Back at the news desk, Ohio is called for Obama, as well as the presidency, and after Taylor’s constant nagging, Will gets up on his soapbox and talks about why he’s a Republican, and why he likes to beat up on the current crop of Tea Party-endorsed candidates in a very rhetorically-pleasing speech that sounded a lot like season one Will. Afterward, Will and Charlie talk in his office about how Charlie was a little too quick to refuse the Patreous tip, and he doesn’t like that. He doesn’t like what they’ve become post-Genoa either. He’s going to refuse to resign, and Will has an epiphany himself…
The denouement of the season involved all the various romantic entanglements of The Newsroom.
First Sloan discovers a poster of The Sweet Smell of Success in Don’s office, and putting two and two together, she walks into the control room, signs a copy of her book for him, and gives him a big smooch.
Jim confronts Maggie about what happened in Africa and how it affected her, and she tells him about the first time she noticed him in the pilot episode, when he got the news alert about the BP oil spill and wouldn’t let it drop. Jim also convinces Lisa to talk to Maggie so that she can help her former-bestie work through her Africa trauma.
Will takes the practical joke ring out of his desk and frantically searches for Mackenzie. When he finds her, he tells her the bit about the kid who wouldn’t stop shredding paper as his way of telling her that he’s been waiting for someone to make the obvious exceedingly clear, and so Will proposes to Mackenzie. She accepts, and the theme music swells…
On cue, Reese and Leona enter the newsroom and Reese announces that he’s convinced that the team handle Genoa as well as it could have been handled, no one is being fired and Jerry Dantana will only get paid when a Federal judge orders him to. Charlie says that’s good because he’s not offering his resignation anyway. Will and Mac announce their engagement, and it’s the happy ending everyone wanted as a cover of Pete Townshend’s “Let My Love Open the Door” closes the show. As everyone celebrates, Maggie receives and news alert and she clicks on it. Smash cut to black.
Wasn’t that nice? To paraphrase Sideshow Bob, it was an ending so formulaic, it could have spewed from the notebook of the laziest Hollywood hack! What I will say is that The Newsroom showed so much improvement this past season, especially in the second half, that I’m prepared to give it a pass for all the rom-com nonsense, all the silliness about Wikipedia and fake-autographs, and all the times Will stepped on Sloan’s lines in tonight’s finale.
What I will give credit to is Jane Fonda’s impression of a stoner, even though I find it highly unlikely that the president of a huge company like AWM would be so checked out as her company’s in crisis. That being said, I would love to see some kind of Harold & Kumar-like stoner comedy with Jane Fonda. What is Kal Penn doing these days?
Also, kudos to Aaron Sorkin for no longer making Don the punching bag for mainstream media sensibilities, and instead making him the only person to have any kind of balls throughout the Genoa storyline. At first, it seemed like Don was going to be the “villain” of the piece, and then he was just kind of belligerent, but now it seems like he’s a real character. There was also progress in making the female characters more well rounded this year, but seeing as how Sloan and Mac’s storylines in the finales came down to relationship drama while the men worried about whether or not they’ll have jobs tomorrow, let’s still call this a work in progresss.
But overall, what worked about this season was less emphasis on re-writing real world news coverage and more emphasis on the ins and outs of producing the news. I take it that the Dantana drama will continue into next season, but I hope the ongoing drama doesn’t eat up all of The Newsroom’s efforts. How will the News Night team get the trust of the people back? How will they overcome their own bad press? How easily will Reese’s sudden moral resolve hold up? That’s what I want to see in The Newsroom season three. We’ll find out next year if Sorkin and Co. can deliver.
