News Night 2.0

Whatever opinion of The Newsroom that was emerging from me after last week's premiere, this week's second episode didn't do much to change it. The strengths and weaknesses from the first hour were still very much in effect this time around.

Essentially, you have in the plus column all that lightning quick Aaron Sorkin dialogue. Characters are witty, intelligent, and swift. There's a musicality to the proceedings that makes the show a pleasure to watch -- or, more aptly, to listen to. But in the minus column, all the characters are still essentially just speaking in that one voice. Without the faces of the actors to guide you, I think you'd be hard-pressed to take any given line of dialogue from the show and correctly assign it to the character who spoke it.

I think Sorkin spent most of his efforts this week on trying to further develop the characters of Will and Mackenzie. And I think he was a bit more successful with the former than the latter. In both cases, he seemed to be humanizing the characters by not showing them at their best.

In Will's case, he deliberately sabotaged his own on-air broadcast, partly in a weak chase for ratings, largely as retribution against Mackenzie. Showing this petulant, child-like side of Will does start to create more of a character there beyond Sorkin's language.

In Mackenzie's case, Aaron Sorkin showed an ineptitude with technology and a desperate neediness for a friend so profound that she started pouring her heart out to someone she just met. (Olivia Munn's new character.) This felt like a less solid choice to me. Will's character is, pun not intended, the anchor -- the person who has been with this newscast prior to we the audience coming to look in. Mackenzie is the new element. We really need to see why she deserves to be there; we need to see her smart and in control, or see what Will saw in her in their past relationship. Something. I think it's easier to show Will in a bad light right now because in that time and place, he could just skate on "tenure" for a while. Mackenzie, on the other hand... well, as of just last week, her job with the show was supposedly on a week-to-week basis.

An interesting element of this week's episode were the references to the signing of Arizona's immigration law. It was just this past week that the Supreme Court issued their ruling on the lawsuit brought over that exact law, and so the "blast from the (recent) past" model of the show got to also have a "ripped from the headlines" aspect this week too.

To borrow the quote from the end of tonight's episode, "I'm in." I'm definitely sticking around for more episodes to hear more of that great writing. But I'm also hoping that some great characters emerge as well, to make the show truly worthy of its predecessors, Sports Night and The West Wing.