Sorkin's Newsroom: Who, What, When, Where, Why | Scanners

Which brings me to a few suggestions -- I'm not going to present them as hard-and-fast Mac "rules" -- for the future:

1) Please refrain from using character and story gimmicks that involve withholding key pieces of information from other characters and/or the audience. This was all over the place from the first episode: Nobody would tell Will why Charlie wanted to see him; Will didn't know that Charlie had hired Mac; Mac didn't know that Will didn't know that Charlie had hired her; Will didn't know that his staff thought he was not a good guy; Don wouldn't let Jim tell Will or Mac about the oil rig explosion in the Gulf; Jim didn't want to tell his own producer(s) who his sources were... At first I thought maybe this could be justified as a thematic device: after all, the series is about the sharing of information, what gets reported and what doesn't. But, no. That's not really a theme the show has begun to develop.

Roger Ebert recently wrote about a movie ("People Like Us") which, he said, was based on a principle that forced the audience to wait "through most of a movie for one simple line to be spoken that would clear up all of the confusion. [...] A truth untold can interest me up to a certain point, and then it grows tiresome." Yes, it does. That's a problem here.

The second episode of "The Newsroom" is predicated on Will not wanting anyone to know why he and Mac broke up years ago. And Charlie doesn't want Reese to secretly break down the ratings numbers for Will anymore. And Maggie doesn't tell Jim that the governor's aide she's supposed to pre-interview is a former date she's still mad at. Everything seems to revolve around somebody telling someone that they don't want them to tell somebody else the truth, which requires arbitrary and artificial contrivances that aren't weighted with satisfying dramatic justifications or payoffs. The cliché about Sorkin is that his characters always say exactly what they're thinking in the moment, but that's not necessarily true. They sometimes only say what they're thinking after they've tried not saying it, and you're left feeling that all the show really got out of the delay was another half-page of dialog.

2) Please don't assume that your audience, or the characters, are technological morons. Most of us (Sorkin aside, evidently) use computers and smartphones every day: e-mail, text messaging, basic software (word processing, presentation, spreadsheet), Google, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, online poker, etc. We are familiar with how they work... and how they don't. There's an elaborately preposterous set-up for Mac to repeatedly send e-mails to the wrong people (whole aliases instead of individuals) due to new IT procedures at ACN. These are explained by Neal (Dev Patel), whom you may recall is the Indian fellow (Will calls him "Punjab" -- ho ho!) with the British accent who is not the stereotypical IT guy at all, but has actually been hired to write Will's blog for him! (I know, it was almost enough to stop me from watching the rest of the show, too.)