*pokes community*/S02Ep01 reaction

[thewrongkindofpc]

Hey, so this is me poking around the internet to see if I can find some active, current Newsroom fans to babble at over this season.

I finally saw the first episode of the new season the other night, and I had the strangest feeling, where I could totally see, really feel, all the critical allegations against the show, could see exactly why people might think it was preachy, overblown and self righteous, but taken all at once, within the full package of the show, I ended up finding even those flaws largely really enjoyable?

It's like a cake--self-indulgent, very possibly not good for me (at least if we are operating under the assumption that NOT being a smug, righteous, wanna-be-intellectual-asshole is what is good for me), but DAMN is it satisfying.

I am not trying to bash this show--I just realized it might be starting to sound like I am, and that is incredibly not true, and I know this is SO not the place for that to be getting confused, but really, Sorkin? The scene where he reaches back through time to speak through Neal and warn Occupy Wall Street about why they would fail? MORE THAN A BIT HEAVY HANDED, NO?

I was really digging the greater inclusion of Neal this season so far, though. He and Sloan are definitely my favorites (though shhhh, don't tell. I am clearly very subtle), though not together--there were a few minutes last season when it looked like the show might be going to a Neal/Sloan place that really wasn't doing it for me. I am much more excited that it looks like we might get some Don/Sloan.

(I maybe ship Jim/Neal a whole lot, please don't judge. I love Maggie to bits but am not convinced that she and Jim are as ~MFEO~ as the show's trajectory would indicate, and I really love the idea that JIM HAS SUCH A THING FOR IDEALISTS. He has a definite type, that way, from Mac to Maggie straight through to Neal, who is the most idealistic idealist around. HE IS SO VERY MUCH MY FAVE.

That bit with "Has anyone talked to him?" after Jim RUNS AWAY FROM HOME and Neal's "He called me" made me waaaay happier than it should have, tbh.)

Anyway, this post is pretty much just to poke my head in, say hi, and see if anyone's down to be enthused about the new season with me. Hello! Anybody out there?

Comments

[erinptah]

Well, I'm still watching, though "enthusiasm" is probably a stretch :/

I loved Mac's ten minutes of being hypercompetent in a high-stress situation, and just wish we could see her like that 100% of the time, instead of getting scenes where she thinks you can stop someone from opening their email by breaking a single computer.

Also, Sloan. Everything about Sloan. She's the anchor who's actually doing what the show wants us to believe Will is doing: fighting to tell the stories that really matter, even when it's politically risky. (Which makes the way Charlie gets away with insulting her, while adoring Will, even more awful. It doesn't matter how awesome and credible and thoughtful she is, he still gets to mock her for wearing a skirt.)

Will is more about saying ~edgy things for the sake of edginess ("Tea Party: American Taliban, amirite?") and then backing down and/or doing the politically-safe thing to compensate (letting the idea of unchecked US drone strikes go unchallenged). Liberals in his audience will get some angry rhetoric from him, but none of the solid facts and strong arguments they actually need.

The romances have yet to do anything for me. I don't think Maggie-and-Jim or Will-and-Mac are ~MFEO~, and the show keeps painting them as totally romantic without doing the legwork of showing us long-form scenes to back it up. (Come to think of it, Will is kind of a microcosm of the whole show in that way...)

So, yeah. I kind of want Sloan, competent!Mac, maybe Neal, and that guy who wouldn't let Reese Lansing into a meeting to ditch everyone else and go do their own show.

[thewrongkindofpc]

I like the way you think! About a brand new show with some carryover characters, that is. Because Sloan kicks ass, and I'm kind of amazed she still puts up with Charlie and his bullshit.

I know what you mean about the slow-burn relationships they're trying to set up there. I don't necessarily think Will and Mac would do very well if they got back together, but I do there's a nice sense of having known each other for a long time in the way they interact with each other. Jim and Maggie, on the other hand, I really hope manage to peter out without ever moving further relationship-ward than they are now.

When I think about it, it sounds like there's not much in the show for me, since neither the news stuff or the romances are all that exciting to me, but I'm still watching, and at the end of each episode, I keep wanting more. I guess it's probably because I still love the dialogue and the pacing, and the characters that are good are reallllly great.

I AM curious about what's going to happen with Intern-sorority-girl, whose name I'm blanking on. I'm really hoping she does something to blow them all away, but I have the slimy feeling the pinnacle of her arc is just going to be Will absolving her.

