The Newsroom: Episode 8 - The Blackout: - Part 1 - Tragedy Porn - Recap

I thought The Newsroom: Episode 8 called The Blackout Part I: Tragedy Porn was a nice recovery from the previous episode which I categorized as the weakest of the season. This one was like a highlight reel. Not only was it mostly all good, but it improved by subtraction as well. We didn’t have to deal with the Maggie/Jim/Lisa/Don follies this week.

From the jump, as Will interviews the writer Brian Brenner (played by Paul Schneider) to the closing blackout which was followed by Bob Dylan singing Saved as the closing credits rolled by, this episode was just superb.

Will wants to get the story out there. That News Night and Will himself have changed. Now he’s no longer a ratings whore. He wants the story of how he and Mackenzie McHale have changed the face of the news at ACN to be told. He’s willing to give Brenner full access for a few days to hang around, to talk to whoever he wants – all off the record. If Will likes the vibe – they’ll go forward and do the story

Brenner: You’re asking me to audition.
Will: Yeah.
Brenner: Why would I do that?
Will: I can think of some reasons… four years ago you were on the masthead of Newsweek Magazine turning out 10 cover stories a year, and spending Sunday mornings on TV. Now you have a blog.

Paul Schneider as Brian Brenner

Will: The Sunday Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, GQ, The New Republic, the Atlantic Monthly – everyone’s offered a cover, and I get to pick the writer. I’m going with New York Magazine, and you.
Are you okay with the audition?

Brenner: That’s fine with me (the limitations that Will has just handed down) but that’s the last time you will tell me what I will or will not report. I’m not your stenographer.
Will: Do we have a deal?

Next Will, Mackenzie, and Charlie Skinner have been summoned to take a meeting with Reese Lansing (the Ratings Guy). Turns out the that viewers have left the News Night show in droves. They’ve lost a half a million viewers because they haven’t been covering the Casey Anthony and Anthony Weiner stories. Reese is livid.

Reese to Mackenzie; You have a ratings obligation…

Reese: You have a ratings obligation.
Mackenzie: No, you have a ratings obligation. You’re in business with the advertisers. I’m in business with the viewers.
Reese: You just lost their business.

Unfortunately, The News Night folks cannot refute that. Reese tells them – That’s it. Use the facts as you see fit.

Back in Charlie’s office – Charlie directs Mackenzie to begin coverage of the Casey Anthony trial. Mack protests strongly. She hates it – equating it to being – ‘just this side of a snuff film‘. Charlie hates it too. But he has to be the pragmatist. Since they’ve lost half their viewers in five days; that much of decline is unprecedented, so they have no choice. Mack thinks Will will take the same stance as she has.

Will is just about to agree to cover the Casey Anthony story. This will leave Mackenzie isolated, so she’ll have to sign on for Casey Anthony and Anthony Weiner coverage even though she doesn’t like it.

But Will wants something to happen. He wants to ‘fundamentally change the way we interview candidates for the job of President. I want the debates’, and he wants News Night to have it. But without viewers and ratings – they have no shot.

Will: I’m willing be Jerry Springer for a few weeks…
Mackenzie: When the going gets tough, the two of you man up…
Charlie: Then go with your principles Mack, but know that a ratings hit like this is all Leona needs to fire Will, and without having to explain why.
Mackenzie: [Beaten but not bloodied] All right.
Charlie: You’ll do it as classy as you can…
Mackenzie: [as they get up to leave] I’ll have Will in a top hat and a monocle as he shows pictures of a wet tee-shirt contest.

While passing the through the newsroom, Brenner sees Jim Harper who he knew back when. Harper tell hims and us why he’s looking at biggovernment.com. The RNC (Republican National Committee) wants a debate between their candidates and Will and Mack have an idea for a new format. Brenner wants to probe, but Harper clams up, saying he has to wait for instructions about how much he can talk about the mock debate with Brenner.

