The Newsroom: The Complete First Season (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Image
A Sound B+ Extras B

"We
Just Decided To," "News Night 2.0," "The 112th
Congress," "I'll Try To Fix You," "Amen,"
"Bullies," "5/1," "The Blackout, Part 1: Tragedy
Porn," "The Blackout, Part 2: Mock Debate," "The Greater
Fool"


Newsroom1

by
Jefferson Robbins
The more
I think about Aaron Sorkin's chimerical HBO beast "The Newsroom", the more I think it would work far, far better as a Broadway musical.
That may
be because Sorkin loads the ranks of his ensemble drama with
accomplished
theatre vets, or it may be because of the endless dialogue references to stage
classics,
beginning and ending with Man of La Mancha.
But it's also
a matter of timing: The show offers strange eruptions of relationship
palaver,
set in the midst of world-altering sociopolitical changes and the daily
churn
of building a TV newshour around them. They arrive oddly, maddeningly,
and
frequently, just when the storylines involving real-world events are
beginning to
compel, and they feel almost uniformly dishonest and manufactured. What
I'm
saying is, they'd go down easier if they were sung.

RUNNING TIME
60
minutes/episode

MPAA
Not
Rated

ASPECT RATIO(S)
1.78:1
(1080p/MPEG-4)

LANGUAGES
English 5.1 DTS-HD MA
French DTS
5.1
Spanish DTS
2.0 (Surround)
SUBTITLES
English
English SDH
French
Spanish
Danish
Finnish
Norwegian
Swedish

REGION
A
DISC TYPE
4
BD-50s

STUDIO
HBO

Will
McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), before he became a very astute fake
Twitter account
, is a high-rated and studiedly
apolitical cable-news anchor. At a Northwestern University panel on
politics in the media, he's situated, tellingly, between leftist and rightist
commentators, whose
blather wears on his last nerve. Tipped sideways by a student's naïve
open-mic
question, Will goes on a tirade that's probably the best monologue
Sorkin's
written since A
Few Good Men
. It's also Will's longing glance backwards to some imagined
"then" when the United States bestrode the world through the virtue
of its people, and it cruelly steamrolls the "sorority girl" who
pried open his psychic can of worms. The scene morphs from
original-gangsta
Sorkin to Sorkin 2.0–post-The Social Network–as
first
one smartphone goes up to record the implosion, then another, then a whole field of them. It's the broadcaster losing control of the broadcast. Sorkin
regards
the Internet and those who use it–including reporters–with
suspicion, if not contempt, and Will's fall and self-reinvention indict
the
click-baiting, dead-white-girl-driven media marketplace in which his
primetime
cable show "News Night" finds itself.

The
meltdown leads to a shake-up at fictional Atlantis Cable News as Will's
long-time executive producer, Don (Thomas Sadoski), bails out to steer
the 10 p.m. broadcast, and news chief Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston, tremoring
towards
Robert-Morse-on-"Mad Men" territory) imports war-weary field producer
MacKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer) as Will's showrunner. Two obstacles:
1)
McAvoy and MacKenzie are estranged ex-lovers, with a lot of prefab
conflict to
be backstory'd in as the series goes on; and 2) nobody had the guts to
tell
Sorkin this surfeit of "Mc" names was a terrible idea. MacKenzie
brings in a junior producer who's likewise back from the Iraq and
Afghanistan war
zones, Jim Harper (John Gallagher Jr.), with the brief to not only put
"News Night" on the cutting edge of TV journalism but also romance
Will's assistant, Maggie (Alison Pill). Literally, MacKenzie orders Jim
to
smoove up his underling, like some studio executive's script note made
flesh,
despite the fact that she's in a longstanding relationship with Don. The
powerful
skill of the actors involved can't drown out this false note, which
rings
continuously through the first season.

The new
crew sets out to report the news with conviction and accuracy, starting
with
the environmental nightmare inherent in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon
explosion.
This move situates "The Newsroom" in the real world, a place we've
lived, and sets the show up as a kind of corrective to the media
narratives
that have accumulated around major events of the past three years.
"News
Night" is first to the plate with the facts that, in real reportage,
took
days or weeks to emerge. The broadcast's new posture reinvigorates Will
after
what we're told is a sleepwalking half-decade behind the anchor desk,
but it intimidates network president Reese Lansing (Chris Messina) and his
mom,
parent-company mogul Leona (Jane Fonda). What follows so closely
parallels the
travails of both MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Rupert Murdoch's tabloid
empire
that I wonder if either of them gets residuals. Whatever… I bet
Keith and
Rupert never interrupt a crucial talk on the debt ceiling to moan that
so-and-so is leaving them, or that they want to move in with such-and-such.
(The
Murdochian plotline even mentions Murdoch by name, causing cognitive
dissonance in anyone who's paid attention to the news in the last two
years,
which I assume is Sorkin's audience.)

