Guest Writer Drew Curle, Esq.
I just finished watching The Newsroom. To the show's credit, I watched it pretty compulsively, including the last 3 episodes in a row. But it always felt like a guilty pleasure, even though its supporters say it is serious cultural commentary.
In creative writing terms, the show tells and tells and tells and almost never shows anything. Will can't forgive MacKenzie for cheating on him; rather than let the audience figure this out, Sorkin literally writes that sentence into dialogue with Will's therapist. Maggie yells at strangers to explain her love triangle (which by the end of the season has become a love square), just in case the audience couldn't grasp it yet. As the above article points out, Don is directly told in the finale that he thinks he's a bad guy, but he's not—there it is, Don all summed up for you.
This is also, in my opinion, why the show's news dialogue works so much better than its relationship dialogue. In a professional context, and especially in a newsroom professional context, short speeches by the various characters are much more plausible. While you need to show not tell a person's life story, you can tell the news.
That said, I think the show falls short even there. The show is all about Sorkin's dream of a world where news was done the right way. It's a noble thing, but it's ultimately just a fantasy—an imagining of how the world should work. Not only does it now show how the world does work, which is not the show's goal since it is ultimately a sort of alternate history, the show fails to show how Sorkin's dream could work.
I'm no tea partier and I'm on record as being the only McCain 08 voter who is more likely to vote for Obama in 12 than Romney, but having Will call the tea party the American Taliban on air in the last episode might have been going just a bit too far. And if that wasn't going too far, then having multiple reac shots of major characters nodding sagely after Will says this, a cheer go up in the news room, featuring not even one voice of discontent anywhere on the show with this takedown, and then topping it all off with a comment from Will's body guard that he expects a lot more serious death threats after delivering that line—well, certainly somewhere in there a line was crossed.
But Sorkin makes a point time and again of saying that some arguments have only one side, because the other is illogical. And in his fantasy world, all of politics falls into this realm: there is the liberal side, and the crazy side.
So in summary, The Newsroom: the characters are flat and the media commentary is unbelievable wish-fulfillment. It's fast-paced, witty, and keeps you interested; so I plan to watch the second season. But I'll watch it as a guilty pleasure, not hoping for another Mad Men or Game of Thrones (let alone The Wire).