I’m beginning to feel about The Newsroom‘s second season about how I felt about Heroes‘s second season. It’s been good, but not as good as the first season, because it has strayed from its premise that made it great in the name of something else. In this case, the season-long story about Operation: Genoa. And that storyline ends tonight.
Thank the merciful gods of Asgard and Olympus, it is over.
But not before a lot of $#!t hits the fan. We learn in the show’s first scene, where now Don is meeting with the team of lawyers, exactly what this is all about. When Genoa was reported as false, Jerry was fired (duh), but is now suing ACN for wrongful termination. Even though he doctored raw footage, he claims it was an “institutional failure” that failed to vet the story and he is being scapegoated.
Through the lawyers’ interrogation of Don, Jim, Sloan, Mac, Neil, and finally Will, we get the story as it unfolds. We get Mac learning about the play clock in football. We get an explanation of exactly what went wrong with the story besides the edit doctoring. And we get Sloan and Don talking about how they’ll do in prison. And much of this goes down in the latter half of the episode after the story has aired and there is a developing situation outside the embassies in Cairo and Benghazi.
And to be honest, that was the part of the story I liked. The insights into how the news is made, how decisions are made– that’s what I love. The fake news story. . . not so much.
And then, just as I was getting frustrated with this episode, Jane Fonda shows up in the last 5 minutes and shows us why she’s nominated for that Emmy as Leona Lansing.
I feel about this episode exactly how I feel about this season– a few moments of sheer brilliance punctuating a storyline I don’t much care for, but am ultimately glad it’s over.
And the last two lines made me want to jump up off my couch in celebration. [inviso text below]
“We don’t have the trust of the public anymore!”
“GET IT BACK!!!!”
Next week we end with the final two episodes, dealing with Election Night 2012.