The Newsroom

The season premiere is The Newsroom at its best.

Season 3 begins strongly and is a joy to behold--with heightened stakes.

With the end in sight, this is a faster paced, more focused, less annoying Newsroom than in the first two seasons.

The Newsroom returns for a truncated six-episode final season, it appears that less may be more--as in, more absorbing and more entertaining, with less irritation from slapstick rom-com subplots that tend to make smart people (especially the women) look insultingly stupid.

A still pointed but more controlled take on the crossroads of media and culture, The Newsroom is now much closer to the show that many hoped it would be.

Season 3 begins with both ACN and Mr. Sorkin in a tamped-down, focused mode. That’s generally a good thing.

By this third season, The Newsroom is a show that's smoothed itself out, for good and for bad. The lows aren't nearly as low--Maggie, long the show's worst example of Sorkin's difficulties in writing for women, is so competent and confident this year that guys like Jim (John Gallagher Jr.) and Don (Thomas Sadoski) feel like doofuses around her--but nor are the highs especially high.

The Newsroom has never been entirely sure about its intentions, failing to carve out a unique identity. While a certain haphazard uncertainty may be a fitting quality for a series about our own fractured political and media landscape, and where the actions of good people are paralyzed by the need for content production, Sorkin's own sputtering pen suggests that such imprecision was not his aim.

[The two plotlines] provides plenty of rich material for Sorkin on both fronts, and we can be sure he’s got plenty to say. The hope is that he will restrain himself enough so the rest of us can distill it into something we can digest.

By the third hour, I can’t say I was in love with The Newsroom at last. But I felt like I was finally seeing the better version of itself that it could have been.

The show was never entirely believable and the conceit of having episodes set during actual events--where the characters and/or viewer perceptions benefit from hindsight--felt like a cheat even though it could sometimes also be thought-provoking. The third-season premiere doesn’t shy away from this.

The Newsroom feels largely the same as it did last year, despite Sorkin’s claim that this season would make up for the flaws of the last two. That is to say it’s both really good and remarkably aggravating—sometimes in the same line of dialogue.

Based on the first few episodes, Season 3 of The Newsroom has a few signs of life, notably a timely storyline about ACN getting spun off its parent company. The actors are, as always, doing their best with one-dimensional characters.

The Newsroom continues to represent a failed experiment--a series that won’t win any converts and too often risks irritating what should ostensibly be its allies.