This is
how "The Newsroom" will go for ten episodes: Serious Issues sit
uncomfortably side-by-side with Relationship Jitters and Vaudevillian
Pratfalls. The pilot is a charmer on its own merits, baiting us with
Will's
crisis and sinking the hook with Deepwater, but then we also have
Maggie
tripping on a chair and trying to run away from her desk with a phone
headset
still attached. Jeff Schoen's admirable production design gives us
a good
sense of place, and it's well-employed as the newsroom percolates
slowly to
life following Will's return to work, though at times director Greg Mottola's
geography is questionable. (Jim hides in an office to take a call; I
thought it
was the same office where MacKenzie and Will were at that moment having
it
out.) The episode glosses over the pain and hurdles of actual
newsgathering in
much the same way The
Social Network
 glossed
over code development, and for all the crispness of Sorkin's dialogue
and
Will's alleged chops as a newsreader, once he finally goes on the air,
he
mushmouths. His series-setting rant concerning "great men" echoes in
the handling of the female characters: MacKenzie, who starts off on
fairly
equal footing, ends the episode as just a girl, standing in front of a
McAvoy,
watching him close the elevator in her face.

She fares
no better in the follow-up, "News Night 2.0," knocking over an easel,
slapping a cellphone out of an underling's hand, and firebombing
herself with a
series of misdirected e-mails. More than just the Internet, Sorkin
appears to
have a blind spot for telecommunications in general. People on "The
Newsroom" are always talking on/about their BlackBerrys, at a time
(April
2010) when the phone's market share was in the latrine and the iPhone
3GS was
the hot mobile platform. Could be a product placement deal, I
suppose, but
you can't have verisimilitude in only one out of three of your show's
dimensions. Two parallel tales of cheating on a current flame with
one's ex run
in tandem with "News Night"'s quest to squeeze juice out of Arizona's
unconstitutional immigration bill. Try as I might, I couldn't see how
the two
things were alike. Sorkin tries too hard to make a Jim and Pam out of
Jim and
Maggie, and as the characters' patterns become set, "The Newsroom"
looks less like "The West Wing" than like "Ally
McBeal"–highly-educated professionals in crucial jobs with the
emotional
maturity of middle-schoolers, evacuating perfectly discreet private
offices in
order to have explosive personal arguments before the largest possible
number
of witnesses.

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Some of
the show's best moments turn outward, to the wider world. In episode 1.4, "I'll Try
To
Fix You," Will (target of the slapstick this time around, earning three
drinks to the face) proves prescient on the gun-control issue in the
days
leading up to Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford's near-fatal wounding. In
"Amen" (1.5), earnest staff blogger Neal (Dev Patel) cultivates a Cairo
source during the Arab Spring. In these scenes, "The Newsroom" taps
into some of the breaking-the-news chutzpah of Michael Mann's The
Insider
, showing journalism happening, against forbidding
obstacles, in service
of the truth. Neal's kinship with Egyptian crypto-journalist Kahlid is
similarly moving: both are post-colonial millennials radicalized by
national
trauma not towards violence, but towards reportage and acting as the
eyes of
the world. And then Maggie hits Jim with a swinging glass door.

"The
Newsroom"'s jaundiced hindsight view of then-current events plays well
to
an informed–not to say liberal–news viewer's pipe dreams. One really
does
wish this was the way the news had been done the first time around,
from Will's
tweaking of the Tea Party to a tentative probe into the National
Security
Agency's domestic spying. (I mentioned prescience, didn't I?) The best
ribbing of the media's decline comes with the first of a two-part instalment,
"The
Blackout," which keenly dissects still-writhing termagant Nancy Grace
and
packs in the most drama with the most finesse. (Thank you, frequent
"Mad
Men" helmer Lesli Linka Glatter.) Yet the gender inequity that suffuses
the storylines infects "News Night"'s coverage bias as well: Rather
than examining the Anthony Weiner scandal as harassment carried out by
a
powerful man troublingly addicted to the sexiness of power, Will and
MacKenzie
regard it as an eruption of avaricious bimbos.

