'The Newsroom' finale stays true to the series — for good and for bad
The Newsroom ends, but the show goes on.
That's what we're left with in the final shot of Sunday's series finale: Jeff Daniels as Will McAvoy, back at his desk (sans cigarettes) ready to do The News.
Sure, some things have changed. Pregnant McKenzie is now the news director at ACN. Maggie and Jim love each other. So do Sloan and Don. Neal is back and more self assured. But really, it's the same old crew doing the same show.
As a journalist, that might be the one thing that felt real about the show's finale. No matter the momentous changes in personal lives, the show must go on. There's always another story, another interview. Like playing tennis against a wall, you don't ever win the news; you just keeping swinging.
The show's main struggle has also changed only cosmetically from its start. The staff of Will's show News Night is still trying to do The News. At the beginning, it was struggling against ratings. Now it's battling the technorati playboy that bought ACN, the fictional network on The Newsroom, and wants it to begin running listicles like 'the Ten Most Overrated Movies Ever.'
Unfortunately, that struggle will remain much discussed but mostly untouched. In three seasons, the show seemed only to point out that this battle exists. It is a show that got on the highest of horses about media and journalism in the modern age without even breaking it into a trot.
The final season of the Newsroom evolved in almost bizarre concert with real life events, and Sunday was no exception.
The show's creator, executive producer and writer Aaron Sorkin took to the op-ed pages of The New York Times to voice his displeasure with how the media had turned leaked Sony emails into stories.
Sorkin argues that journalists helped the hackers behind the recent Sony hack by writing stories based on leaked emails. In doing so, he seems to insinuate that those who have written on this are in cahoots with people who have threatened murder. It includes this little doozy:
As a screenwriter in Hollywood who's only two generations removed from probably being blacklisted, I'm not crazy about Americans calling other Americans un-American, so let's just say that every news outlet that did the bidding of the Guardians of Peace is morally treasonous and spectacularly dishonorable.
Lumping together every single media outlet with those Sorkin finds most odious is a blatant reminder that the person who just finished three seasons of television about an American newsroom seems to know nothing about American newsrooms. Sorkin might as well have decried 'the lamestream media' and started his own network.
With that understanding, The Newsroom makes far more sense. Sorkin has always been something of a modern Norman Rockwell, painting pictures of Americana that resemble how a simple person might wish for things to be rather than how they are.
That falls apart quickly when confronted with real world situations like the Sony leaks. To be clear, there are plenty of examples of media outlets pushing stories from the leaks that are at best borderline. But one of Sorkin's examples is a Huffington Post story about how the leaks help illustrate a diversity problem in Hollywood. That seems awfully newsworthy to me.
Just like in The Newsroom, instead of any nuanced discussion, we are treated to some finger wagging from Sorkin. 'As demented and criminal as it is, at least the hackers are doing it for a cause. The press is doing it for a nickel,' he finishes in the article.
MacKenzie McHale would be ashamed of us.
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