Fixing 'The Newsroom' in Three Easy Steps

Since it premiered four weeks ago, the new Aaron Sorkin series The Newsroom has inspired quite the Internet discussion. The reviews have been widely negative, but it’s still a fascinating, compulsively watchable show that gets so much wrong yet has a ton of potential. While I’m not necessarily a fan of all the hate-watching/live-tweeting this show sees on a weekly basis—if you can’t stand it, just stop watching it—but it’s also very much deserving of the vitriol that gets sent its way with each new episode. It’s a mess, and sometimes an offensively bad one at that. Like any writer, Sorkin has good habits and bad habits. With The Newsroom, it seems like he’s stuffed all of his bad habits into one place.

That said, Sorkin is one of my favorite writers out there. That still remains true. His four seasons of The West Wing are impeccable, and his film scripts—particularly his recent work on The Social Network and Moneyball—are terrific more often than not. Yet there’s no denying that one of Sorkin’s biggest fans is Sorkin himself, and never before as he seemed as comfortable on his high horse than in The Newsroom. It has all the elements that would seem to make a great Sorkin show, but his writing here seems like an endless series of uncharacteristically bad decisions. It’s not news that Sorkin’s writing has gotten a little preachy; it is news that he’s chosen to go about his preaching exactly the wrong way.

My problems with The Newsroom can be boiled down to three main points, and I believe that if the show were to address these points it would be substantially improved. I’m not sure if the show will address them, and it may already be too late, but I do think that it's problems aren't incredibly complex. I realize that Sorkin is a much smarter man than I, but if there ever was a show that could be drastically improved with a little outside influence, this is it.

1) Put the characters first and the mission statement second

It’s easy to sympathize with The Newsroom’s ultimate message: modern news media has lost sight of what it means to report the news. To a degree, this is true. The Newsroom’s primary target is cable news, which has been taken over by the biased and occasionally facts-averse sensationalism of Fox News and MSNBC. The station that employs newsman Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) is ACN, which seems to be more of a CNN-type network than anything else. (Though CNN does exist in this universe.) By all accounts it’s a relatively unbiased network, but it’s also boring. McAvoy is the chief culprit in this, and while participating in an event at Northwestern he is referred to as “the Jay Leno of cable news.” He's inoffensive, vanilla, and no one can muster much of an opinion on him. This is a mask he’s worn in public for quite some time, but in the show’s very first scene he snaps.

Immediately McAvoy goes on a diatribe against everything modern, and it was here that people (read: critics) began to smell blood in the water. Once again, the intention is interesting and not incorrect—the basic gist of his Network-like speech is that America is not the greatest country in the world, but it can be—but Sorkin immediately enters “grumpy old man” territory when he refers to the group of college students he’s addressing as the “worst. generation. ever.” (The periods are spoken, seriously.) At that moment, I knew that Sorkin may be barking up the wrong tree. Blaming the younger generation for all the world’s problems is historically a load of crap, and folks have been doing it since Galileo thought his twentysomething downstairs neighbors were playing their crumhorns way too loud. The world has turned out fine so far, and I’d think Sorkin would be smarter than pointing the finger at the young’uns what with their Twitters and blogs.

I realize that this is a character saying these things and not Sorkin himself, but McAvoy is so plainly a Sorkin surrogate that it’s hard to distinguish between the two. In the fourth episode entitled “I’ll Try to Fix You”—and ooh boy, we’ll get to that one in a minute—McAvoy constantly repeats that he is “on a mission to civilize.” While Sorkin occasionally pokes fun at McAvoy, it’s hard not to hear Sorkin’s voice when he speaks those words. The Newsroom is Sorkin’s mission to civilize, and too often the show feels like it’s yelling at everyone for being wrong without actually bothering to tell interesting stories. It feels less like a television show and more like an ill-conceived manifesto.

Through four episodes, virtually nothing has happened on The Newsroom, and it doesn’t seem like it’s building up to anything either. Besides some threats from the top floor about the content of McAvoy’s new-and-improved program called NewsNight, the show is just a lot of empty speechifying. There isn’t even much insight into how a cable news show is run, and Sorkin has made the curious decision to focus on the message rather than the content. Instead of making an entertaining television show and using it to create subtext, The Newsroom is all text. Turn on an episode, and you’ll be treated to an hour of Sorkin telling you how the world should be. Few people on this earth get much joy out of being lectured to for so long; even if the lecture is covering some pretty important stuff.

I, unlike some, do not get a kick out of disliking The Newsroom. I sympathize with its message, I love its writer, and I think it can be something great. I would love the message much more if it didn’t feel like Sorkin was simply spitting venom without regard for the world around it. The characters can all be described in but a few words, and sometimes it’s hard to tell them apart. Sorkin characters have all been well-versed in the same language of Sorkinese, but at least in the past he’s created characters that we spend time getting to know. These are just a bunch of types that have so far been used as mouthpieces and nothing more. Besides McAvoy, there is the idealistic executive producer (Emily Mortimer), the love triangle (John Gallagher, Jr., Thomas Sadoski, and poor, poor Alison Pill), the geek (Dev Patel), the good-looking financial analyst (Olivia Munn) and the boss (Sam Waterston). I’ve seen four episodes and that’s about all we've been told about any of them.