The other best
moments are Will's alone. He's a knee-jerk mansplainer who understands
the
times he lives in less and less but can't help trying to maintain the
upper
hand. When he finally gets a non-office supporting cast to use as foils
(bodyguard Terry Crews and psychotherapist David Krumholtz), we become
as
invested in him as they are. Still, his inner life is communicated through
verbal
exposition, almost never through Daniels's performance. We know he's
damaged,
but it's up to everybody else to explain why that is. The performers can't be
faulted
for any of this–they're top-notch, from Sorkin's above-the-line
Broadway
regulars to Olivia Munn as the smart but flailing market newscaster
Sloan
Sabbith (oy, these names), finally given a role that lets her test
herself
against veterans. In part, the cast's appeal is why it's hard to see
them
ill-used: Sloan confronts Charlie's sexist language during a
disciplinary
lecture, but doesn't mind Don literally chucking her under the chin in
consolation. "The Newsroom"'s first season ends where it began, much
as The
Social Network
 did,
with somebody fatefully gazing at a screen. In terms of dramas where
human
relationships play out against the mediated backdrop of history, it's
no
"Mad Men".

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THE
BLU-RAY DISC

I dunno,
it doesn't feel like I should be seeing this much grain in an HBO
presentation
in 2013. The pilot is the main culprit, as later
episodes resolve to better smoothness. Past that patina, the 1.78:1,
1080p Blu-ray image impresses,
from the warm clutter of Will's office to the dark corners of his
sombre, minimalist apartment–again with that fine production design,
reflecting professional
and private sides of the same man. (I will say the graphics generated
for the
newscast look like somebody CGI'd the illustrations out of my
high-school
geography book.) Nothing is lost in these depths, and our close-ups
with the
players offer unblemished skin and clothing textures. The camera moves
from
interior to exterior environments without strain–all crucial elements
for a
show that explores America's aggressively televisual way of seeing.
Soundwise,
the 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio mix keeps dialogue corralled in its
traditional
front-channel box, ensuring that no line of Sorkin's scripts (he's
the sole
credited writer on all but one episode) goes unheard. The ambients–and
there's a fair amount of newsroom chatter, clatter, and Blackberry
pings–occupy most of the remaining channels with an even and convincing distribution.
Thomas Newman's grandiloquent, maddeningly hummable theme trumpets
bracingly at
each opening, while interstitial composer Alex Wurman gets plenty of
showcasing
within the episodes, usually when a character starts rolling on a
monologue.

Crew and
cast commentaries accompany five episodes along the way, with director/producer
Greg Mottola revealing on the first, for the pilot, that it was shot on
Super16, thus accounting for the obtrusive grain. Mottola's complaints about
it are
similar to my own. Sorkin leads this commentary group, which includes
executive
producer Alan Poul and offers some nice making-of vignettes. For
instance, HBO
funded the building of the set for the pilot, a rare move that sort of
indicates they'd already committed to a full season; and Sorkin responded
to
Sadoski's skilful audition by merging two characters to expand Don's
role–the
constructive instincts of a playwright reacting to his actors. Amusingly,
Sorkin
claims to be confused as to why so many critics made a big deal about his
"West
Wing" pedeconference
scenes. ("The Newsroom" is far lighter on walk-and-talks.) He
also defends Will's opening rant, saying he in no way intended
nostalgia for
the dominion of white men–but when you say "things were better
then," white dominion is the implicit core of your argument. On the
yakker
for episode 3, "The 112th Congress," Sorkin pauses his confab with Daniels and
Waterston to moon over a beautiful bit player. Beyond that, it's all
shop talk, complete with the two actors offering warm remembrances of
performances past.

Munn, appropriately for an episode that involves Sloan going
rogue on-air, thoroughly hijacks the "Bullies" commentary from Poul
and Daniels, talking for what seems like eight years about the cruelty
of
online comments. I guess she should know, but…skippable. Sorkin
dominates the
remaining confabs, although the commentary for the season closer, "The
Greater Fool," turns into a transcontinental Skype party with Sadoski
and
Pill joining Sorkin, Daniels, Poul, Waterston, and Mortimer.

"The
Rundown" (26 mins., HD) puts Sorkin in a room with Daniels, Mortimer,
Waterston, Mottola, and Poul, who mostly reiterate bits they've given
on
commentaries elsewhere. "Mission Control" (5 mins., HD) shows off the
basically functional TV control room that was installed just for the
show,
letting actors work with each other through monitors and audio feeds as
actual producers and newscasters would. Sorkin offers three- to
five-minute
post-mortems in ten "Inside the Episode" featurettes (HD), and there
are approximately six minutes of deleted scenes distributed across the discs.
HBO
provides its usual, optional "previously on/next on" reel with every ep. The package additionally comes with the full series on two flipper
DVDs–stripped of
all extras save language options and subtitles (really? Finnish but not
German?)–plus a Digital Copy downloadable through HBO Select. Follow Jefferson Robbins on Twitter

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