The Simpsons Already Did It: The Newsroom Edition

Here you’ll find a recap of this week’s episode of The Newsroom – and all the spoilers that implies.

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THEORY: The Simpsons does not exist in The Newsroom’s universe.

I know this is radical. The Newsroom is realer than real, man. How could the world possibly be the same without the most important television show of our generation? How could a show that so wants to be the most important television show of our generation be filled with people in their 20s and 30s who have totally failed to absorb the many life lessons of the world’s favourite four-fingered freaks?

For one thing, their whole “mission to civilise” is pretty pointless, particularly in an election year.

For another, if you’re going to selectively edit a crucial bit of footage to make it seem like something happened when it actually didn’t — like Jerry, who manipulates an on-the-record statement to reflect the off-the-record confirmation he couldn’t get on camera — think about it really hard first, because it’s a dick move.

But if you’re going to go ahead and do it anyway because you’re a shifty-eyed ringer from DC where nobody has any morals any more because Obama, don’t have a fucking clock in the background. 

If Jerry The Everything-Ruiner was thinking (which he obviously wasn’t), he might have thought that the jump between two different shots in the basketball footage might look like a live cut or a replay, maybe? But there’s still the issue of the BIG RED COUNTDOWN CLOCK in the very corner of the screen that is entirely visible throughout the entire interview.

Like, seriously, Jerry. Go and look around your fictional TV news studio. Glance around the fictional editing studio you’re in. Look at the computers. There is a big ENHANCE button on every one of them, is there not? Yep. That can make anything ever captured in celluloid or pixels bigger and clearer and more incriminating.

You’re fucked, mate.

Aside from that bit of plot momentum, the reindeer conversation and the f-bomb count that’s slowly creeping up each episode (someone must have reminded Aaron Sorkin that he’s on HBO now; either that or he picked up my bad language after he visited Junkee over the weekend), this wasn’t the season’s finest episode.

Here are some ways it could have been better (by taking a few more cues from The Simpsons.)

1. The first Red Team meeting could have been way more mysterious and/or guest-starred Steve Guttenberg:

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2. Will stops surly-hurling footballs at innocent light trees, and hurls them at the crotches of America’s enemies instead.

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3. Neal’s biggest story gets scooped by a regional paper:

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Entertainment Weekly reported at the end of last year that Aaron Sorkin will be appearing on an upcoming episode of The Simpsons – as the voice of reason in Kent Brockman’s head (which would explain some things). By then, we’ll know just how the Genoa story unravels: how the team got it so wrong, why Jerry hates them, and the exact time when everyone starts panicking, cracking open one another’s heads and feasting on the goo inside.

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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.

You can follow The Newsroom with her here.