What Kind of Day Has It Been

The first season of "The Newsroom" saw each episode focus on a specific real world news-related issue. Season two went with a season-long arc. Both approaches had their pros and cons. Here in season three, the show begins without any sort of episodic organization, but fortunately picks up for a few great hours at the end.

Featuring only six episodes here in its final run, "The Newsroom's" swan song loosely focuses on the events surrounding Neal's (Dev Patel) possession of classified information, as well as the sale of ACN to Lucas Pruit (BJ Novak). The transition from doing "real news" to what seems like pandering for viewers has Will (Jeff Daniels), MacKenzie (Emily Mortimer), and Charlie (Sam Waterston) rankled and scrambling for purchase.

Of these six episodes, I found the first four to be just so-so. No real organizational structure was in place, and I didn't see where any of it was leading. Fortunately, "Oh Shenandoah" comes along at that time and proves to be the best single episode of the show--and by a pretty wide margin at that. Had all "Newsroom" episodes been as poignant (in both the A- and B-level stories), this show would have make the jump from "solid" to "great" in my estimation.

The series finale--"What Kind of Day Has It Been"--is also a gem, weaving the past and present of the characters together in an emotional tribute to what Aaron Sorkin is ultimately trying to accomplish with this show. Characters like Jim (John Gallagher Jr), Maggie (Alison Pill), Don (Thomas Sadoski), and Sloan (Olivia Munn) all get reasonably well-done sendoffs in addition to some of the older actors.

Overall, I never ranked a season of "The Newsroom" higher than 7 stars or lower than 6. It always sat in that range for me for one reason or another. In this final spate of episodes, the brilliance of the final pair "rounded up" and provided a tantalizing glimpse of a "prestige" version of the show (one focused a bit less on verbal cuteness or physical comedy and more on well-written characters and emotion). In other words, for better or for worse, the show went out exactly as it came in.

One's fantasies are not merely a function of one's upbringing and temperament, but also one's age.

My current fantasy (will kindly spare you the earlier versions) would be to see Sorkin and Moffat co-write something. Each is arguably among the best writers of our generation, if not actually THE best. To see them work together would be something.

This episode hit all the right notes but lacked the emotional punch of episode 5 because, to match that, Sorkin would ACTUALLY HAVE TO COME TO YOUR HOME AND WALLOP YOU IN PERSON.

Oddly, it reminded me of the EMBER ISLAND episode of THE LAST AIRBENDER, an animated series which (justifiably) had aspirations far above its station. In that 'sode, one of the best of the series, the writers took a timeout to have the main characters attend a local play where their own story (ie, the story of the main characters, their legend) was being acted out on stage by amateurs.

In the time of Shakespeare, that device was a "play within a play" and the extensive use of flashbacks here (made possible by modern tech) achieves essentially the same effect.

If you are fan of the series (probably the only reason you would be reading this, methinks) then the effect is mesmerizing. You watch these snippets and you realize that Sorkin and his team IN BARELY THREE SHORT (very short!) seasons have made these characters feel like family.

Your family.

You will hear a lot of fans tell you a lot of reasons why this episode is brilliant (or not brilliant, as the case may be) but I humbly suggest that the real power of this one lies is its ability to remind the viewer, to bring to the surface, to underscore, how potent, how powerful, this production has been.

And it has.