Sloan meets Mack in the bar. Sloan is asking for some extra minutes on Tuesday to report on the upcoming House vote on the debt ceiling. There’s a possibility that the US could default on its debt. So this story could be about a financial crisis of catastrophic proportions. Mack hasn’t the minutes to give her. Her 42 1/2 minutes of news have been cut to 22 1/2 because they have to cover the Casey Anthony case. In her usual motor-mouth way, Sloan presses on. Mack hasn’t the minutes to set aside for Sloan. Sloan’s says ‘It’s not about me getting more time’. Mackenzie says, ‘We want the debate. That’s the price.’

Don’t know about you, but when Sloan and Mack share a scene it always works for me. They’re so passionate about what they do. Sorkin has said that the women on the show, may occasionally be asked to slip on a verbal or situational banana peel, but that they’ve been invested with smarts. And a scene like this proves it – but we break away from Sloan and Mack for a few minutes to listen to Neal and Jim work on the mock debate. This has Jim as Michelle Bachmann answering Neal as Will delivering the questions. Jim gets a tweet about the breaking news on Anthony Weiner.

Back to Sloan and Mackenzie who are still at the bar. Sloan says that she’s been reading Brenner for years but hadn’t known what he looked like. He’s cute.

Sloan: Is he single?
Mackenzie: He is.
Sloan: Are you interested?
Mackenzie: No.
Sloan: That’s contempt prior to investigation…
Mackenzie: No, that’s contempt after thorough investigation…
Sloan: So you dated him?
Mackenzie: I did.
Sloan: When?

Mackenzie lays it out for Sloan who takes a moment or two to connect the dots. Wow!

Sloan: Why would he do the piece?
Mackenzie: Brian?
Sloan: Yeah…
Mackenzie: He needs a cover story…
Sloan: Why does Will want Brian to do the piece?
Mackenzie: That’s a perfectly fair question for which I have no answer…

Will hasn’t an answer either. But that will come up later. But for what it’s worth – the short segment between Mack and Sloan was very well done. I really got into the ratatatat cadence of it all. Even though it veered away from the news show and settled in to be two women discussing two men, it was well done. And informative. And a clever way for Sorkin to give we viewers the background we needed. Sloan says, This is really messed up. And Mackenzie replies that she’ll do her best to find those minutes for Sloan, just as long as there’s no news story that…Just then Jim comes over to announce that Anthony Weiner accidentally tweeted a picture of his groin to 40,000 of his followers.

Fade to after the weekend. It is now Tuesday. Mackenzie gets another shining moment while she debates doing the Weiner story with Will. Brian is the fly on the wall listening (Will gave him full access).

They bat it around for a while. Mack reminds Will that he said that having balance, One from Column A and one from Column B, for the sake of being balanced, is bullshit;

Will: When the RNC boys come here on Friday, they won’t see it the same way.
Mackenzie: And we’ll explaining to them that we don’t care that he’s ‘sexting’. We care how he votes…
Will: And they’ll understand, they’ll gives us the debate, they’ll give us the format we want, and we’ll all go out for chocolate milkshakes after.

Which is the standard Sorkin way of giving a sarcastic, Yeah, right…

Will: Three minutes in the B block, please, after Casey Anthony…

Mackenzie: Okay. I know it only seems like a story that affects 300,000 people in Queens, but since there’s SEX involved, we can’t deny its NATIONAL IMPORTANCE despite that we don’t know all or any of the FACTS!

Wow, that was sharply written. Nice to have Mackenzie back as the Exec Producer with both of her legs under her. She may have lost the last two discussions – with Charley and Will about Casey Anthony, and with Will about the Weiner story, but she sure fought the good fight.

Which leads us into a discussion between Brian, now out of the fly on the wall mode and into his investigative reporter stance, and Will. Brian is nobody’s fool. He lays it out in plain English. We’ve all seen this before, but Brian hadn’t,  but he connects the dots anyway. Will took his shots at the Tea Party. Leona’s friends on Capitol Hill are the same people. That seems like a good reason for Leona to fire Will. Only she can’t go public with that. So she had the TMI stories against Will set in motion. Still not enough of a reason to fire the second most popular cable TV anchor. But a steep fall in the ratings would be sufficient.

