Can Aaron Sorkin Make The Newsroom Great This Season?

There’s an episode of The West Wing where Chief of Staff Leo McGarry gives Deputy Communications Director Sam Seaborn a totally insignificant assignment — a birthday message for the assistant transportation secretary — in order to keep Sam stuck at the office instead of out on a date with Leo’s daughter Mallory. (Which, put like that, makes it sound more like Full [White] House than a show about policy wonks having ideals.) Mallory is a willowy school teacher with red hair and cheekbones ’til Tuesday, and she and Sam do flirty banter like they just stepped off the set of a Preston Sturges movie, yet Sam politely but regretfully explains that the date is off because he “really want[s] to nail this thing”. The man who co-writes the State of the Union just can’t stop himself tweaking a superlative here, swapping sentences around to see how the tone shifts.

Sorkin is also a glutton for punishment, it seems. Not content with having made a rod for his own back by pinning the timeline of The Newsroom to actual events, he decided to write the second season as taking place over five days leading up to the 2012 election, revealing many of the events of the preceding years early on and then exploring them further in flashbacks. This long-game framing device is a departure for Sorkin, who usually likes episodes to have a discernible theme threaded through them, although having the upcoming election as a constant presence could make for a tighter, more focused season.

The dates are an odd choice given that by the time we were five days out from the election, most Democrats were already allowing themselves to grin with relief in private, and making small shrines to Nate Silver. (I’ll be running a Twitter pool on how far we get into the first episode before there’s any mention of Silver and/or FiveThirtyEight — hit me up if you want in.) The main (fictional, so vague spoiler alert) plotline appears to centre on a News Night staff member or members being fired over a doctored report on a drone strike, so we can expect to hear a grand, fiery Will McAvoy speech about Obama’s drone program that also takes a shot at Republicans. Marcia Gay Harden and Patton Oswalt will also be classing up the joint. But the biggest question will be whether the show can overcome its penchant for the overwrought, the on-the-nose and the self-congratulatory, which saw so many people — critics and fans and Sorkin tragics alike — mocking it mercilessly on every social media channel they could lay their thumbs on.

“Season one, we’re guessing,” star Jeff Daniels told HuffPo, “it’s like a first draft. So, for Aaron, he’s trying to figure out how to write for me. We’re trying to figure out who Will is, who MacKenzie is.” This is Sorkin’s M.O. I had totally forgotten that this is how he works things out: in front of his audience, like the playwright he once was. The first season of every one of his shows is awkward, unnatural, rife with his personal biases and pet plots — and, notably, it’s the show that had the longest run that has ended up with the best legacy among critics and fans alike.

The first season of The West Wing contains some of the show’s most iconic and beautiful moments, but on a recent full-series re-watch, where I came full circle after starting somewhere in the middle, I found myself grumbling at the screen about what a useless, waste-of-makeup character Mandy is (can you even remember her surname?), or that as grand as it sounds coming out of Martin Sheen’s mouth, “blow them off the face of the Earth with the fury of God’s own thunder” is a savage, emotional response that sits uncomfortably against Bartlet’s later characterisation as a temperate POTUS for whom military force is never the first option.

And the first season of Sports Night — where do I begin? The gratingly awkward laugh track? The Natalie/Jeremy romance, which is about as sexy as the gunk in the bottom of your toothbrush cup? The way Dana is, like, this really successful Career Woman but just can’t seem to get her personal life together so she’s probably just gonna get engaged to this asshole attorney over here like a desperate chump? If it weren’t stacked with smart, charismatic actors like Peter Krause and Robert Guillaume and Felicity Motherfucking Huffman it would have been an insufferable chore instead of the delightfully dated home of one of the all-time great TV bromances.

Sorkin is a very writer-y TV writer, and his default is to write the way he talks. His characters use similar idioms and phrases and their lines have a particular cadence; they repeat phrases constantly, either in a confused, echolalic back-and-forth or in the middle of an epiphany. He seems to need to hear his words come out of the mouths of the actors before he can start making the characters into people; luckily, good actors love saying his words.

Not everyone can spare an hour of every week for three months to patiently wait for Aaron Sorkin to find the keystone that will allow his new project to support its own weight. But if this show becomes great, it won’t be because its characters succeed in making the best news program of all time — it’ll be great because it convinces us that they really, desperately want to. Faith in the importance of the work you do and a group of characters working together for an ideal are Sorkin’s two favourite themes, and his best work comes when he can make both the people and the ideal worth rooting for. Jeremy’s impassioned rant against hunting in Sports Night; Toby and Leo and Bartlet giving away the glory for saving Social Security; Tom Cruise wanting the truth, even if he can’t handle it. If he can find that balance, he could really nail this thing.

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Season Two of The Newsroom begins on Monday July 15 at 5:30pm on Foxtel’s showcase.

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Caitlin Welsh is a freelance writer. She has written for The BRAG, Mess + Noise, FasterLouder, Cosmopolitan, TheVine, Beat, dB, X-Press, and Moshcam. Find her on twitter.