The Newsroom - Season 1 Episode 8 - Recap and Review - The Blackout Part 1: Tragedy Porn

News Night is going to hell in a hand basket in "The Blackout Part 1: Tragedy Porn," the third to last episode of the freshman season of The Newsroom. Will (Jeff Daniels) and company have lost over half its audience off of Mac's decision not to cover the Casey Anthony case. In an unprecedented drop from 2nd place to 5th in the ratings, viewers have switched over to Nancy Grace, flipping to Headline News in droves, leading to ACN President Reese Lansing (Chris Messina) reading Charlie, Will, and Mac the riot act. Mac (Emily Mortimer) is obstinate in her refusal to cover the Anthony case, but Will compromises his holier than thou principles since principles don't matter all that much if nobody's watching. Mac is horrified with Will, but eventually relents when Charlie (Sam Waterston) tells her that if the ratings continue to go down, it'll be all the excuse Leona Lansing (Jane Fonda) needs to finally fire Will without having to explain why. Of course, not long after Mac finally caves in to covering the Casey Anthony case, Jim (John Gallagher Jr.) comes with news that Anthony Weiner just accidentally tweeted a photo of his privates to his Twitter followers. The trials of high-brow news coverage...

The episode is a bit chaotic, owing to the nature of the news the team is being forced to cover. The issue with running a news organization is that you don't really get to pick what stories you cover. Sure, you can make those determinations among the smaller stories, but mostly you're ruled by the dictates of public interest. Being an executive producer, you would think that Mac, of all people, would know this. Even Will, up on his high horse for the majority of the season so far, understands that to be able to reach the widest possible audience with the most incisive brand of news, they need to maintain that audience in the first place. This means lowering themselves to covering such issues as the Anthony and Weiner brouhahas. It doesn't surprise me that the team would be upset about it, but I would at least expect Mac to understand the necessity and not sourpuss her way through the entire thing. To all ends, there are a means, and this is simply the means to the end of getting to air the Republican debate that ACN wants to air - which they won't be able to if nobody is watching.

In a staff production meeting, Mac is forced to cross more relevant stories off the dry-erase board in order to make room for the wall-to-wall Casey Anthony coverage, and no one on the staff is happy about it. As Mac crossed off the stories, the point was made perfectly clear: ratings require ethical compromise. Not every story can have immediate relevance to society as a whole; sometimes, it's necessary to lead with stories of rubber-necking social interest, a metaphorical car crash we can peek at as we drive on by. But it's made in a labored fashion, with all the sighs and eye rolls that attend having to do something you'd rather not be doing. Don (Thomas Sadoski) is brought in to help teach the News Night crew exactly why Nancy Grace is so effective. It's a genius scene, breaking down Grace's techniques (utilizing experts who agree with her soapbox rhetoric and playing to the audiences' emotional response) and boiling it down to a formula that can be replicated for the News Night team to utilize. It's the sole bright spot in a difficult sequence of scenes, in the sense that the staff is acting uncharacteristically prickly at the idea of actually doing the news, simply because it's not the news that they themselves deem relevant.

Meanwhile, Will wants an all-access profile written in a major news magazine, and auditions Brian Brenner (Paul Schneider), a famed print journalist who just happens to be the ex-boyfriend Mac cheated on Will with six years ago. His presence in and of itself doesn't create any more controversy than one might think, though Mac is immediately suspicious in Will's motives in picking this writer, of all the writers he could have picked. Upon confronting him, Will admits to Mac that it is because he essentially owns Brenner. If Brenner writes a negative article, then it will come out that he was the person with whom Mac cheated, and his credibility will be shot. It's a more ruthless Will than we're used to, but the Will of "The Blackout Part I: Tragedy Porn" doesn't really have the time to put up with the usual office drama, now that ratings are in the toilet.

Brenner, for his part, is able to infer that Leona Lansing is looking for a reason to fire Will, and this ratings debacle might be her opportunity. Will does not deny the observation. If Brenner intends to report this, it could potentially help Will's leverage against Lansing. That said, as Charlie learns, Lansing has secrets of her own. As Charlie meets with a National Security Agency whistle-blower, he discovers that the government has engaged in a Dark Knight-style phone-tapping operation, and Lansing has her hand in the proverbial till, so to speak. This leads to an icy standoff on the streets of New York between Charlie and Lansing, as her vendetta against Will takes on the form of an enveloping conspiracy that could sink ACN if any of it came to light.

In smaller developments, Sloan (Olivia Munn) is at her wits end. Her segments have been marginalized to the point that it feels as though she's hardly even on the program anymore. To make matters worse, there is a legitimate financial crisis that requires attention, and Mac hardly seems interested in hearing about it. Sloan believes it's something the public deserves to hear about, particularly if they have stock invested, but there are more pressing matters, namely the ratings. Sloan's frustrations lead her to snap on Mac, and then on Neal (Dev Patel). Munn is developing well in the role, crossing legitimate frustration with well-honed comedic timing, owing to the strength of Sorkin's acerbic dialogue. It's not much of an advancement on Sloan's overall arc, but it helps to develop her character and integrate her into the ensemble, if not turning her into one of its breakout stars.

But we've yet to address the titular blackout of "The Blackout Part I: Tragedy Porn." The Newsroom does a fine job of taking fairly dramatic situations and making them dryly comical. As the episode comes to a close, Mac has prepped one of Anthony Weiner's mistresses for a pre-tape interview segment. Just before she is set to go live-to-tape with Will, the power blacks out. It's so sudden, such an "oh for crying out loud, what NOW?" development that you can't help but laugh about it. Of course, no one on the News Night crew is laughing, and I sincerely doubt part 2, next week, is going to change anything about that. But one thing is certain: it's going to be tough moving the ratings with the lights off.

Credit: HBO