Brian: Say nothing if I’m right…
Will: ….
Brian: For what its worth, [if I were you] I’d cave too …(Touche!)
Will: For what its worth, no serious journalist would have agreed to the demands I laid out last Friday, but you already did…(Touche back at ya) [For what its worth, IMHO, this was a draw].

The mock debate meeting is next. We get a nice segment of Alison Pill as Maggie in this one. She’s role-playing Will, asking the questions, and Jim Harper is role-playing Michelle Bachmann.

It seems that Michelle Bachmann had said that she was told by God to run for President. The question is What was God’s voice like? Maggie is offended, as a Christian, that Bachmann says she speaks with God. Without going into the religious beliefs of Bachmann, Maggie, or even Sorkin, I think that Maggie’s rant about Bachmann being a crazy woman worked – not as dramatic segment but more of as a bit of comic relief. What ever the intent was Maggie was really fired up and did a great piece of acting.

But Mackenzie gets the meeting back on track by spiking some various news story pitches. One by one they get crossed off the list. She then brings in Don, yes that Don, who is something of a wizard about the darker side of news broadcasting. He breaks down the competitor’s methodology about how they produced their own Casey Anthony pieces.

That segment wasn’t all that interesting or well done. At least to me. Heck, I live in Florida, only a little more than two hours away from Orlando, and I didn’t even read one news article about the case. I got by on the headlines from the newspapers on the Publix supermarket shelves. But that’s me. On the other hand – it gave Don a bigger role, allowing him to step out of the Maggie-Jim-Don triangle, or is it the Maggie/Jim/Don/Lisa rectangle?

Charlie Skinner heads over to the New York Public Library’s main branch on Fifth Avenue. We got a great shot of Charlie striding through the main reading room. It was a low angle shot looking up at Charlie and captured the beautiful lamps, tables, and books as high as you can see.

Charlie mistakenly took some other guy for his source code-named Late for Dinner. Before he heard the pssst from Solomon Hancock, the real Late for Dinner. This was a guy who was very good at his job. He had the credentials and the skill sets to be an effective spook. A long history of surveillance and code breaking work, then a few years in the private sector, then he signed up as a software engineer with NSA working on data collection in the fight against terrorism. Charlie is impressed.

Late for Dinner? Solomon Hancock. Charlie Skinner.

Charlie listens – The whistleblower Code name Late for Dinner speaks

Hancock gives him the rundown on the Global Clarity program which is the interception of billions of phone conversations and emails. When Charlie asked him why he’s become a whistleblower he said that he had fought against communism for years, and now he finds that we are doing the same thing to our own people. Electronic eavesdropping is a violation of the Right to Privacy. Hancock said that wasn’t what he had signed up for. This was pretty much what Joan Allen had said as Pamela Landy in a conversation with Noah Vosen about Blackbriar in a Bourne film.

Anyway, Hancock gave Charlie some terrific stuff. That Global Clarity was being used by TMI to spy on the ACN people like Will. And the orchestration of it went all the way up the chain of command right to Reese Lansing. Charlie says he will have to research all of this to make sure, so he can use it to protect Will, Mackenzie, himself and the rest of News Night staff against Reese and ultimately – Leona.

Jesus, how high does this go?

Charlie meets with Will, Mackenzie. The writer, Brian Brenner is asked to leave. Charlie levels with his team and tells them about what is going on with Reese and Global Clarity. Will and Mack are shocked.

Reese…

Charlie tells Mac to have the story vetted, and she says she’s going to give it to Harper. When Will asks her if Harper can do it, she says, that she taught Harper how to do the news. In short – no worries. Harper has to be extremely careful with this vetting. No one can know, especially not the NSA.

By now a few days have gone by. Will and News Night have been covering the Casey Anthony story as well as the Anthony Weiner story. Some of the viewers have returned. A considerable number. Reese is impressed. He’s excited to tell Will the good news.

But Will remains somewhat aloof. Reese says You’re looking at me funny. Will says. No I’m not – this is the normal way I look at you. Reese replies – If you say so, and then tries to turn the conversation to the weather. Extreme temperatures, possible tornado warnings for NYC, possible power outages. Will says ‘We are not doing the weather on News Night.’

