After an ambitious first season in which “The Newsroom” was deemed not to be “The West Wing,” the HBO drama returned Sunday with a new writers room and an extended dramatic arc for the season.
Using the device that framed his screenplay for “The Social Media,” the season’s first episode began with a court deposition.
It was a scene that both introduced Marcia Gay Haden as litigator, but also laid out the premise: ACN, their version of a cable news network, reported the U.S. use of poison gas during a war exchange, the kind of story, a source says early on “that makes careers and ends presidencies.” Unfortunately, it was also wrong.
So much of the season will apparently be taken in slowing down the narrative and seeing how that happened, while simultaneously framing their defense of their fatal mistake — will it cost their careers?
Action cuts back and forth between August, 2011 — when Gadaffi fell and the D.C. earthquake hit — and 14 months later to Oct. 2012, when nothing is going on but the ACN court preparations, it seems (except that a Presidential election will occur the next month).
Sorkin may have a new writing staff, but it seems everything uttered out of every character’s voice is still his — fast-paced, screwball comedy style patter; newsreader’s penchant for fun facts and forgotten stories; a smug moral ground and nonstop pugilistic verbal jousts. Fun stuff, when it doesn’t get annoying as hell. Everybody can’t talk that way all the time.
As we flash back to 2011, we see Jim is still freshly rattled by Maggie back together with Don, so much so that he volunteers to get on the Romney campaign bus in New Hampshire for a couple of weeks to get away.
Sloan is flirting with Don for some reason when she isn’t becoming obsessed with drone strikes.
Jim’s absence calls up a D.C. bureau chief, played by Hamish Linklater (of “The New Adventures of Old Christine”) who gets the tip that gets them all on the wrong track.
There are a couple of moments that make it seem as if Sorkin expected us to watch all those recent HBO marathons of season one. That way we’d rememberer Maggie declared her love for Jim next to a “Sex and the City” tour bus or that Jeff Daniels’ Will McAvoy declared love to his ex, Emily Mortimer’s Mackenzie McHale during a late night phone message sent to the wrong person. We catch up soon enough.
Mostly, the network is feeling the chilling effects of McAvoy declaring the Tea Party the American Taliban. Romney won’t let an ACN reporter on the bus; network president Reese Lansing (Chris Messina from “The Mindy Project” !) can’t get into his House judiciary hearing; McAvoy is pulled from 9/11 tenth anniversary coverage because too many “see him as the enemy.”
There are other issues brewing. Dev Patel’s activist newsman Neal is looking into Occupy Wall Street plans; they keep returning to the ethics of drones, though a stung McAvoy won’t ask a panel about AUMF during one segment, perhaps chastened to a more demure approach.
(No, not even Americans know off the top of their head what AUMF is; it refers to presidential authorization for use of military force).
Sorkin is guilty of treating his audience as smarter than they may be, which is such a different approach for TV writers it almost seems like an insult.
When he has his characters explicate the meaning of The Who’s “You Better, You Better, You Bet,” though, it’s just cause for justifiable eye-rolling.
There is almost a conscious effort to keep it lighter, though. McAvoy is singing the internet hit “Fridays” at one point; Olivia Munn’s Sloan has developed a comic timing that puts others to shame.
The alleged “women problem” on the show’s first season seems to be on the agenda; an organizer of Occupy refuses to be seen as a joke; Alison Pill’s Maggie sports such a different hairstyle, though, it’s seen as an indication of mental instability.
Overall, you have to admire how much he throws into a teleplay, and how much of it is relevant to modern life in a way that almost all other TV is not. For that, we applaud the return of “The Newsroom” no matter the occasional wincing.