The Newsroom - Season 1 Episode 5 - Recap and Review - Amen
The Newsroom is officially at the halfway point of its first season. Having already been renewed for a second season, one would think Sorkin and staff would be able to rest easy, but that's apparently not the case at all. This past week, it was announced that Sorkin would be letting go of the majority of his writing staff for this season, perhaps owing to the show's poor reviews in critical circles. I'd argue that perhaps expectations were too lofty to begin with, since the show more than makes up for what it lacks in the writing department with incisive, engaging performances from one of the most uniformly talented casts on TV today. It also seems somewhat hypocritical to purge the writing staff, including former MTV News anchor Gideon Yago, when four of the five aired episodes so far bear Sorkin's name on the script, and his alone, including tonight's “Amen.”
The episode does an admirable job of juggling two disparate headlines: the fall of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker's bill to cut teachers' jobs as a means of solving the state's budget crisis. The first development in the story is significant in that it gives Neal (Dev Patel) a chance to finally shine and show us who he is as a character. Eliot, the anchor of the ten o'clock show Don (Thomas Sadoski) produces, is embedded in Egypt, where riots have broken out on the streets. He has a satellite phone and a whole lot of gumption, not to mention encouragement to get the story from the ground, and so Eliot decides to play Anderson Cooper and go get the story on the streets below.
He's beaten mercilessly by the crowd for his efforts.
Eliot lives, but it's at the cost of an embedded reporter, as he must be sent home due to his terrible injuries. Thankfully, Neal knows an Egyptian native who can give them the insight they need. Going by the Twitter handle “Amen” (Egyptian for “the hidden one”), the source agrees to go live on News Night and offer his unique perspective. However, he does this at considerable risk: his face is not concealed, and he uses his real name, Khalid Salim, in the interview. Thus, it's not really a surprise when Salim goes missing after the interview. It is surprising, however, when Neal puts his fist through a computer monitor in outrage over a poorly-timed Rush Limbaugh joke about kidnapped journalists. Rush Limbaugh: Lord Paramount of Comedic Timing.
All this, in the midst of a running theme throughout the show concerning the 1993 classic “Rudy.” When Will (Jeff Daniels) learns that Mac (Emily Mortimer) hasn't seen the football flick, he and the rest of the staff give her a rundown of the film's climax, in which players from the Notre Dame football team, one-by-one, offer to lay down their jerseys so underdog Rudy can get a chance to play in the big game. This point factors into the conclusion, when Don, feeling guilty, nearly dislocates a shoulder trying to break down the door of network president Reese to get ACN to pay the $250,000 ransom the Egyptian army is demanding for Salim's safe return. Ultimately, Will is the one who ponies up the cash, finally showing himself to be the man Mackenzie keeps telling us he is, but not before the rest of the staff pull a Rudy moment of their own, chipping in their own money, one-by-one.
Let me start with what worked: Neal feels like a fully-realized character now, deserving of the respect and attention that Will never seemed too concerned about giving him. It was never that Will was outright disrespectful to the man, but simply that Neal was the kind of personality that easily faded into the background. With tonight, Neal is given the opportunity to show that he's every bit as committed to justice as Will, as he embarks on a crusade of his own to get the real story on the Egyptian uprising. Here is a young man who believes in the power of the news to not only inform, but also affect change in the world by calling to the carpet those in power. Though hardly a showcase episode for Patel, “Amen” did an exceptional job in orienting us towards the character's mindset and principles.
Another bit that worked, which I hadn't expected to work at all, was the return of the TMI business. The tabloid storyline never seemed to work for me since it didn't seem like a tabloid would be all that concerned about what the executive producer of a cable news show did in her private life. But nobody does righteous indignation like Jeff Daniels, and the only thing better than seeing Will take Nina Howard (Hope Davis) to task over her insistence that she's a journalist is watching Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston) absolutely lay into the host of ACN's own morning show, after the host catches wind of what TMI is planning to run, and decides to lay it all out for the world to hear. Waterston's Skinner is a man who has no patience for any of this. In the tradition of Network, he's mad as hell and he's not going to take this anymore. Watching him tell the smug anchor (played by Patrick Fabian) that he had ten seconds to gracefully send the show to commercial break before he'd face termination was wonderfully chilling and cathartic. Sam Waterston just kills it every week with the little screen time he has. I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention Emily Mortimer's excellent work this episode, as she dates her boyfriend Wade when she discovers that he's only using her to front his own political ambitions. Telling him to leave, lose the congressional election, and go to hell, in that order, was a fantastic kiss-off.
That said, what didn't work so well this week was the former love triangle-turned-love quadrangle between Don/Maggie/Jim/Lisa, Maggie's roommate whom Jim slept with. It's Valentine's Day, you see, and in between planning an evening out at the Four Seasons for herself and Don, Maggie (Alison Pill) has been working to help Jim (John Gallagher, Jr.) plan a romantic evening for himself and Lisa. Of course, all her planning is for naught, as Jim forgets about the date, leading Lisa to storm to the office to come find him. Luckily, Jim is a smooth operator and an apology sets things right, but it seems like such an inconsequential storyline when set against the heftiness of the Egyptian revolt, or even the business in Wisconsin with Governer Walker, which wasn't particularly exciting but served to help bolster the newsroom atmosphere in its own right.
Though not as strong as last week's episode, “Amen” showed a considerably greater amount of dramatic heft. The Newsroom is still one of the top shows to watch this summer, in spite of what critical consensus would argue, as it coheres as a collective whole every bit as well as it does in individual viewings from week-to-week. I imagine a season-long rewatch would be much more rewarding than taking it a week at a time, as the lofty sense of righteousness interspersed with an almost incongruous sentimentality would be lessened somewhat by the quicker consumption of the episodes, and the season as a whole. Whether this approach will work for season two, given the complete overhaul of the writing staff, remains to be seen. But as for a midterm grade at the halfway point of its first season, I'd argue The Newsroom deserves a B. At the very least, over the past two weeks, the show has found its footing, and seems to genuinely know where it's going.