I didn’t connect it at that moment – but the title of the Episode included the word Blackout. So Sorkin tipped his hand. It wasn’t necessary, and even though it flew right by me – I thought later, in hindsight, that it was a poor selection or decision.

Next Charlie has called in Will and Mackenzie as well as Harper. They give Harper the rundown.

Charlie: The NSA is spying on Americans. a violation of the 4th amendment. And TMI is in the same game as News of The World (a scandal about the same thing in the UK at the Murdoch shop) a firm spying on its own employees.
Jim: Jesus!
Charlie: We need you to do the vetting of this story. You’re going to have to get inside this guy (Solomon Hancock) to verify his report. You’ll need to file a couple of hundred Freedom Of Information requests. Are you up for this?
Jim: Yeah!
Charlie: We need it fast, we need it right, and …we need it fast.
Jim: I’ll start mapping it out.
Will: Since the day you started working here, I’ve not felt the need to discuss confidentiality, I don’t feel that need now.
Charlie: Okay

So Jim has his marching orders.

At this point we have a slight down turn. Mackenzie and Brian Brenner start with business, backtrack to their own relationship. They debate whether Mack cheated on Will with him (her perspective) or that she cheated on him with Will (his perspective) They bat that around for a bit – and Mackenzie said the she and Brian didn’t have a relationship. Midnight booty calls are really not what a relationship is about. She calls him a douchebag. Brian asks if douchebag is one word or two?

Then Neal interrupts to pitch a story. Trolls. Not the ones that live under bridges and demand money to cross those bridges. No Neal wants to do a piece on the internet trolls who verbally accost people in chat rooms, and who publicly disparage and disrupt chat discussions. Why? Because they can, especially under the anonymity of User IDs. Neal’s plan is to troll somewhere and the target would have to be someone on News Night. Mackenzie likes the idea and tells Neal that he’s passed the first hurdle.

Neal leaves Mackenzie’s office and instantly runs into Sloan. Neal ask her if he can publicly trash her for the purposes of a story. How? she says. When he tells her, she gets really pissed off. Sloan does a few riffs on Elaine Benes from Seinfeld who would shout GET OUT! and then push Kramer, or Seinfeld, or Costanza across a room. Neal doesn’t go flying across the room, but Sloan twice pins him against the wall; and ultimately refuses his request before walking off.

Next in a game of seniority musical chairs, Maggie has to take a call from a woman who claims to have more dirt on Anthony Weiner. This probably is not what Maggie signed on for but a meeting is arranged. We’ll return to this shortly.

Will and his bodyguard Lonnie head over to Jake Habeeb (Will’s shrink) for an emergency meeting. Will doesn’t care if Jake has another patient in a session that has already started. To make a long story short:

1) Will asks Jake why he (Will) is doing all this negative stuff.
2) Will asks why he asked for Mackenzie’s ex-boyfriend to do the story on Will.
3) Jake says he doing it all for masochistic reasons – like one holding his hand over a candle flame. Will says Ah. Jake says the trick isn’t not minding the pain, the real trick is to forgive Mackenzie. Will say’s he’d rather hold his hand over the flame. Jake says, You know that while you’re working your way through this, you’re hurting Mackenzie. Will says I know that. To Lonny, Will says, I’m not doing it on purpose…

Told you we’d have a down turn. Hold on it gets worse.

Maggie has the sit down with the woman with the Weiner dirt. Basically she has tweets, emails, pictures – the works. She’s simply cashing out via Weiner. Maggie is furious about this – as if she needed boots up to the hips to wade through this woman’s (and Weiner’s) slime. The last tweet is from the woman (Sandy) to Congressman Weiner where in she suggested that he just come over so they could get drunk and fuck. They set her up to go with Will via a taped session that would take place in a few minutes. It would have to be done that way as this Sandy is booked for Access Hollywood, Fox, and ET (the big three). When Maggie asks her why she is doing this, Sandy says, Because the world needs to know what kind of guy he is [what she doesn't say is that every one will see what kind of woman she is].

