I tried. I hung in there as long as I could. I wanted to like it.
He’s depressed because he was the subject of a hatchet job by hack he invited in to punish the girl that betrayed him be sleeping with the hack??? That is a self inflicted wound. His insurance company should have made him pay the bill out of pocket.
WTF is Don still doing in every episode? All these people who have a full-time news show job? Well, Don has one too…ON ANOTHER SHOW!!
They spent two months going over stump speeches and quotes on every candidate for a mock debate to pitch an actual debate that was, at best, unlikely to happen. And the mock debate lasted 30 seconds? Oh no they did NOT!
I love the news show. I like Will. I would have the rest of them shot.
The only thing that would get me to tune in again is if Maggie actually gets put into a burlap sack and tossed in the East River.
But this is what bugs me about the character. I feel like we’re supposed to find her a sort of adorable-flibbertigibbet type, when really, she has “loony bin” written all over her. Why are either of these guys attracted to her?
I love how they’ve stopped trying to make excuses for why Don is at News Night all the time. A few episodes ago, they at least had a half-hearted, “Don is at this meeting because mumblemumble” Now? Nothing.
Reading this thread reminded me of something I heard recently.
It was suggested that people who post on the internet run at about 1:30, content to incontent.
Sorry, I mean discontent.
Well, if one was perfectly contented with (or utterly indifferent to) a topic, one likely wouldn’t bother to comment at all. Thus whoever formed the “suggestion” was working from a self-selected sample, and in addition I rather doubt the data was collected with anything resembling rigor.
My wife loved it and I thought it was fine. I see all of the issues that folks, even at 1:30am, are discontent about and pretty much agree. But I still enjoy the idea of the show - a cross between the West Wing and the Daily Show (as a topical commentary on politics and the media) - and enough of the actors to stick with it.
Olivia Munn is acquitting herself well; Sloan remains the female character least coarsely drawn. But falling for the douche didn’t feel correct; if she was going to get plot-twisted, I would see a damaged genius in her future.
Still too many false notes. Let’s see what next season brings.
I was wondering why Neal’s story about the internet trolls and the death threats against Will never led to anything in the plot. So will the next season pick up immediately or will there be gap?
It keeps Terry Crews involved as his bodyguard, which is fine by me, but I wish he had a better part.
Neal/Dev Patel’s attempts at trolling are part of what rings a little false. I know *nothing *about that world, but I don’t get the sense that Sorkin is giving me any legit insight into it. Similar with the hacking of voicemails - but because there was a known precedent in the Murdoch scandal, where all the How To’s and What Happened’s have been raked over, he could slip that maneuver into the storyline a lot more easily.
Hijack: I checked his wiki, simply to remind myself of his bio. They discussed his NFL career and transition into acting…and his infamous robot dance…hunh? Hadn’t heard of that.
Looked it up on YouTube. Amazing moves, period, but even more so for such a muscular athlete of a guy.
I wonder if he will ever take his shirt off on The Newsroom.
Okay. My recommendations for the show: get rid of Mac AND Maggie AND Don. No more relationship b.s. Kill the message-board-troll plotline. And have Terry take his shirt off from time to time. That will fix things nicely.
No, don’t get rid of Don! His meltdown watching Sloan go rogue on the air is probably my favorite scene of the whole first season. Plus, he’s one of the few people on the show who actually seems competent enough to be a part of producing a nightly newscast.
Getting rid of Mac, Maggie, and Jim? Now we’re talking.
I watched the finale last night: on the whole I liked it, but I am seriously tired of every single one of the female characters – especially Maggie. When it comes to characters who are so annoying that I sometimes want to stop watching the show just because of them, Maggie gives Sookie Stackhouse a run for her money. And Mackenzie isn’t too far behind Maggie.
If they don’t fix the women next season – and I mean early in the season – I think I’ll be done with this show.
And, quite possibly, the moment she fell in love with him.
Anyway, these ten episodes cover more than a year in these characters’ lives, yet they remain stuck in their initial patterns as firmly as cartoon characters whose clothes never change. Didn’t MacKenzie push Jim toward Maggie in the first episode as (I thought at the time) a cynical ploy to try to get MacKenzie and Jim (the newcomers at the time) a foothold in the office dynamic? A year later, it turns out she was playing matchmaker, and she’s it still concerned the Jim/Maggie project isn’t moving forward? Jeez, woman, get your damn priorities straight, including fixing your own shambles of a life.
I still haven’t seen “5/1,” which some people said was the best episode of the season, but I did watch the other episodes and I still think the Giffords one was mostly good. There are enjoyable lines and moments here and there, but this show is still a total mess in terms of the characters and structure and its ideas, and most of the people in the newsroom aren’t nuts in a fun and amusing way, they’re nuts in an irritating way that makes me think they’re mentally ill and hope they are sterile. Much of what they do makes no sense and only happens to create random conflicts and “romantic” complications. Every single conversation about work is interrupted or delayed by a conversation about relationships, often someone who isn’t even in the room, the characters interfere with each others’ lives in a way that is much more bossy and annoying than funny, and Jim and Maggie and Don are all coming off as kind of psycho. Mac seems to get dumber every week. Remember when we were supposed to think she’s a brilliant producer? I’m not sure how she even dresses herself. The scheming-CEO-hates-them plot was trite in the first place and resolving it with blackmail didn’t feel believable to me. This is just a bad show on almost every level other than the cast.
In the first few episodes of West Wing, Moira Kelly’s character was a lead, and President Bartlett was supposed to be an occasional drop-in character. Things changed dramatically in Season 2…so don’t be surprised if Sorkin tweaks his creation.
Well, if Jane Fonda and Chris Messina (the mother-and-son execs) end up taking larger roles, it’ll kinda look like what Stephen Weber and Amanda Peet were doing on Studio 60 - playing corporate characters who take an active interest in the activities of the central cast, even though the work of that cast comprises about 0.01% of their corporate responsibilities.
