“If You Don’t Want Someone To Fail, You’re In The Wrong Business”: Failed Backstabbing in Aaron Sorkin’s ‘The Newsroom’

For the past three weeks, I’ve been desperately trying to enjoy Aaron Sorkin’s new show The Newsroom. In truth, I’ve never had much exposure to Sorkin’s work. During the seven season run of The West Wing, I didn’t have much interest in American politics. Besides being a political morality tale, the show also seemed to be a highly stylized  piece of propaganda, inspiring  belief in “the land of the free”.    I presumed this meant that the staff of the show’s fictional White House were tough but wise and good-hearted people who, together, would work for the greater good of their nation and humanity. In reality, this camaraderie is laughable. You don’t need to have a degree in politics to know that most White House staffers are ambitious and ruthless people who generally look out for themselves. After all, they wouldn’t be working on the grounds of America’s most famous piece of property if they just philosophized over their national pride and the glorious benefits of team work. Hence, I chose to steer clear of the show. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip sounded like a more interesting option but it’s time on the air was too brief and I never managed to catch it.  I’m told that both shows had a preachy subtext. While this did wonders for the former show, it caused the latter one to flop miserably.

When it came to Sorkin’s  film work, I really didn’t  know what to expect from his screenplay for the Facebook movie The Social Network. The only other Sorkin film I had seen was The American President which was directed by Rob Reiner. That film was a mundane and sentimental romantic comedy about an American president who falls for his lobbyist. I would then be forgiven for thinking that The Social Network would turn out to be the sappy story of a poor, kind but unhappy college nerd who rises from obscurity into glory, wealth and everlasting happiness. Such a story would turn Mark Zuckerberg into a symbol for the American Dream, a proud product of the Sorkin school of patriotic moralizing. To my surprise though, The Social Network was anything but an American morality tale. It was a brutal and unforgiving film about a man who begins the film as a jack-ass and ends it as an even bigger one. He comes to no moral revelations. He backstabs, cheats and lies because, let’s face it, how else would his idea (if it was his idea) become so lucrative and profitable? Whether the story Sorkin created here was factual or not, The Social Network is a masterful piece of cinema.

It was with this feeling of post- Social Network euphoria that I sat down to watch The Newsroom. I expected the show to be biting and aggressive, a chronicle of the deceptive dealings of a network newsroom staff. However, from the minute the show’s opening credits revealed themselves in the first episode, I figured I was in for the exact opposite of what I was hoping for. The show’s  theme music, like that of The West Wing, is a victory anthem.  As the music plays, clips from American news broadcasting history are displayed on screen before morphing into the traditional show snippets which introduce each cast member. An opening sequence such as this one is rare in television today. Actually, in most cases, it’s completely unnecessary.

The opening sequence is appropriate to the theme of the show which, in basic terms, is all about using broadcast news as a platform for social and political change. The show’s protagonist, Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) is a disillusioned news anchor who is disgruntled by the fact that his news show has softened its approach to political issues, thereby doing a disservice to the American public. After a public breakdown,  most of Will’s staff abandons him and a new executive-producer named Mackenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer) comes on board to help save the show. Sorkin tries to interweave the show’s narrative with some sexual politics in the sense that Will and Mackenzie are ex-lovers but that comes second to the bigger task at hand: going against “The Man” (aka the network) to produce news that is honest, fair and stimulating for the American public. Will makes this goal quite clear in a rambling monologue at the beginning of the show’s third episode where he apologizes to his viewers for producing such sloppy journalism up until this point and promises that, from this point on, he will produce news that will change the world (well that seems to be the underlying subtext here). Of course this means Will himself will undergo some sort of character reformation. He will go from being a jack-ass who barely knows his employees names to slightly less of a jack-ass who remembers these names almost automatically. He’ll also ease up on his animosity towards Mackenzie, the woman who cheated on him, because his main aim is to save lives via broadcast news. This means that the whole team will work together for the greater good of the show and, as is conventional for this kind of television, any squabbles will be solved within an hour.

The camaraderie we see in The Newsroom makes me think of  the “camaraderie”  we see Smash, mainly because there is no real camaraderie in Smash. It might be a show about musical theatre, as opposed to a show about broadcast news, but Smash really understands office politics. This understanding is exemplified in one of the first season’s later episodes where Ivy, the Broadway chorus veteran, coaches Karen, the Broadway ingenue, on the art of showbiz bitchiness. As the two women watch Rebecca Duvall, the film star who has stolen the Marilyn role they competed for, Ivy tries to encourage Karen to hope that Rebecca will screw up. After Karen says she actually hopes Rebecca will succeed, Ivy replies “If you don’t want her to fail, you’re in the wrong business”. Indeed, as Ivy identifies here, the art of theatre may be about team-work but, at the end of the day, each performer is out to get his or her own spotlight and each will aim to destroy the other in order to succeed.  I imagine that the same rules apply in a newsroom, just as they do in other political and entertainment institutions. That’s the drama that happens in reality and that’s the drama that makes damn good television.

And yet Sorkin chooses to revel in his positivity and patriotism, perceiving his characters as emblems for righteous American values. He makes up for their lack of tension by making them overly neurotic and putting his trademark dialogue into overdrive. Yet these neuorotic and over-talkative characters remain really boring, despite their eccentricities. Of course, they would have more life in them if there were some aggression and bitchiness in the mix but that would probably cause the perfection of Sorkin’s world to unravel completely. The only figure of doom in The Newsroom is the network which is out to restrict the show’s freedom of speech. Ironically, thanks to The Newsroom‘s conservatism, there isn’t really any freedom of speech to begin with.

I will continue to watch The Newsroom because, at the very least, it fills in my knowledge gaps when it comes to recent American history. The show is structured on a frantic timeline which jumps between 2010 and more recent news headlines. To The Newsroom‘s credit, it really does know how to represent the news in an appealing form, at least when Will is in news anchor mode. Off the stage, however, the show remains a feel-good mess.

Source for Pic 1: http://blogcritics.org/video/article/tv-review-the-newsroom-amen/

Source for Pic 2: http://collider.com/the-newsroom-trailer/166078/