[erinptah]

I wouldn't even call the relationships slow-burn. They're more like "fast-burn, then throw in all sorts of really artificial obstacles to compensate for the fact that you burned too fast." Like, Maggie constantly and loudly pushing Jim together with her roommate. (While from the beginning, Lisa is going "Jim, you like Maggie, don't you?" and Don is going "Is anyone else thinking Maggie is into Jim more than me?") Then Maggie and Jim actually kiss, but instead of breaking up with Don, Maggie accepts an offer to move in with him. Then Jim goes across the country, so he's conveniently not around when Don dumps Maggie. It's all so contrived :/

The dialogue is sometimes snappy and engaging, it's true. And, yeah, it has Sloan.

I'm both interested in and afraid of what they're going to do to "sorority girl." It was nice that they brought her back as a smart and driven character at the end, so she's not just a one-note "dumb blonde girl" joke who gets tossed away after getting the plot started.

On the other hand, your fears sound pretty reasonable; the way they show her to be smart and driven is (so far) largely "look, she's learned to idolize Will and want to be just like him." And Will still can't be bothered to learn her name. (If the pinnacle of her arc turns out to be "finally Will deems her worthy enough that he starts calling her by her name" there will not be enough facepalm in the world.)

[thewrongkindofpc]

Popping back in because I just saw the last ep, and I was kind of hoping you were still down to let me chatter at you about it.

One thing that was kind of refreshing about this episode was Jim and Maggie getting to each have storylines not particularly tied to each other. Jim's crusade against the Romney campaign is both satisfying in the way it is being written to be satisfying and also really irritating and burning with self-rightiousness. I'm enjoying his new friend's joy in pointing that out, and I only wish she wasn't clearly a device snowballing straight towards plunging Jim and Maggie into another love triangle.

No sorority girl sitings, which is disappointing to me. I don't know--were you ever into TSN? I really enjoy that she's played by the same actress as Ashley the intern, who was also in a sorority. Part of me is tempted to play around with timelines, see if there's any way to swing a crossover. She's make an awesome watching-from-a-distance-then-plunged-straight-into-the-Newsroom POV. She could watch the way the reporting changes with a critical eye, because she's got the kind of perspective where even if she agrees with some of the directions their reporting is going, she has first-hand knowledge of how Will can be a bully.

Anyway, loved Sloan's storyline this week, for all that it was pretty limited, and there was a nice slice of Neal getting to be interesting (I really love that he and Mac get to have actual discussions, where they both have actual, differing opinions based on differing backgrounds and points of view, but they still respect each other--it's kind of awesome), so if I ignore Will and Charlie and the way I can't really stand them when they are in a room together, especially when they are plotting things, and whatever it they think they're doing with Nina, I was actually pretty pleased with this week? A lower proportion of rage-watching to actual enjoyment, which was nice.

Thoughts?

[erinptah]

I'm almost always up for more Newsroom discussion! Feel free to make new posts for new episodes, too, so other people will be more likely to join in =)

It's hard to be satisfying with Jim's storyline because it's so smugness-in-hindsight. Like, it was wonderful and satisfying and provided a lot of catharsis when the Daily Show and the Colbert Report were saying the same thing in real-time, because they were stepping up and calling it out. But at this point it's just safe, unimaginative gloating.

Also, the last two episodes have both had a pattern of "every other scene involves 2-3 characters rehashing the latest developments in one of the romance plots." Can't we just have Jim and Maggie doing further interesting things, instead of the umpteenth replay of the YouTube clip of the last interesting thing they did?

(And why on Earth is Maggie moving back in with Lisa at all? Lisa should have gotten a new roommate already. Even accepting that she hasn't, she should pass on Maggie and look for a different one now. It's not like there's a shortage of people who can't afford to live in NYC on their own.)

So fed up with Will. He's back to his "mission to civilize!" rhetoric, which would be annoying only in a minor way, except that last episode he was all "we report, we don't editorialize" on both the Troy Davis case and the subject of drone strikes. I'm no fan of the Tea Party, but they aren't in some special class of awfulness where their actions deserve callouts while the direct murders of innocent human beings don't.

I never saw The Social Network, but I would approve of this crossover.

Sloan continues to be wonderful. I love it when she gets to call out workplace harassment. (Although I would like it more if she didn't have to put up with the workplace harassment in the first place.) And I appreciated Don backing her up -- it's refreshing when they show that, in addition to not being sexist themselves, men should be actively calling out the sexism of their fellow men.

