The Newsroom
I thought the show was going to be good. You have Sam Waterston from Law & Order playing as the president of the Atlantis Cable News. You have the writer Aaron Sorkin who was famously known for creating The West Wing (another show I have yet to see). HBO might not have been the greatest avenue to pursue, but I figured it might be good enough to watch all 25 episodes over 3 seasons. It is so sad to say that the show was terrible. Maybe I should go over a few points.
The Good
Real-Life Events: The show takes place between 2010 and 2014. Many people, like myself, might have forgotten all the major things that happened back then: BP Oil Spill, Japanese Nuclear Fallout, Occupy Wall Street, Osama Bin Laden killed, or the Boston Marathon Bombing. We might feel like these stories Aged Like Milk. But the show does a very good job covering all these topics. They also add a bunch of political stories that I didn't know about regarding the details of different US Elections. Every now and then, they'll include interesting stories like Gabby Giffords being shot in the head and live to tell the tale in Season 1 or a fictional retelling of how a famous news channel mistakenly believed the military used unsanctioned tactics like they did in Operation Tailwind in Season 2. Although some of these stories are shown through the eyes of a "professional" newsroom that somehow magically knows when things aren't true as they appear in Season 1, the little details of each case have some real-life truth to them.
The Neutral
Newsroom Mold: There are certain expectations when you are working the news. You check to see what has happened lately, interview people, make sure you fact-check with more than one source, and then try to condense your story within a few minutes of air time. There is a full cast of people working in all sorts of different avenues. Every now and then there will be "Breaking News" in which people would have to come in and report something important at odd hours of the day. These long hours and fast-paced movements can be quite stressful on the team when they are trying to get accurate information in a timely manner before everyone else. I like when I can see and feel the cast members displaying their weakened states in almost every episode. What I don't like is when this is happening all the time. There is a certain point where I have to ask if these people ever have a normal day where they aren't always on edge trying to get the next big scoop. It's ironic when the only time I saw anything resembling a realistic setting was within the last five minutes of the entire show when people weren't shouting across the room.
The Bad
Teen Drama: Have you ever watched a group of teenagers fight? Usually it has to do with a couple who decided to hook up, only to break up and date other people, then cheat on them with another person, and then "rebound" to a third individual. You sit there on the sidelines wondering if they will ever stop yelling at each other and devising petty schemes that generally has some huge consequences to everyone around them. That's what it was like while watching this show. Every major cast member has some major relationship issue with another member that lasts for 50% of the show's air time. Every episode has at least 20 minutes devoted to people arguing over personal problems. People are screaming, throwing things, and outright swearing because of the sexual tension that develops between everyone.
Tone Deaf: When I'm watching a show and the cast wants to be serious, it is very hard for me to be impressed when they throw in some witty jokes and dumb retorts. People talk fast and their high-caliber satire pops in way too quickly for me to believe these are actual real-life characters. Their comedic timing generally goes over my head when they add things like: a man who spends the entire episode fixing an office chair that constantly falls apart, people not believing a man's name is actually Gary Cooper, a man trying to show evidence that Big Foot could exist with extensive research in a Powerpoint Presentation, and a man that supposedly never could get his pants on right falling to the ground outside his office (despite not ever seeing it happen in the rest of the show). Their long list of metaphors from different mediums (to which I only knew about 10% of) are constantly called back to episode after episode in the most unusual of circumstances. I had no idea what sort of mood I was supposed to express when so many different things are happening at once.
Lack of Focus: There is something strange when a show gives you 10 episodes in the first season, 9 in the second, and 6 in the final season. There is also something weird when several stories are all happening at once and deflate rather quickly in unexpected ways. The threads that were presented in both Season 1 & Season 3 both abruptly disappeared after the key contributor mysteriously died. The first couple episodes of the third season started with a person "accidentally" doing insider trading, a person "ignorantly" committing espionage, and a woman posting a demoralizing tweet on someone else's account. Is everyone that works for this company a moron? The show also loves to develop these fast swipes when reporting important newlines and montages while songs like Teenage Wasteland plays in the background. I found the whole thing rather cliche if you ask me.
Summary
Review: When first coming into the series, I thought I had finally found a program that would report on the various intricacies of real life events. In this aspect, the show actually performs admirably. The problem occurs when you have to muddle through what is contained in the other three-quarters of the program. Instead of focusing on the primary theme of "the lack of quality journalism," we are presented with annoying, unlikable characters that over-dramatize and make way too many mistakes to be taken seriously.
10-23-2021