The Newsroom - Season 1 Episode 4 - Recap and Review - I'll Try To Fix You

This latest episode of The Newsroom was a hell of a show, owing to how well Aaron Sorkin writes explosive dialogue compounded by the awkwardness of certain social/work situations. That said, not to come across as the purveyor of a broken record department, but the man is so terrible at writing women. Never mind Maggie (Alison Pill) apologizing for her perpetual jerk of a boyfriend, Don (Thomas Sadoski). Forget about Mac (Emily Mortimer) falling completely to pieces with jealousy over Will going on dates with other women while she, herself, had a secret boyfriend. Tonight, we get Hope Davis as Nina Howard, a reporter with whom Will (Jeff Daniels) flirts at the company New Year's Eve party, and who can't handle Will's realness when he tears her apart for equating her take down of the Real Housewives with Will's war against the Tea Party movement. He rails against her for being a part of a wing of the industry that pollutes minds and makes viewers all dumber. And Will is not only painted as being right, but fist-pumpingly so. This is to say nothing of Kathryn Hahn as the gun-loving, pot-smoking, off-her-rocker Carrie, another potential love interest. After a disastrous date in which the two argue over Will's antigun stance, with Will discovering a gun in her purse and trying to demonstrate how easily it could be used against her, Carrie takes the juicy details to a TMZ knockoff. Meanwhile, Don sets up Jim (John Gallagher, Jr.) with Maggie's roommate, Lisa. Maggie, for her part, completely flips out over Jim sleeping with Lisa, despite Maggie having just gotten back together with Don last week.

Granted, it's not so much that Maggie is written to completely lose her mind that's off-putting, but that she sees fit, like so many of Sorkin's women, to make it everyone's business, making passive-aggressive quips during meetings and generally acting like a teenager about the entire situation. The outcome of her nosing around? A demotion, as Jim puts her on assignment desk. These are women whose professional personae are rooted in the goings-on of their private lives, for reasons I'm still not entirely understanding, four episodes in. The gender politics at play here are troubling still, yet I would be remiss in not acknowledging just how good the show still is, in spite of it all.

It's January 8th, 2011, and Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords has just been shot in the head in Tucson. The media uproar has led to premature declarations of her death from all the major news sources, including NPR, of all outlets. But our beloved ACN crew withholds pronouncement of death until something more verifiable rolls in. Sure, Sorkin is playing Captain Hindsight again, but these sequences are part of what makes this show a routinely fascinating hour of television. The minute-to-minute pressures of cable news in the Digital Age, where it's all about breaking the big stories before the other guys, allow the show to let the audience in. To specify, we believe it's important because its importance is self-evident, so the next time Will makes a big, grand-standing speech about the importance of the news, it rings true because of the steps we took to get to that point. It's not just about the news itself, but the struggles of the people putting on the news, who are only human and can only follow what evidence they're given. Had Maggie not gotten a line-in to Giffords's anesthesiologist, ACN might well have been pronouncing the Arizona congresswoman's death just like all the other networks; but, as Don later says, “It's a person. A doctor pronounces her dead, not the news.”

Outside of the big story, there's the continued efforts of Atlantis World Media president Leona Lansing (Jane Fonda) to manufacture a context for firing Will. His no-compete clause would keep him off the air for three years, minimizing any damage he could do by signing on with a competing news network, while getting a volatile personality off her payroll. Not only is Will's outspokenness ruffling feathers with business partners, but his escapades with drink-tossing women has him landing on Page Six more often than not. Will McAvoy is the worst kind of televised personality to Leona Lansing: an uncontrollable and highly-visible liability. Not even Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston) will be able to protect Will if Lansing can find cause to get rid of him. And it's becoming more readily apparent that these new women in Will's life are being fed information about him from higher up. This leads to a meeting between Will, Mackenzie, and Charlie which serves as Will's declaration of purpose: he's not going down without a fight, and it's going to take a lot more than just a few acid-tongued dates to bring him to his knees.

The Newsroom continues to be appointment television less for the romance arcs (although I do find myself actively rooting for Jim and Maggie to get together, if only because they have 1000x the chemistry of any other prospective pairing on the show. They're seriously adorable) and more for the brass-tacks of the news business, coupled with the backroom duplicity of corporate politics. The show is more focused now than at any point so far, thanks in large part to a clearly defined villain in Jane Fonda's Leona Lansing. It usually seems as though who/what Will is fighting changes from week-to-week, but with Lansing as antagonist, we can really see what Will McAvoy is capable of when facing an opponent who can give as good as they get. And Will gives hell at the slightest provocation, so it should be explosive. All the better for viewers.

Credit: HBO