Signifying Nothing

Aaron Sorkin has publicly promised stated that he's done with TV, which means this week's episode of The Newsroom is his last-ever chance to title a season/series finale "What Kind Of Day Has It Been." And even though this one doesn't have a question mark on it for some incomprehensible reason, I'll field this one: it's been an exhausting waste of time.

The idea of The Newsroom was solid: it would take Sorkin's fascination with serious policy debate that everyone loved on The West Wing and place it in an appropriate behind-the-scenes TV setting. Unlike Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, if someone on The Newsroom wanted to get all self-righteous about who was doing what in Afghanistan, at least they'd be at a fictional 24-hour cable news network, so that even if it was annoying, it would make some kind of sense.

But while The West Wing referred to and commented on real-life events with suggestive fictionalized storylines, The Newsroom did something much riskier by bringing us real-life news stories...months or years after they actually happened. And that's why it never really had a chance to be thoughtful or thought-provoking: it was too busy being Aaron Sorkin's wish-fulfillment fantasy of how he felt those news stories should have been covered. Will's "mission to civilize" was Sorkin's, and both were as smug as they were pointless.

Was The Newsroom's final season its worst? Given how offensive the penultimate episode was, then even if the rest of the episodes had been graded A+, it would still end its semester with, like, a D-. Which is kind of a shame because I feel like some of it evinced an effort to address some of the criticism the show has received over the years. Neal, the Internet Boy, was not only taken seriously but appreciated and missed when he went on the lam. The eternally hapless Maggie got a confident new makeover (which was called out as such in so many words in case we didn't notice, achieving ambitions we didn't know she had and speaking what seemed like fairly fluent Russian). Will gambled that his fame would let him shoot his mouth off without consequence, and got thrown in jail for weeks. If there had been more of this in the rest of the series run, it wouldn't have been so dispiriting to watch it.

At a screening of the episode the night after the penultimate episode aired, Sorkin noted that The Newsroom's series finale is the first time in the four TV series he's run that he's known, when he wrote it, he was definitely writing the end of a story; with Sports Night and Studio 60, he hadn't been certain that there wouldn't be another season, and by the time The West Wing's series finale came along, he'd long since been canned. So watching this series finale -- the hour the previous five had supposedly all been building to -- gives us a sense of what Sorkin may have felt he hadn't gotten to do with those first three shows.

Apparently, we've been spared a lot of country music.

About half of the finale revolves around Charlie putting together the events that led to MacKenzie and Will working together again in 2010 (in an echo of "In The Shadow Of Two Gunmen," the West Wing two-parter that flashed back to tell the story of how Jed Bartlet's closest advisors all got hired to work on his campaign), making this episode both a series finale and a prequel to...the series premiere, basically; everything we're looking back at seems to be happening within seventy-two hours before Will bites off the head of "Sorority Girl" for asking what makes America great. Anyway, there's a runner where people remember that Will plays a little guitar and Will "self-deprecatingly" jokes that he does "a little news anchoring on the side. (We also see Jim loading up a basic guitar tutorial and then slaying, like, it's okay to just be good at music, guys, it doesn't make you gay.) Anyway, after Charlie's funeral, Will notices that Charlie's littler grandson is moping and his bigger one, previously described in the episode as a musical prodigy, is messing around with his bass in the garage, and Will goes in, picks up a guitar, and starts playing a song that Charlie, in a flashback, had been listening to in his office back in 2010. Bo, the older grandson, easily picks it up, and then Jim rolls in to join them.

No one's ever going to be mad when John "Spring Awakening" Gallagher Jr. sees fit to sing; Jeff Daniels has a pleasant voice too, and Jared Prokop, the kid they got to play Charlie's grandson, is apparently a musical prodigy for real. Don't get me wrong: it's corny as hell. But it's also just three characters having a relaxed, pleasant moment together, not trying to prop up the idea of Journalistic Integrity like a passel of Atlases or be The Best At What They Do or Deliver Vitally Important News To A Grateful Nation. It's just nice!

One Sorkin interview trope that has grown increasingly hoary over time is his claim to write characters who are more intelligent than he is. One example: "I haven't become an expert in anything....I'm not sophisticated when it comes to politics, when it comes to journalism. I'm not as smart as the characters are or, as you can see, as articulate. I want to make it clear: I don't know nothin'." (There are more.) In the past when I've read these weird self-defenses, I just assumed they were humblebrags or compliment-fishery (or both), but like...maybe they really are true! Maybe he picked high-stakes, gravitas-laden settings for The West Wing and The Newsroom (and oozed into one with Studio 60) because he figured it was the best way for his work to be taken seriously and/or showered with awards; maybe he would have an easier time -- and so would the viewer -- if he used the chilled-out dad jam of the Newsroom finale as a touchstone for whatever his next project after this Steve Jobs situation turns out to be.

The finale also evinces examples of all the false notes that made The Newsroom so laughable and/or infuriating. Like, it's nice that Neal got to come back to the country and kick around Bree, and clearly that's Sorkin trying to prove he's not terrified of the entire internet. But the website of a 24-hour news network is run by more than three guys; they don't just sit around grab-assing and coming up with half-baked list ideas (and btw this is still spring 2013 in the show's timeline; Gravity probably wouldn't be on their "Most Overrated Movies" list when it was still half a year from being released); and they CAN'T JUST PUT UP A NOTICE SAYING THEY'RE GOING OFFLINE FOR A WEEK FOR RETOOLING. I love that Sorkin gave MacKenzie a line joking that she has greater career goals than to make some man better at his job, and it's cool to be reminded that she got stabbed while reporting. But if she's such hot shit as a journalist, she shouldn't be in the dark for an entire afternoon about the News Director job she's about to be offered. Jim and Maggie are still very irritating characters in general...but they are played by very likable actors, and got one of the season's few legitimately funny moments.

What's tough about the structure of the episode is that it has to establish that there was a problem with NewsNight; that the problem was Will; and that the solution Charlie came up with was installing a woman at the helm that Will would strive to impress. And even though MacKenzie gets the throwaway line about what bullshit that is, the episode ALSO has to try to convince us that it worked, and that Will is not just a better journalist but a better person -- one we're supposed to be happy is about to be a father for the first time even though he's a 200-year-old man in a 100-year-old body. Sure, The Shitty Old Will was rude to everyone around him and half-assed his interviews for the sake of ratings...but The Awesome New Will is going to quit smoking! (The Awesome New Will's response to his wife's disgruntlement over having been offered the News Director job because the new ACN CEO has a woman problem in the press is "Who cares?," because Will has never questioned his privilege and apparently neither has Aaron Sorkin.)

Inasmuch as this episode is more watchable than the rest of the season, though, it's because it focuses on personal stories among the characters and leaves actual news stories almost completely out of it. And other than the Woman Problem that is endemic through all of Aaron Sorkin's work, this is actually something he does well, in large part because he keeps managing to cast actors who elevate his weird, off-putting material. Will has been a pretty loathsome character since I met him, for instance, but Jeff Daniels is so dadly -- the matter-of-fact way he has with the littler grandson is really pretty adorable -- that I can't even be that annoyed about Will's imminent fatherhood, despite the way he makes Charlie's funeral reception all about himself. But then, the whole point of the episode is that Charlie was the architect behind everything we're seeing, and this is part of what is supposed to make this a happy ending: those Charlie left behind have rearranged their positions in a way that will allow them to do the news the way he'd want them to. And we don't have to watch it anymore.