fire, if you agree you feel you have a champion, if you disagree you feel steamrollered, assailed and belittled.

tumblr_mruekjbUse1qjde42o1_500Unlike the titles above The Newsroom has not been a critical success for Sorkin. Many reviewers have eviscerated the show for weak female characters, for its intellectual bias or for not being a true representation of a newsroom. The latter complaint must seem particularly frustrating to lawyers, medical professionals and cops who watch show after show mangle their careers.

Me, I’m a fan. I love the unique nature of this passionate do-over for heavy news. I love rom-com schmaltz. This show combines these two polar opposites and it gels more often than it grinds the gears.

Season 3

tumblr_m91gll6oQ91qicr06o1_500What do we know so far? Well, in a spoiler-free world we can disclose the titles of the last six episodes:

1: “Boston”
2: “Run”
3: “Main Justice”
4: “Contempt”
5: “Oh Shenandoah”
6: “What Kind of Day Has It Been”

That last title will be familiar to Sorkin fans (well, the more obsessive ones). The title of the 25th and final episode of The Newsroom (around the length of a standard free-to-air series) shares the title of the final episode of the first seasons of Sports Night, The West Wing and Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip. Plot wise … that tells us almost nothing.

The title of the first episode refers to the Boston Marathon bombing and the episode is particularly obsessed with the social media involvement in that real world event, as indicated in the trailer:

The rest of the series will have an over-arcing plot revolving around an Edward Snowden-style government source and how to handle it.

So with six episodes to go, what do we want from the final six episodes of The Newsroom?

One more lecture

First up, one more of these please. The moment in which news anchor Will McAvoy lost his rag and ‘fessed up that America isn’t the best country in the world. This was the lecture that started the series, that set out its stall and which established an impossible benchmark for the rest of the show. I dare you to click on it and not watch it through.

If we can have just one more of these, ideally as the final scene (because they so seldom work) then all will be right with the world. I don’t need another reference to Australia, but it would be nice.

Romance

Do the romance right. We know Sorkin can do this, but he also has a huge history of big soppy love narratives that don’t quite gel with the rest of his shows. It’s the most common cause of his female characters shifting from great to grating.

There are three romances on the boil as we go into season three: Will and Mac who became engaged in the final episode of season two. Sloan and Don, the only relationship to grow organically over the series. And Jim and Maggie (and Hallie) the sitcom relationship tacked on to season one.

tumblr_m7vt22vp1d1qgmv4ao1_500So overall, please ensure the female characters, like their opposites, exist in the series for the news, not to be an object of affection. Romance is a great plot device as a complication.

Please don’t put Maggie (Allison Pill) and Jim (John Gallagher Jr) together. He makes a real-world sense with the rather impressive Hallie (Grace Gummer, a.k.a. Meryl Streep’s daughter) and like Ben Affleck in Tropic Thunder, this series shouldn’t go full-rom-com. These are two people who might have got together once but now life has moved on. It’s kind of like the news. You don’t get a do-over. It would feel too contrived.

Stop under-cutting McKenzie. Emily Mortimer was rightly cast as “Perfect Girl” in Notting Hill (seriously that was the character name, look it up). She wears the title well without grating through excellence. She doesn’t need a pointless character flaw. Don’t make her bumble. She’s awesome in every scene where she isn’t suddenly failing to use technology. Whether Mac and Will end together is dramatically legitimate. For anyone who watched Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip to its conclusion the outcome might feel a little pre-ordained.

As for Sloan (Olivia Munn) and Don (Thomas Sadoski), have fun. They feel real and as such we’ve bought into it hook, line and sinker.

tumblr_n85v2fuJdg1qkr28lo1_500Don’t waste the bit parts

This show possesses a few heavy-hitters in “minor” roles:tumblr_myagy6uwnO1rmltcao1_500

More Leona (Jane Fonda) please – particularly after she was just on our screens supporting the laziest big-breast-gag of the decade in This Is Where I Leave You.

More Charlie (Sam Waterston) please. He’s awesome.

And from another generation, more Neal (Dev Patel) please. And not just as the IT guy who can fix Mac’s Wikipedia page (a storyline that exemplified the worst of both characters in one). Making the Indian guy the computer-savvy character is only an excusable archetype if he is given way more qualities and quality stories. The occupy New York stuff was a bit half-arsed in the end. Hopefully his role at the centre of the informant plot should be meatier.

tumblr_m7foufX3521ru90dzo1_500

Keep re-doing the real news

The news in this fictional world is our news. Oil spills in the Gulf of New Mexico, the Tea Party, the use of drones, the Fukushima meltdown, Occupy New York, Osama Bin Laden’s killing and phone hacking to name a handful.

For some reason this seems to get a lot of critics’ goats. In showing how a well-meaning but demonstrably fallible newsroom might debate and handle real-world news stories, some commentators feel Sorkin is taking some unacceptable moral position. Surely it is better though to use a story that allows viewers to bring their own knowledge of the context, or possibly even think about it again from a different perspective.

This is the only way in which The Newsroom has been ground-breaking and if anything it should double-down not back-off. In a world where news and fiction are dangerously close, there’s no problem with the latter pushing back a bit.

Don’t listen to the critics, rise above them

James Poniewozik in Time magazine summarises the show’s greatest fault as “to imagine itself less as a work of art than as a repair manual for civic society”. It’s the core and most valid complaint.

tumblr_m7yw8urBrn1r1e5vwo1_500The Newsroom can’t cease its mission to civilise though. That would rip out the soul. Rather preach, but preach well. Earn the soapboxes then deliver lines that will become memes, lectures that will flood YouTube. And also remember brains and heart trump melodrama. Don’t get lost in a Sex and the City plotline. Don’t take Maggie to Africa.

Fulfil your own promise. Be the best Newsroom you can be for your audience.

Do one more season

Number six in our list of five, because it just won’t happen. But there’s no way this show should miss out on doing a Presidential election. They’ve handled the candidate race in season two but it seems the first Tuesday in November is out. The West Wing’s final (Sorkin-free) season predicted the rise of Obama. It’d be great to see The Newsroom handle the fight to be his successor.

The Newsroom season 3 airs on Foxtel’s Showcase at 7.30pm Monday.

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