The Newsroom Recap: In Which Angry Old Men Do Not Like This “Social Media” Nonsense All The Kids Are Into

Four episodes in we’re at the end of this season’s second act, so all the characters must be up tree so that we can watch Aaron Sorkin ever-so-cleverly get them down again. Like last week, this episode is flabbier and weaker than that sneakily excellent second hour; it has a lot of scenes where characters just yell past each other in the general direction of a philosophical or emotional argument, but it’s all table-setting for the final third.

All of ACN is up a tree. Will is up a jail tree. Neal’s up a tree in Venezuela. Maggie was powering along until her new boyfriend (who went from adorable ethics professor to mansplaining plot-device slash buffoon between this episode and last one without a costume change) pointed out that she’s up a puffy stupid tree she’s too good for. Puffy Jim Harper is a tiny bit less puffy this week but he, too, is up a tree – with Charlie, D-R-I-N-K-I-N-G, and complaining about how everybody else is up trendy young trees and whatever happened to good old fashioned sturdy oak trees that had birds in them and only birds should be tweeting and get off my tree’s lawn.

If Sorkin is on the side of the old-fashioned oak-tree newsmen like Charlie and Puffy Jim, he’s not doing a very good job of selling their perspective. The idea that we’re supposed to be nodding along with Charlie as he staggers around throwing a tantrum about TRUTH, or with Puff Jimmy as he methodically takes a steaming, righteous shit on every single aspect of Hallie’s job, is not a comforting one. BJ Novak’s strawman nightmare of a tech-investor continues to be devoted to the idea of turning ACN into a “news” network powered by a self-selecting army of smartphone owners and Hallie maybe should have respected Jim’s privacy a bit better, but Jim and Charlie’s fingers-in-ears, old-men-yell-at-the-cloud schtick is making characters who talk about “The Digital Revolution” sound cutting-edge, and making them sound very soon-to-be-unemployed. We haven’t seen either of them actually be good at their jobs since the first episode.

Another part of the problem is that this episode – hopefully in preparation for a veritable avalanche of substantial, snappy discourse and denouement – focuses too much on individual relationships. The smoochin’ and swoonin’ has never been this show’s strong suit. I’d ship a body pillow and a potato if you put a Sara Bareilles track over a montage of them exchanging slow-mo meaningful looks, but it’s been hard to be invested in Jim and Maggie since the horrible SATC bus tour incident, let alone during Puffy’s self-involved self-righteous victory lap of terribleness this season.

We never really got a sense of why Mac and Will were so hung up on each other at all until we got to see them be an actual couple this season (seeing them in their half-renovated apartment, giggling over Chinese takeout and tripping over each others’ belongings, helps with this a lot). Jim was a dick to Maggie’s roommate Lisa the whole time they were dating, Maggie and Don never made any sense at all and now it creeps me out just to think about them as a couple.

Don and Sloan are perfect together, of course – so perfect, in fact, that Sorkin brought in Keith Powell for two episodes of Javert-level dogged pursuit and then revealed that he was actually just fucking with them. Like, literally, his reasoning is “HR is boring, needed teh lulz”. While it did make for some fun sitcommy antics, like Don’s multi-floor dashes and the secret codes, it was 100% irrelevant to anything except forcing Don and Sloan to admit again what we already know – they like each other a lot. Two more episodes of their dorky, besotted snark is the best we can hope for.

And the less said about the wedding montage, the better – it’s nice to see an unexpected payoff for all the tedious chat about seating plans and fish entrees, particularly when it takes the form of Mac binning the lot of it without getting at all weepy about her dream wedding. But the mood whiplash from legal drama to feelgood sitcom is severe: “Will’s going to jail? Buck up, gang, we’ve got a wedding to plan in just three hours!” For more than six interminable minutes of ‘Ave Maria’, we watch Charlie wander into Juillard and pick out a chamber sextet and a boring soprano like he’s buying goldfish at the pet store; the guys go to Tiffany to try on rings (putting them ON EACH OTHER, HILARIOUSLY).

Maggie buys flowers! On the street! How homespun! Sloan ducks into what looks like Magnolia Bakery and buys a single cupcake… for Mac to eat alone, later? And Mac picks out a slightly mumsy brocade cocktail sheath after gazing longingly at the marshmallow dresses, sticks a glittery comb in her hair and bravely soldiers on through her wedding even though it’s in a non-denominational courthouse chapel and she is, apparently, a devout Catholic. (By “the less said”, I obviously meant “Now I need to write down all the things I yelled at the TV”.)

The one thread with potential is Reese Lansing’s assertion that everything Will does is down to him still trying to prove himself to Mac. Leaving aside the utter randomness of Reese having these trenchant insights into a relationship he sees up close maybe once a month, it actually makes something resembling sense.

The fact that Clea DuVall’s whistleblower harks back to the rant that started it all (specifically the “Worst period generation period ever, period” part, which is odd because DuVall is 37 and her character is probably not supposed to be of the same generation as Blonde Student/Intern Jenna) underscores the feeling of circling back around to the beginning.

You may remember the obnoxious reveal that Mac really was in the audience at that panel discussion, flashing hastily scrawled but perfectly inspirational cue cards at Will and precipitating the aforementioned rant – thus helping him demonstrate that a spark of passion still flickered somewhere in his flaccid old heart, paving the way for “the Leno of news” to reshape himself as one of the gutsy oak-tree Newsmen who Informed a Once-Great America!

You can almost see the envy in his eyes when he recalls that Mac had been shot and stabbed in her time reporting from war zones; this season has leant on his hotshot legal background not just to back up his scheming around the Kundu leak but also to remind us that he’s had an extremely comfortable career. And now here he is, a shiny wedding ring on his finger and two shinier handcuffs around his wrist in quick succession, because MAC and TRUTH, apparently.

In amongst all this angst, it’s easy to miss one glaring omission: there is no real news in this episode. Between the ACN buyout, the Kundu case, and Hallie’s well-crafted oversharing, The Newsroom could pass comment on the news only in the abstract this week, with the question of public interest versus likely harm and “the price of telling the truth”. In a weird way, it’s nice to be reminded that the impulse to lecture IRL newsrooms has never been the only thing holding this show back.