'The Newsroom' - Season 3

Drowning In Sentiment

'The Newsroom' closes out with season 3. It doesn't even go the distance of 10 episodes; it wraps up at episode 6. As binge-watching experiences go, it feels a little short, but on other ways it feels exactly right to quit right now. For a start the story seemed to have nowhere to go beyond the confines of the fictional network and its corporate context. The characters had family limited horizons on their story arcs so they rapidly coalesced to a finish.

I'm still wondering if it was as satisfying as the way the whole series kicked off. The arguments to do with freedom of press are rather cursory while the sentimentalism flows as if an oil barrel full of the stuff was knocked over the TV screen.

What's Good About It

It's still the same show, the same characters with remarkably little emotional distance traveled for some of them. Others, are developing and changing and bursting out of the storyline. In a nutshell, the series tries to deliver on all the good endings that seem to have been promised in the earlier seasons.

Jeff Daniels remains superb. In between the last season and this one, he had that stint playing Jim Carrey's sidekick in 'Dumb & Dumber To'. It's amazing how broad and deep his acting chops run because he's equally convincing as the cantankerous ex-prosecutor News Man as he is playing an out-and-out idiot. He's equal parts sly charm and bluff in both incarnations but he manages to put so much across with his respective characters. He underlines just how good the casting was to put him in the hot seat of this series. He doesn't let you down, and you forget you're watching Jeff Daniels, an actor.

What's Bad About it

They do lay the sentimentalism on thick. Even with an acceptance that these characters are going to work out their troubles and problems and rise to their best selfs, you're struck by how fictional such an arrangement can be. Maybe it just brings out the cynic in me (which admittedly doesn't lurk too far from the surface) but it seems too pat with the way things work out cleanly in a way that one wouldn't possibly imagine for real life. Of course this is why we do fiction - to fix reality of its faults - but sometimes the seams are showing, the stitching is peeking out, and you don't quite buy the reality in which these characters dwell.

What's Interesting About it

They rushed to the end. Aaron Sorkin ran out of story, and so the show ground to a halt. It's a shame - but it appears that Sorkin got to point and didn't want to break up the dynamic within the show. These characters are so good where it counts, they don't betray one another. And so the whole thing grinds to a halt in the stasis of their situation.

Chasing Edward Snowden

The events surrounding Edward's Snowden's defection to Russia is briefly shown. Edward Snowden is expected to come through Moscow Airport and expected to fly to Havana, Cuba. Of course in real life Snowden found himself in a kind of diplomatic limbo that saw him cool his hellish Russia, which is where he is to this very day. Instead our characters end up on a plane to Havana while completely missing Snowden. It would be interesting if the characters offered up an opinion about what Snowden had to say, but the show never really gets there. It consumes itself on the romantic matter at hand and maybe that's all that's needed for TV to be "TEE-VEE!" but it left me cold.

Considering the big kick off in season one started with the call to do the news properly, somehow the characters got lost in their own space and that made for some tedious story-telling. A newsrooms is probably not so romantically charged in real life so it goes back to the problem of sense of reality. It was beginning to erode pretty quickly towards the end.

Implicit Assumptions About Freedom Of Expression

The most important issue in season revolves around press freedoms and what it means for broadcasters. It's actually thought provoking because the media companies are self-regulating bodies that have rules for going to press or going to air. Facts have to rechecked and sources need to be verified before words are uttered on camera. They do this vigorously because without it, they wouldn't have leg to stand upon. Yet,outing the world of social media and the internet, there is a wave of unqualified, un-vetted people saying and writing just anything -like this blog right here! - and  so this forms another layer difficulty for professional journalists.

I do wonder if this is really true. Julian Assange thinks most blogs are amplifiers of commonly held opinions to reinforce peer groups. In other words, the vast majority of blogs are about doxa (opinion) and hardly about episteme (knowledge). Assange said he leaked important stuff and expected the bloggers of the world topic through the information and see for themselves the horrors of governments. But we/they do not. Thus Julian Assange opted to work with traditional media outlets to release his leaks in tranches. Simply put, the professionals were every bit important and vital to the process. Aaron Sorkin need not have argued so vehemently.

And yet, Snowden came forward in the manner that he did, emboldened by Assange and his Wikileaks. It was (and remains) a historic moment - and season 3 sort of pushes that content into the background while arguing a case for a professional press corps. It is rather ironic.

What seems to be the case is that news networks sit on a lot of information and don't necessarily go public with them for many reasons. Some arena principle, some are impossible to verify, and sombre simply too dangerous. Yet, it is through this professional vetting system that the mainstream media receive their news. This implies the apparent freedom of expression rests explicitly on what is and what is not conducive to the state. And for all the grandstanding, the press is not so powerful as to have it all their way.

The Fear of A Democratised Media

"Citizen journalism" comes in for a heavy pasting by the protagonists. The websites driven by the writings of non-professionals get the most opprobrium. Twitter and Facebook users get a lambasting for what professional journalism is not. Watching the show, one would think the wider public participating in journalism is a terrible thing. It comes across as paranoid, because it's not like individuals out in the public sphere have the kinds of resources of a professional news agency.

And as with Julian Assange's observation above, most blogs are simply amplifiers of previously held opinions and hardly what one would call reportage. It's true enough to put "citizen journalism" into a little box. Sometimes it does well, but its chances of doing it regularly with consistently good results are close to zero. Even if I decided to just blog full time, I doubt my output would be earth-shatteringly profound; and I'd be relying on real news sources to feed me informationIt would just be this kind of cultural echo chamber representing views of a particular stratum of Sydney's denizens - I'd only be collating and editorialising as I already do, but not much more. We bloggers, we're just not much whack at journalism.

Hence it seems incredibly paranoid for the show's characters to constantly deride people who find employment at the edges of traditional journalism working on the new digital media. The real problem isn't that professional journalism's lunch is about to get eaten by bloggers and the Twitterati. It's that the traditional capital is refusing to fund it as thoroughly as it once funded it because profitability has to come into it somewhere. Doubly, this problem makes the media the tacit mouthpiece for the 1%. The people are not happy with this arrangement, but Sorkin seems oblivious to this side of the issue. He's happy to rail about Wall Street and the 1% through his characters in one direction but he won't let them stand trial as part of the 1%'s apparatus of control.

Is Sentimentalism Such A Bad Thing?

I did wonder about this for quite a while watching season 3. The problem with sentimentalism is that it is a kind short hand for actual emotional depth. The mawkishness of some of the characters and their relationships gets us locked in on perhaps the wrong thing. The show raises a lot of interesting ideas, but it is constantly being undercut by the interpersonal to-and-fro that perhaps masquerades as love when all it is, is simply attachments.

The most sentimental show I can think from the top of my head is Ricky Gervais' 'Derek'. 'Derek' comes at you with the sentimentalism dialled up at 11, and the main character is hardly the greatest intellectual. It makes sense that Gervais' character spends his time watching baby animal videos on YouTube. We all like it, and go 'awwwww' at baby animal videos on YouTube. The question is, is it appropriate to build a show with such high aspirations and then back in to a kind of 'awwww' when the going gets complicated? Is Will McAvoy played by Jeff Daniels, such a sucker for sentiment? Does that even fit with his upbringing or professed political leanings?

I think Sorkin could have been tougher with his characters but somehow bugged out from making it tough. The entire series ends on too comfortable a note as a result.