Monsters of Television

“How are you still working here?”

Adorkable.

And, finally, we have the story of the cylon.

While Mac Mac and Maggie have been busy flitting about girlishly, getting themselves worked up into tizzies that big, strong men continually save them from, there is one woman at the office who has been on the fringe of the nonsense. No, not Kendra.

It’s Sloan and her Munn-Face, blue-steeling through all the emotional scenes, establishing herself as unable to feel whatever hyperbolic emotional meltdown her radioactive coworkers are in the middle of. She stares robotically as Mackenzie carries on about stuff that happened four years ago. She’s maintains a stance that she has been told she does not communicate well with humanity. She has not found herself beholden to Will at any point, which clearly means she can’t be a female in this newsroom with her name in the excruciatingly long title sequence.

Well, no more! Sloan will prove her weak womanhood once and for all by being silly on camera, all so Will can paint himself as a martyr, the penitent bully, and a more square-jawed Obi Wan all in the same episode. Girls are such a mess!

The bully thing: I can see how, on paper, that might be an interesting story. The show is premised on Will getting the truth while no one else on cable news cares enough to do it. He drills the Tea Party candidates. He gives it to BP. He even tells his ratings guy to shove it so he doesn’t have to call a death on initial reports. This week he takes on the internet.

Yeah. Trolls. He takes on internet trolls.

It’s through this that he gets a death threat by a person who games the system to stay anonymous so — I guess we did that so the bodyguard assigned to him seems like a not so implausible idea? I don’t know. What we needed was another character that is on a lower pay-grade than Will who can still keep up the repartee and we got that guy.

It’s the only real source of repartee we have in the episode. Charlie is too serious the whole time because everyone keeps effing around. Mac Mac gets misty if she’s in a conversation with Will for too long. Sloan is a robot. Everyone else is too wrapped up in their nonsense. How will Sorkin get the banter out of his head and onto the page if none of the characters are available to participate? If he doesn’t get the banter out he will die. His brain will hemorrhage and he’ll bleed out witty catechisms and playful jabbing. Please, lowly, non-threatening security guard! Give Sorkin the outlet he needs so this awful tragedy does not come to pass!

Back to the bully thing. Along with the negative outpouring of the internet, Will also takes on Rick Santorum. Sort of. You see, The Newsroom operates in a timeline that is at once together and separate from our known history. I’ve described it before as the flash-sideways but that’s the end of time so it’s not a perfect metaphor. It’s more like Forrest Gump, where Tom Hanks is placed in the timestream and historical figures react to him as if he’s there but they’re not reacting to him at all. Think of The Newsroom as the guy who went to the White House and had to pee.

Because Rick Santorum would never lend his image to this show and since compiling an interview with him from found footage would be too much trouble legally, physically, and financially, Sorkin has Will interview one of Santorum’s aides, a gay man working on a campaign that openly marginalizes the homosexual population. Now, the haranguing this man receives in Will’s “mission to civilize” is part of the newsman’s eventual breakthrough that he is a bully. That maybe this aide, a man of principle and confidence, doesn’t need to be civilized seems to be the lesson Will is about to learn.

He fights back. He tells Will he is not defined by singled-out characteristics of his being and that he doesn’t need rescuing from the gruff, talking head who just wants to pick a fight. And it could have ended there. When Will says he’s a bully, we can read that as Sorkin (not necessarily as a person but as the perspective of this series) is a bully. The show is heavy-handed and biased and aggressive to a singular point-of-view. The “bias toward fairness” is a cop-out so that the show can rationalize the opinions of others out of the context of the debate. As a tenet, it’s not without base. But it’s used here to tell to shove one side down the throats of an audience.

This interview, however, feels different. Stuart Hall finally tells Will, tells Sorkin, that he is out of line, that this show is bullying. And it could’ve ended there. But Will and Sorkin have one more line.

McAvoy ends the argument by missing the point entirely. After Stuart Hall provides him with reasons why he’s siding with Rick Santorum and that he, as a man, is the sum of his parts, Will ends the interview by pointing out that Santorum doesn’t feel that Hall is fit to teach. You watch Hall’s reaction and it’s hard to tell whether the character is angry because he hadn’t been heard or if that’s the realization that inspires him to resign. The thing is that you can’t trust it’s the former and not the latter.

