The Newsroom

The bottom line on Season 2 of The Newsroom is that it's unlikely to sway viewers one way or another. Devotees will continue to embrace it, and the haters will continue to hate.... As for this critic, let's just say that I'd rather watch an energetic, well-acted, provocative show that aims high and sometimes falls short, than one that doesn't aim high at all.

Edgier, more sharply drawn, while that Sorkian chatter remains at a very high boil.

[The Newsroom] is much stronger and more solidly entertaining. [29 Jul 2013, p.37]

Yes, there's the same theatrical, slightly on-the-nose symbolic imagery, the recurrence of familiar narrative structures like legal depositions, and the grandiloquent speechifying of a comfortably centrist liberalism that sounds more progressive than it acts. Yet for those attuned to the Sorkin style, those excesses have their own kind of virtue, and season two of The Newsroom salvages the promise of becoming something urgent and vital.

For some reason the series’ use of recent real-life stories seems more problematic this time around, starting with a subplot on the birth of Occupy Wall Street.... [But] The Newsroom still has a lot to recommend it. McAvoy and McHale remain strong characters.

What The Newsroom lacks in vampires, serial killers and terrorist love affairs, it makes up for with topicality, intelligence and messy romances.

There's still a lot of craziness and rants designed to resonate with a certain demographic. But an air of if not humility then self-awareness pervades, softening everything it touches, even Will.

I wouldn't say season two of The Newsroom is a big improvement over season one, but the show's definitely more measured and confident--and now that we've accepted that certain tics, such as setting the stories in a recent, real past, aren't going away, it's easier to appreciate what Sorkin and company do well.

Season two at least appears stronger than last year but this all comes with a caveat, which is pretty much everything before this sentence. That is, Newsroom is the show we’re getting from Sorkin even if it might not, for some of us, be quite the show we wanted.

There are new faces this season, and two of the better additions aren’t even journalists. Most important, the narrative this time around is driven by an overarching story line--a libel suit--that pulls viewers past the rocks and eddies of liberal piety. This revamped version of The Newsroom is no less preachy, but it’s a lot more fun to watch.

In a cable universe where antiheroes dominate the scripted drama landscape, there's something reassuring about spending time with characters who, though flawed, usually try to do the right thing.

The Newsroom manages to be both precious and irritating at the same time, and Sorkin’s characters still have that habit of talking over each other, which might be realistic, but makes it hard for viewers to understand what the heck they’re sparring about.

In the second season of The Newsroom, much of the posturing and preaching has given way to storytelling--a good thing. The bad? There's still way too much attention placed on the importance of the jobs being done in a cable newsroom.

Though The Newsroom, like "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" before it, is mostly Bad Sorkin on display, there are also those occasional flashes of Good Sorkin that make it worth sifting through the rest of the mess to find.

If you didn't like Sorkin's politics before, I doubt you'll be any happier with them this season.... Technology continues to be a bugbear for Sorkin (maybe that's why he was so prescient last season about the NSA stuff?), but stupidity in general seems more evenly distributed this season.

Alas, the show's sophomore season--which tracks the consequences of McAvoy's and his team's interconnected, uncorrected blunders--hits the ground slumping in its first four episodes.

As revealed by the first four episodes of the second season, even a tweaked Newsroom is a still pretty much a bore.

If you get your news from anywhere other than The Newsroom, to watch the show is to be harangued by opinions you have heard many, many times over, just polished with Sorkin’s trademark linguistic flourishes and passed off as shiny and new.