Maria Aspan

The opaque women of The Hour and The Newsroom

The Hour is a much better show than The Newsroom. It’s more entertaining, funnier and more sophisticated in its depiction of a team of television journalists chasing stories and Standing Up for The Truth. Its characters are more interesting and more likable than their counterparts on The Newsroom and it’s more feminist, mostly.

Which is why it was so blasted irritating to keep having Newsroom flashbacks during this season of The Hour, and to realize that I have the same problem with the main woman characters on both shows. Abi Morgan’s Bel Rowley is essentially Aaron Sorkin’s MacKenzie McHale - a news producer who’s supposedly brilliant at her job, even though we spend most of our time watching her lose arguments to her hot-headed, even more brilliant male colleague-slash-love interest. Bel has so much potential, and admittedly at times she’s allowed to show flashes of actual professional competence. But like MacKenzie, she’s a cipher in the romance that the show tells us is its all-encompassing, overriding central relationship. Like MacKenzie, she’s the misguided partner in the relationship for rejecting the hero’s love. Like MacKenzie, her reasons for doing so remain mostly hidden to the audience.

Spoilers for The Hour’s second season…

Read More

Bel, Freddie, Lix and Marnie: Cautiously optimistic about The Hour, season two

I was bitterly disappointed with the first season of The Hour, otherwise known as the British Newsroom by way of Mad Men, plus spies. (And oh, those halcyon days of last October, before I knew how acute “Aaron Sorkin’s massive inability to write consistently intelligent women and/or romances” would become.) The show seems to have gotten a lot more buzz for its second season on BBC America; some of the attention is of the wary, “please don’t bring back the spies” variety, but much of it applauds The Hour’s glamorous atmosphere, pedigreed cast and seeming feminist bona fides.

I was less convinced, especially after this season’s first episode. It featured nominal heroine Bel Rowley (Romola Garai) once again passively reacting to events, having lost her “spark” along with her spurned platonic soul mate (Ben Whishaw playing Ben Whishaw, eerily pubescent face not improved by a breakup beard). “She’s an excellent producer, you know,” was said of Bel late in that episode, in a throw-the-remote example of “tell, don’t show” characterization.

The second episode was much better. We actually got to see Bel working on her own, protecting her reporters and digging up information from cagey sources. It was the first time in several episodes that the show bothered to show us the professional competence of our main woman character, rather than assuring us that really, she is professionally competent, trust us, and wouldn’t you rather see her make another disastrously bad romantic decision? (Of course, the episode couldn’t help teeing up a bit of the latter. Someday I’d love to see a female journalist on television whose characterization doesn’t boil down to “professionally brilliant, personal screwup.” But at least Bel’s personal foibles this season seem like they will pale next to the implosion of her co-worker and ex-lover, Hector “Jimmy McNulty” Madden.)

And there were other promising developments. Whishaw’s Freddie Lyon is still a little too perfectly saintly and Gary Stu for me, but the second episode showed a few interestingly ugly cracks in that identity. Notably: his new wife is attacked in a hate crime, and he leaves her side to catch her attacker — not to punish him, but to convince him to come appear on Freddie’s TV program. Freddie’s crusading morality and drive to get the story at any cost was already a big part of his character and the plot in season one, but I found it interesting that we’re now shown how extreme he can be even when the stakes are relatively minor. He’s not trying to crack open a super-secret Soviet conspiracy (spies!), he’s trying to book a guest for what amounts to a talk show. This choice, the privileging of professional over personal, is one he will always make, and his wife Camille is understandably upset when she becomes the “personal” in this episode. Freddie later tells Bel that eventually, “she’ll love me for it,” but whether that’s truth or foolish optimism remains to be seen. Camille would be a more interesting character if it’s the former, but given her romantic-spoiler status in the core Freddie-Bel-Hector triangle, I suspect it will eventually turn out to be the latter.

And then there’s the marvelous Anna Chancellor, whose Lix Storm seems to be getting a bit more background and screen time with a new love interest. (Yes, Lix also invited Freddie into her bed, for reasons that probably had to do with her role as a partial Abi Morgan stand-in, allowing the showrunner to consummate her crush on her favorite character. Let us never speak of it again.) Lix spent much of last season fondly mocking the shenanigans of the kids around her, which made it all the more unsettling when she decided to partake in them. But with Peter Capaldi’s Randall Brown, she sparks against an equal. Brown is a strangely compelling character, somehow managing to balance quirk with gravitas, and Capaldi and Chancellor show how chemistry is done. In the second episode of this season, they exchange glances - just a look, just fleeting expressions — and it’s like an entire relationship in a few seconds.