You would suspect that Sorkin, as the writer, understands that he’s committing to the page a statement on the show as a whole. By having Will admit he’s the bully while on the couch means that Sorkin understands that, by doing this show, he is also the bully. But you can’t trust it. Because Sorkin does have the last word of that argument and, in a show that has struggled to demonstrate anything other than slapstick, pathos comes off like a veiled weapon.

All of this, of course, ties into Sloan’s story where she becomes the mindless padawan after Will’s pep talk. Just as Will bullied Stuart Hall, Sloan (in a 10 o’clock guest spot that is ridiculously bestowed upon her) bullies her conveniently-placed buddy in the Japanese nuclear power hierarchy. Despite the fact that she’s been doing news on television for years (probably — right?) and would have a very clear understanding of what “off the record” and “speaking in a language non-native to your listeners” would mean for a broadcast, she blindly (and literally) does what she’s told (by Will — the alpha male).

Sure, she does a lot of grandstanding afterward, saying she wants to do the right thing. But, at the end, she looks to Will for guidance (because the only other people offering her advice are flitty girls). And Will saves her just like he saves everyone else. He tells her he’s always going to be there for her, stand up next to her even when he sucks. What a swell guy. And she, again, does what she’s told (lie on camera about who she is).

Will’s breakthroughs about being a bully land without much of an impact with me. He has to be a bully for the direction the show wants to take, both News Night and The Newsroom. So it has to amount to nothing. He can’t let people get away with the things the other news networks allow. So this is almost an admission of guilt and a lack of remorse. Sorkin is a bully. Get used to it.

Other things:

• How many episodes are we going to get that are told out of order/backwards?
• “Not unless he was in an a capella doo-wop group, no.”
• I think the major problem is that the show makes grand statements without credible opposition. Will’s plan is that employing a system of accountability in the comments on the website will “be civility in the public square and a triumph of populism.” Anyone that has used the internet knows that’s not true. The voice of reason to Will’s assertion is MacMac weakly voicing her say (saying people will just ignore the website — the most likely case) and the upending of Will’s assertion is an isolated death threat that flouts the system. Nothing and no one on the show actually negates Will’s mission to single-handedly fix the internet. Again, character study (here Will’s aggression against peons) is a veiled weapon, assaulting us with Sorkin’s solution.
• The pre-interview meeting before the segment on the community center near Ground Zero, where staffers come up Devil’s advocate assertions, is another way of undermining opposition debate so that Will looks triumphant. My opinion on this notwithstanding.
• Of course, Maggie thought the Russians were invading Georgia the state. Of course, Jim gets another moment of superiority. Can Jim or Will or someone with a penis make a mistake on this show and have it not be because one of the girls put them there? Penguins in the Arctic might be the first time.
• Even though it comes in on the tail-end of another Maggie Fail story, I thought the bullet thing was cute.
• Everyone else is seated while Olivia Munn leans over the table in a low-cut shirt. I don’t mind it but I thought I’d point it out.
• “Kanye. It was awesome.” I like Lonnie. I like the scene with Sloan poking at his pecs. It might the most humanizing moment for her of the series. And I’m including all the banana-pants nonsense that happens later.
• I’m convinced Sorkin has no idea how to use the work “fuck.” He needs to have a talk with Mamet.
• I love how this whole episode where Mackenzie barely appears is hijacked by her flitty girlishness, whining about how Will was as invested in their relationship as he claimed to be so she can be bamboozled by his gamesmanship (buying the ring once he learned the opposition investigation was afoot). Just — wait — did he just tear up the receipt? That’s it. I’m leaving.
• I’m Sloan moving out of my office in my moving hat!
• Why — why would Don think Sloan would know anything about Maggie? Why would Sloan answer Don in a way that sounds like she’s emotionally invested? Why would Charlie call her “girl” — unless that’s just an attempt by the show to further establish its point that (a) Sloan is a girl because she’s weak and (b) girls are just faces and legs if they’re not around to report the news.
• “When are you and me going to get busy?” “I’m flattered but you’d crush me.” That’s it. I’m really out of here.