Just about now we need something a bit more worthwhile. How about a street side ‘discussion’ between Charlie Skinner and The Dragon Lady – Leona Lansing. They go through the motions of it being up-beat and sweet with laughs, smiles, and gentle touching of the shoulders and arms. But it is the mongoose and the cobra type of situation only without someone ending up dead this time.

The Mongoose (Charlie Skinner) and the cobra (Leona Lansing) about to do the dance

Charlie tells Leona that he knows where the tabloid stories are coming from. Leona asks, How would it look if one of  our own ‘news’ magazines went soft on our flagship ACN anchor? Charlie – Are we calling TMI a news magazine?  They dance around it for a while. This where you really get to appreciate Waterston. Fonda as Leona is just as good – only she doesn’t know what Charlie knows. And what we know. So she has no idea of how slippery a slope she’s standing on. But the niceties don’t last. The fangs come out.

Leona: {referencing her Tea Party friends) You made them look like hypocrites…
Charlie: By rolling tape …

Charlie says, You don’t want to do this. Leona leans in pats Charlie on the shoulder. They’re close enough to be almost hugging. Leona: You tell him he’s one tabloid fuck up and one ratings point away from having his own podcast.

So Charlie has warned Leona without tipping his hand. And Leona has replied in kind. Will could be history faster than an air-kiss goodbye peck on the cheek which doesn’t happen.

As good as this was, it was not much of a smoke screen . We know what’s coming, don’t we? But it will have to wait. And as good as this was, it wasn’t even the highlight of the episode.

Which comes next. A ‘DISCUSSION’ between Mackenzie and Sloan about Sloan covering the impending time bomb of the US fiscal policy. Sloan is nearly exhaling flames. She’s on fire. For those that think that Sorkin has played fast and loose with his female characters – this segment blows that idea out of the water.

Never minds all the words – just watch the passion coming out of Sloan. This is easily the highlight of this week’s show as well as Sloan Sabbith’s crowning moment of the series. Watching these two talk, one at a time, or both at the same time, was just as creatively ingenious as anything Sorkin has given us so far.

The scene closes with this last exchange:
Mackenzie: Why do we have to do it tonight?
Sloan: To give people time to call their Congressmen and to say, If you fuck with the full faith and credit of the US Treasury, you’re fired. To give them time to say, I’m a fiscal conservative, and you’ve got to put the pin back in the grenade right now… that’s why.

Now I’m not going to tell you that I know anything about what Sloan is talking about – but even if don’t, I can recognize a powerful moment in dramatic television.

After Mack says I’m going to do everything I can, and Sloan says, please do – Sloan walks off.

What’s left? Will has do the Q&A with Sandy, who is certainly not the first nor the last Miss Tell-it-All in exchange for a pile of dead presidents. on paper. Mackenzie chats with Sandy, while Will is throwing on a jacket and tie. Will gets to the set and asks if they’re ready to do to the pre tape. Mackenzie says Yes, and Will says just give me the countdown.

Mackenzie mumbles a prayer to God asking for a sign. Just then the power goes out. Not only is the set and broadcast studio in darkness, so is the entire building. Mackenzie says [about God] I didn’t know he had that kind of comic timing.

As we fade to black we hear Bob Dylan beginning his song ‘Saved’.

I was blinded by the devil
Born already ruined
Stone-cold dead
As I stepped out of the womb…

Okay, I wasn’t head over heals for the Blackout to close this Part I. And I should have seen it coming – what with Reese talking about the weather AND the inclusion of the word Blackout in the Episode title. But those things aren’t important enough to downgrade this episode. Kudos to Olivia Munn for a strong, strong performance, and kudos to Sorkin for giving Mackenzie McHale something good to work with. Also wasn’t it great to have Jim and Maggie on vacay this week (at least romantically).

What’s next – the blackout, the fiscal issues, the magazine article, and the ultimate shoot out between Leona & Reese with Charlie about Will & Mack. Just hoping that Solomon Hancock doesn’t turn out to be a Trojan Horse engineered by Leona.

C-Ya next week

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