With the season long yarn about a botched military story completed last week, the only thing left to report on in “The Newsroom” is the 2012 general election.
And we know how that turned out.
So all the excitement of election night coverage, and the mounting electoral college votes, are a little lost on those of us clearly in the second term of the victor.
There is still that lingering masochism in the ACM newsroom that the main producers want to quit or be fired for their part in the botched story they called Operation Genoa, which, like the current Syrian crisis, involved sarin gas.
But the main boss uncharacteristically won’t accept their resignations, and the only person who can be fired is Mac by Will McAvoy himself, and he won’t do that.
Legal ramifications linger from the botched story, and so Marcia Gay Harden is haggling around as well. Leona Lansing says she’ll sue people who quit; the evil never-seen-again Jerry Dantana, who doctored the botched story to make it a botched story, is suing not only for corporate malfeasance that allowed him to do a bad story, for $5 million, he’s also suing Don for giving him a bad recommendation for a future job — for $20 million.
Back in the newsroom, the idea is to bring honor back to the fictional cable network, and while some believe the only way is to step down or b fired, Leona says the only way is to be better.
So Charlie Skinner tells everyone not to make any mistakes during the election broadcast. Not that anybody is supposed to make any mistakes anyway. But especially none this night, he says.
There are all manner of silly secondary stories that make this one of the most insufferable episodes of the season — lots of fast talking patter meant to be witty and of classic screwball vintage (the names Abbott and Costello are actually mentioned). Actually, it’s annoying and relentless.
Plus the things they banter about are completely useless. Mac doesn’t like her Wikipedia listing. Sloan is mad someone faked her autograph on a book that went for auction for $1,000. Neal is enlisted to do both and as such looks as exasperated as the average reader. (And mark this as Sloan’s worst episode ever).
There are other dumb things: a lot of fuss about a separate statistics room meant to analyze and call elections without the influence of other network. Elliott gives a tour in a way that’s either meant to elicit wonder at the process, or poke fun at CNN and Fox News for doing similar thing (ACM falls short by not having an election night hologram).
There’s another bonehead rape comment by a candidate that they probably wouldn’t report anyway since the election is going on that day, but Don and Maggie parlay it into getting a bigger scoop: General Petraeus is about to resign because of the affair he’s having with his biographer. Which elicits the usual Newsroom watcher reaction: This was going on at exactly the same time? Yup, it was Friday of election week 2012. This revelation makes Charlie yell something in the newsroom very loudly that is also completely unintelligible after rewinding it several times (being Charlie, I’m sure it didn’t have much meaning anyway).
Taylor Warren is still in the mix because they don’t want to can the actress that’s been playing the fired Romney spokeswoman, Constance Zimmer, who was also Zoe’s reporter rival in “House of Cards.”
Now, she’s an election night commentator (though they don’t have one from the Obama point of view),and is able to bring out the “balancing” complaints about how bad the liberal press was to Romney.
There is a mistake in the election night coverage — they mistook a MI on a legal pad for Mississippi not Michigan and Don is so worried about the no-mistakes rule that he doesn’t want to correct it, he wants to quietly change it. This is very unlike Don. Don should fall on his sword and quit for the mistake. Instead there’s an absurd scene in which an analyst is brought into the newsroom blindfolded with a tie so as not to be influenced.
Mac still wants to fall on her sword and she and Will start talking about something even more tiresome than Genoa – the reasons they broke up before the first season started. Now she accuses him of not firing her because it would make him look bad to can an ex. He takes the bait and fires her; she’ll just have to leave after the election newscast.
Which won’t come until next week’s season finale, and part two of this episode called “The Election.” As it is, this episode ends about 12 minutes shy of the hour mark.
So it was the shortest episode of the season as well as the most annoying.
And we know what happens in the finale: Romney loses.