Neal is being interesting. Neal-and-Mac are being interesting. I...am not angry at that storyline in general, which is often the best I can say of storylines in this show ^_^;

If only Sorkin could have resisted adding "lol, those women, you know how they are about their shoes!!" jokes into the conversation.

And if only he could stop excusing everything his characters do. It's probably most obvious with Will and Charlie, but even here: it's obscene that Mac paid what for me would be three months' rent on a single pair of shoes. If Will mentioned that trait about a CEO he was arguing with on his show, it would be a sign of their corruption, excess, and disconnect with the vast majority of the country who are struggling just to pay their bills.

But on Mac, it's treated as cutsey. She's never going to have to do any serious introspection about whether it's a problem. She gets to joke "hey now, don't you insult my shoes, I take them very seriously due to being quirky and also A Lady," and we're supposed to think, aww, how cute! We may be mad about the economy but we're not going to get mad at you, because you are A Good Character who totally deserves $1200 footwear.

Ugh.

I...did not have a low proportion of rage-watching this episode, as you might have guessed ^_^;

[thewrongkindofpc]

I think there's enough smugness-in-hindsight in, well, the majority of their news stories, to power a small town--I've been making an effort to try to think about the show in the present tense since it started really bothering me over Neal's conversations with the woman from Occupy--both are ringing with a definite echo of 'oh, if only you'd been there, Sorkin, to warn these poor, misguided people,' so it is possible that I missed it with Jim this ep because it's just the general trend of the show.

I don't remember the youtube-clip thing coming up more than maybe twice, though? Which would be over the top and excessive on any other show, sure, but seems actually pretty restrained for this one? Which isn't saying much, to be sure, but is hopefully the beginning of a trend.

Yes, Maggie and Lisa living together again is absurd, YES, Will is continuing to be insufferable. I think if I was in the mood to view the show generously, I would probably take a stab at making the argument that his Tea Party fixation s just that, a fixation, whatever journalistic integrity he ever had has been compromised all to hell, but it's possible that the show is aware of this and will comment on it in the future?

I do not actually hold out hope for this in the real world, but in a different one, where Sorkin's brain gets possessed by show-writing aliens, it could actually start to occur to people that Will is a republican, and that most of his energy seems to be being poured into hackneyed attempts to try to reform factions of his own party, that news stories that do not pertain to that one issue fall by the wayside, and that Mac's original vision is growing more compromised by the day.

Again, with the scene with Mac and her shoes, though, I think it's possible, in the most generous of readings, to take that not as something that's being excused about her character, but as a (sexist as fuck, to be sure) way of making a point about class differences which adds a little nuance to Mac's character. Yes, she is the moral compass of the show, yes, she's just as self righteous as Will, yes, she's out to save the world, but she was raised wealthy and she's comfortable with excess, and because she IS righteous and idealistic and HAS risen to a level of authority, no one generally calls her on it.

(Again, I'm not sure that's what the script was going for, but that was how I chose to take it--hoping I'm not made to regret that in the long run.)

I mean, yes, I totally agree, $1200 on shoes is excessive and appalling, but then, I think most weddings are excessive and appalling, too--I'm used to TV not agreeing with me.

Anyway--Sloan, Don, who is creeping up into my list of favorites almost against my will, And Neal all had a relatively good show. That, at least, pleases me :) Always glad to hear more of your thoughts! And yeah, for sure, I'll probably set up another post for next episode.

[erinptah]

Not counting the original incident as we saw it last season, we have Don playing the video in episode 1, then Maggie recaps it for Sloan, then recaps it for Jim, then recaps it for the woman who filmed it, then Lisa plays it for Maggie, then Jim plays it all alone. I guess, to be fair, they didn't seem to play it in episode 3, so they may be over it by now...

I like your headcanon alternate reading of the show much better than what we're actually getting.

Weddings can be horribly expensive, but to be fair, that's a big special occasion where you're celebrating a life-changing event and likely getting your whole family together. I don't mind the idea of people getting crazy-indulgent every once in a while. It's when it becomes a way of life that it gets ridiculous.

Don has been having some decent moments (setting aside the "suddenly, Troy Davis becomes a source of angst for all the white people in the newsroom!" subplot). Neal's been good. Sloan has continued to be crushingly awesome and criminally underappreciated. I'm still willing to watch for Sloan's sake alone.