The Newsroom Recap: New Confident Maggie Vs Puffy Jim Harper
Halfway through the final season, and it may finally be safe to argue that The Newsroom's female characters are almost uniformly not terrible.
“I’m not sure I like this new confident Maggie,” mutters Puffy Jim Harper, bitter after being schooled on how to do his job by her. What a ridiculous, petulant thing to say about a talented young coworker who just saved your bum. You don’t have to like New Confident Maggie, Puffy Jim Harper. She doesn’t care if you like it. She’s getting shit done whether you like it or not.
In fact, now that we’re halfway through this final season, it may finally be safe to point out that the female characters are almost uniformly not terrible. Sloan continues to own the place; Maggie is winning so consistently DJ Khaled’s calling her for advice. Mac remains the most irritating, mostly due to behaviour like bleating like Gretchen Wieners about her wedding seating plans in front of 50 FBI agents — although it’s possible this lazy lady-sniping is mostly a smokescreen to cover their cosy steam room meetings. (This was a nice touch, as secret steam room meetings are a total old-school boys’ club power move.)
But nearly half the agents raiding the Newsnight computers appeared to be women; Neal’s informant is a woman; Blair is obviously the more competent of the Lansing twins; Kate Harper Molly Levy is a woman. These characters could have been (and on many shows would have been) male, but someone decided to not do that. Even Hallie got to show some of that — dare I say it? — Streep steeliness, when she gave Mansplaining Jim Harper a serve. It’s progress, is all.
But Jim Harper remains completely terrible. John Gallagher Jr. looks tired and bored in the role, and he seems to exist purely to mansplain (yes, I’m using it correctly) How The News Works to women he’s swapped spit with. $45k plus incentives at a hungry young news start-up that bases its business model around (gasp) getting people to click on links and read things is a pretty decent job offer considering Hallie got fired for doing something very dumb and very public – and they’re not exactly handing out media jobs with Happy Meals – but he just has to shit all over her parade BECAUSE MURROW, or something.
Clicks and UVs and pageviews and bounce rates matter to news outlets now, and the fact that Jim Harper didn’t know this is both concerning and implausible. (He also says their rundown meetings aren’t about what’s “grabby”, but then lectures Maggie on making her story about the end of the world more entertaining.) That Jim Harper doesn’t like the new state of affairs is also irrelevant.
Speaking of dislikes, Will seemed to cope all right with his crow-eating visit to the Correspondents’ Dinner, posing with fans in a scene that recalls the complacent “Leno of news” he was supposed to be at the beginning of the series. And nobody seemed to prod him about his lofty dismissal of the event the DC pool calls Nerd Prom: “ACN won’t be attending the saturnalia of incestuous ingratiation that does little to instill confidence in the public that the press isn’t ensorcelled by the powerful.” (Parklife!)
It’s especially deft to remind us that he is actually a household name, just after he’s smugly insisted to the government’s bulldog of a prosecutor that he is (as he puts it to Mac) too big to jail. In the past couple of weeks he’s been stumbling over his words, and he’s been cautious and conciliatory in all public interactions about the Kundu story. The “gotcha” monologue, with the reveal that he’s been orchestrating the whistleblower case to turn the heat on Famous Will McAvoy rather than Noble Neal Sampat, is too much fun to make fun of, and even feels semi-earned with all his boasting about his brilliant legal acumen.
It turns out he’s not too big to subpoena, though, and so the heat is on: Will must testify in two days, and ACN must run the Kundu story within four or get scooped by their own source, leaving two of their number facing possible felony charges for nothing.
And then there’s the minor matter of ACN’s entire future. Turns out I jumped the gun by breaking out the Parks & Recreation reference for the Lansing twins last week. How was I to know BJ Novak’s creepy tech-billionaire Lucas Pruit was waiting in the wings, about to fulfill his role as yet another chilling manifestation of the black-skied dystopian future of Real Journalism?
His bro-capitalist stream of consciousness was like if a Yahoo!7 social media intern accidentally found themselves giving a TED Talk. Disruption! UGC! “Crowd-sourcing the news”! And the idea of turning ACN into 500 “news” channels, apparently unmoderated — including one dedicated to people who stalk Danny Glover — comes off like an unadulterated Entertainment 720-style satire of vague startup-culture “innovation”.
I wrote last week that one of Aaron Sorkin’s strengths as a writer and a polemicist is selling the validity of the opposing argument nearly as well as his own; that is not what’s on display here. Pruit is only not an abysmal, irredeemable straw-man character if his entire exchange with a justly disturbed and baffled Charlie is simply a test to see if Charlie will stand up to his terrible, terrible ideas.
It’s a shame, because Novak’s initial introduction is intriguing – the rigmarole about Schweppes Bitter Lemon is not peculiarly specific promotional consideration (one assumes) but a whimsical Sorkinism designed to suggest an old-fashioned exactitude in a character. (Parklife!) And his unsettling stillness and composure – that combination of the crisply expensive suit and eyes that follow you around the room like a creepy painting – help to give him shades of the same super-rich weirdo-genius energy as one of the best characters on TV this year, Silicon Valley’s Peter Gregory. (Pretty sure he’s going to murder the PA who couldn’t get him his drink, though.)
The sitcommy notes, familiar faces (Novak, plus Keith Powell, AKA 30 Rock’s Toofer), and generally improved sense of humour might be at least partially down to Paul Lieberstein’s influence. Best known as HR rep Toby from The [American] Office, he was also a writer, director and producer, stepped up as showrunner for a few seasons, and is now pulling double Newsroom duty – as an executive producer, and in the role of our new favourite downtrodden high-level EPA doomsayer, Richard Westbrook.
Let the goo-feasting begin.
Whatever he’s up to behind-the-scenes, Westbrook is a great example of one of Sorkin’s favourite minor characters to write: the civil servant who knows exactly how bad things really are. (It’s true the EPA didn’t have an administrator in April last year; Gina McCarthy was nominated on March 4, but due to Republican stalling in the Senate he wasn’t confirmed until July, leaving the agency leaderless for the longest period in its history.)
For a moment during his interview, it looked like the show was setting Maggie up for another blow to her confidence, as foreseen by Wise Jim Harper – after all, she found this guy bleating off-the-record info down the phone on a half-full train, what did she expect? But his blunt, apocalyptic expert commentary on the utter fuckedness of our poisonous garage of a world turned out to be riveting TV. New, confident Maggie wins again, and Newsroom itself is keeping it together.
And if they want to start all of the final three eps with Chris Chalk singing showtunes in a jaunty hat and then swearing loudly, they could do worse.
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The Newsroom airs on Showcase at 7:30pm on Mondays, fast-tracked from the US.
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Caitlin Welsh is a freelance writer who tweets from @caitlin_welsh. Read her Newsroom recaps here.