If The Newsroom is to turn itself around, that needs to change. Throw away the message part of the show for a while and start focusing on all the characters by having them do interesting things. Look at, say, The West Wing, where Sorkin accomplished just that. There was potential for that show to be about nothing more than his dream President, and it’s often clear that President Bartlet is a guy he’d love to have running the show, but he earned all the speeches and lectures by making the audience want to listen to the characters. It was a fun universe to hang out in. That is not the case with The Newsroom, which is all mind and no matter.

2) Start fictionalizing

This point is tangentially related to the first, as the show’s lecture-heavy tendencies are directly proportional to its reliance on real events. When the pilot first revealed that The Newsroom takes place around two years in the past, it struck me as a particularly unwise idea on Sorkin’s part. The fourth episode “I’ll Try to Fix You” only reaffirmed this suspicion, as it took the real-world shooting of congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and turned it into an opportunity for Sorkin to show the media how he would have handled coverage of that event. The particular aspect of the shooting he focuses on is the media’s eagerness to declare her dead once NPR leaked the information. Instead of jumping on the death-reporting bandwagon like everyone else, McAvoy nobly refuses to report her death and is ultimately proven correct.

Here’s the problem: no duh, Sorkin. Everyone here in 2012 agrees that the media should have held off before reporting this information, and you aren’t breaking any ground. Unless there is video of you watching the coverage and saying, out loud, that the media shouldn’t be pronouncing her dead so quickly then you don’t have a lot of ground to stand on. You don’t get a medal for pointing out the obvious a year and a half later. That is the great danger Sorkin faces by setting the show in the recent past. He has the benefit of hindsight, so there’s nothing bold about saying “hey, I think that the reporting surrounding Giffords’ shooting could have been better handled!” We all already think this, and The Newsroom is way too proud of itself once this moment comes around.

I've wondered whether or not this moment would play better if it was a fictional event set in the modern day. That way Sorkin is actually going out on a limb rather than being ol' Captain Obvious. Or, better yet, he could have had Will learn a lesson by having him erroneously report Giffords’ death. Anything to shake up the situation would have been nice. Thus far, The Newsroom has been nothing more than Aaron Sorkin Fixes Media Coverage of the Recent Past. A much more interesting show would be Aaron Sorkin Fixes Media Coverage in the Present by Creating Examples That We Don’t Already Know the Solutions To. That way he’d avoid eye-roll-worthy moments like when McAvoy declares that he won’t report Giffords’ death while Coldplay’s “Fix You” blares on the soundtrack.

There’s nothing wrong with fictionalization. The West Wing did it, and it was better for it. If that show had President Bartlet go through the exact same struggles as, say, President Clinton, it would have been a real difficult show to stomach. It’s much easier to buy into Sorkin’s messages and speeches when it feels like it took some effort to get there. So long as The Newsroom is set in the recent past and dealing with real events, it’s not going to connect with me as much as it could. Plus, it removes any sense of unpredictability. As of episode four, the show has progressed to January 2011, which is about four months away from the death of a certain terrorist. Season finale, anyone?

3) Fix the female characters, because sheesh

I’ve normally not been one to write about sexism and the like, because I don’t consider myself to be in a position to judge such things. (Mostly because I’m not a woman.) However, I know blatant sexism when I see it, and The Newsroom has got a real problem in that department. Sorkin has long been criticized for his writing of female characters, but this show has got to be the nadir. I defended his use of females in The Social Network since, if anything, the negative view of women was Zuckerberg’s more than it was the filmmakers’. In The Newsroom there’s no such excuse. The women all exist to have relationships with men, and even then most of them are klutzes, supermodels, or—worst of all—fans of the Real Housewives shows. Emily Mortimer’s Mackenzie isn’t anywhere near the competent, powerful character she needs to be; in one episode there’s an entire plot that concerns itself with her inability to send a freaking e-mail correctly. Mackenzie is, in theory, supposed to be this show’s C.J. Cregg, but Sorkin has yet to give her the chance. Whenever he gets the opportunity to give the focus over to a male character, he does.

I would say more on the subject, but there have been a million blog posts and thinkpieces on sexism and The Newsroom and anything I say will just be adding to the noise. Instead, I will simply direct you to this angry piece by Sasha Stone, who lays it out better than I ever could. It’s areas like this where Sorkin’s tendency to go the writing process alone can hurt him, because he’s in a position where there’s no one else around to tone down his bad habits. The Newsroom is pure, unfiltered Sorkin; that has occasionally worked in the past, but in this instance he seems to have gotten lost in his own mind.