This season of The Newsroom promised to follow a linear storyline rather than the jumping around like they did in their first season. However, they just managed to keep the jumbled up storyline by starting with a legal hearing in the present day that forces the characters to backtrack and tell a story from the beginning. For those of you unfamiliar with the show, the characters are employees of a 24-hour cable news network called Atlantis Cable Network. Jeff Daniels’ character Will McAvoy is the host of their hit broadcast News Night who considers himself a Republican. The show is centered around the chaotic work environment that comes from working in a 24-hour news network. In the first season, they jumped forward and backward in time, covering different events in the news while overarching stories such as relationships between characters were pieced together throughout each episode. I think that is one of the reasons why the show runners decided to go with a more linear storyline, because I think it got a little too confusing for most viewers to follow what was happening in the lives of the characters when they were constantly going back and forth in time. But I’m a big fan of Tarantino films so I kind of liked that storyline. But now things are in order. More or less.
The show begins in the present day where Will McAvoy is being questioned by lawyers about a story he and News Night decided to air when they probably shouldn’t have. Later in the episode you find out that it’s “a story that makes careers and ends presidencies.” So to get the story straight, Will and the other characters being questioned, have to back track and tell exactly what happened from the beginning which was 14 months ago. As you can see, this is how the show managed to keep its non-linear storyline while still being linear in a Tarantino kind of way.
According to the first meeting Will has with the lawyers, it seems like a perfect storm of issues all led up to why they are having this meeting. So in this episode they go 14 months back to show what started the storm. The stories they cover are the Libyan Rebel surge in Tripoli and the beginnings of the occupy wall street movement. Jim, a young producer for News Night decides that he is going to ACN’s correspondent on the Romney campaign bus as a way to get away from this coworker Maggie who he loves but she has a boyfriend and he can’t stand it. But because Will McAvoy called the Tea Party the American Taliban in a previous broadcast, the Romney press guy won’t let Jim on the bus with the rest of the reporters.
Maggie is going through her own slew of troubles as well. In the beginning of the episode, in the present day, she has ratty clothes and dyed red hair that looks to be cut by herself. Will tells the lawyers that she took an assignment in Uganda, things got real very quick and she came home. That should be interesting to explore later in the season.
Overall, this show seemed to pick up where it left off. Great writing by Aaron Sorkin as always and great acting by the whole cast. There’s a very good reason why this show is critically acclaimed and if you watch it you will find out why.