“Season 3, Episode 23: “Contempt”
That was quite a metaphorical moment at the end of Sunday’s episode of “The Newsroom,” though I’m not sure Aaron Sorkin, the show’s creator, intended it as such. Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), after years of denying his feelings for MacKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer), finally takes the leap and marries her, and moments later is led away to prison. We can’t be sure that the priest concluded with “I now pronounce you Inmate of the Marital Institution and Wife” because of the way the scene was edited, but it seems likely.
Speaking of that final scene, it evoked, at least for me, the baptism/massacre scene in “The Godfather,” which if intentional makes that the second “Godfather” reference this season. Contemplate and discuss. But there were plenty of other talking points leading up to those last few minutes.
The episode opened with the principals in hot discussion over whether Will would in fact be jailed for refusing to name the source of the leaks or whether his fame made him untouchable. But, in that Sorkinian way that makes this series so enjoyable, the debate over a weighty issue soon morphed into a dissection of one of the show’s romantic relationships. In this case it was the old-media-versus-new coupling of Jim Harper (John Gallagher Jr.) and Hallie Shea (Grace Gummer).
Hallie confessed to having put her new employer, a raggy-sounding website named Carnivore, onto the scent of a story that made Will look bad, and after a few more Hallie-Jim scenes, their never-convincing relationship imploded. I’m guessing few of you will miss it, although Mr. Sorkin might. It was an easy vehicle for showcasing his contempt for new media, or at least new media used recklessly. Anyway, the budding romance between Maggie Jordan (Alison Pill) and her law professor also seemed headed for a crash-and-burn by the episode’s end. Any doubt about where this thread is going?
Amid the romantic quarreling came a subplot in which Sloan Sabbith (Olivia Munn) and Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston) tried to line up an alternate buyer for the network to prevent the irksome Lucas Pruit (B.J. Novak) from acquiring it. Any business minds in the audience are invited to weigh in on how plausible this plot wrinkle was. In the long run — which is to say, by the end of the episode — it was all for nought. The supposed alternate buyer was just using Charlie and Sloan. (How did the super-smart Sloan not figure this out, especially with that clue about the buyer not eating her sushi during their restaurant meeting?) Lucas ended up with the network anyway.
I may not know enough about business to discuss the plausibility of all that, but I do know about making the trip from New York to Washington and back. If I have the geography of this series right, MacKenzie made that round-trip on the spur of the moment in order to talk to the mysterious document leaker, and it took her only four hours, even though a monsoon appeared to be inundating the East Coast. Yes, I know there are airplanes. But I also know that even a modest drizzle clogs New York-area airports and Washington-area streets with delays.
Sorry, that’s nitpicking, something that violates my own rule: no matter what I’m watching, always try to keep in mind that it’s only a TV show. I grow weary of critics of this series who complain that “The Newsroom” is nothing like a real newsroom. Yeah? Big deal. Police procedurals are not remotely like real police work, medical dramas bear little resemblance to what goes on in actual hospitals, and so forth.
That said, I thought this “Newsroom” episode broke the faith with the wedding theatrics at the end. Most of what has occurred this season has at least had a grounding in reality — it might have happened in a real newsroom, though at a much slower pace and without the zippy dialogue. But the final moments of this episode, with the hurriedly planned wedding followed immediately by imprisonment, seemed a bit much — too scripted, as it were. Your thoughts? In any case, we now know one thing: The series isn’t going to end two weeks from now with the feel-good marriage of Will and MacKenzie. So how IS it going to end?