I haven’t even mentioned how much I like what Morgan is doing with Hector’s neglected wife Marnie, a onetime Betty Draper who just staged a coup in her marriage. I loved how Marnie mentioned Bel when she told Hector that she was done with all but appearances, that by then Bel was not The Other Woman but another example of Hector’s mistreatment of “two smart, beautiful women.”

So yeah, I’m hooked again. Here’s hoping the next four episodes don’t implode quite as much last year’s did.

The Newsroom’s completely forgettable season finale

There’s a special art to ending a season of a television show, especially if that show’s future is uncertain. A season finale has to leave the viewer hooked, willing to wait a summer or a year or more for the future adventures of the characters — but also satisfied to some extent, in the case of cancellation or other catastrophe. I’ve never been a fan of the big cliffhanger ending: “Tune in next year to see what’s in the hatch, who was shot, if the main character lives or dies!” I like the milder cliffhangers, the ones that provide a certain amount of closure while opening the door to new questions.

Unfortunately, The Newsroom’s first season finale failed as any kind of cliffhanger. “The Greater Fool” was the opposite of enticing - nothing and nobody changed from their season-long stasis, no questions were raised that demand answers or even invite speculation while the show is off the air.

Will McAvoy’s news program is pretty much back where it was at the beginning of the season - tilting at windmills, making little difference, with a reprieve from the network ratings mandate that wasn’t even a known threat when the series began. Will McAvoy’s romance is pretty much where it was at the beginning of the season, and even more frustratingly, Will McAvoy’s staff’s romances are pretty much where they were at the beginning of the season. Yes, Sloan has been invited to join the least plausible office incest pool ever, but her conversations with Don were maddeningly emblematic of how this show treats romances - Aaron Sorkin finds any excuse not to move any relationship away from its season-long holding pattern, even after a big splashy kiss in front of a painful Sex and the City reference. (I could have found some excuses for that scene if it had actually led to some sort of change in the characters, but no - Maggie and Jim have now made explicit what they’ve both known, and what the audience has known, for ten episodes, but please let’s not do anything hasty, like actually act on that knowledge.)

As a contrast, rival summer TV series Bunheads and Political Animals knocked their season finales out of the park. For Bunheads, renewal was confirmed by the time I watched it; for Political Animals, it seems much less certain. But for both shows, I could almost be satisfied if their first season finales were their last.

Political Animals ended its season on an upbeat note, Bunheads on a relative downer, but both left me wondering about the characters’ futures, without leaving them in mortal peril. Michelle will crawl back to Vegas, waiting for a call from Fanny that may or may not come. Elaine Barrish will run for president, and may or may not succeed. Both finales showed the main characters making decisions and changing course, reaching some resolutions while opening up new avenues of conflict. 

But not at The Newsroom. Sorkin basically pushed a big reset button on his characters and his setup, assuming a (granted) renewal, assuming that we want to see the same stories over again next season. Why should we bother? Sorkin did a major disservice to his characters and his stories by giving The Newsroom one of the most forgettable television season finales I’ve ever seen.

More TV I Like: Political Animals and Bunheads, pre-finales

Bunheads got renewed, hurrah! I finally caught up on last week’s episode, which unfortunately was as disappointing as advertised. All of the characters were written to be the cartoonish parody versions of themselves, acting more like escapees from a painful Saturday Night Live sketch than actual human beings. (Fanny injuring students — really? All of the girls losing their brains and/or voices when faced with boys who maybe liked them — really? Michelle and the interminable saga of the coffee shop… I mean, there were literally at least four pratfalls in this episode, with the falling student, the falling Ginny, and Michelle’s double coffee-shop knockout, which is at least three pratfalls too many for any television series that isn’t an improv comedy show.)

Michelle and Sasha’s talk near the end was great and perfectly in line with the show’s failure-and-regret strengths, but that was one minute of good versus 44 of bad. But let’s focus on the positive — a surprise renewal, which hopefully will mean a much better balance of good-to-bad in tomorrow’s finale and future episodes.

I’m hoping for a similar ratings reprieve for Political Animals, the other summer show I’m watching and mostly enjoying. The good:

-Sigourney Weaver plays Hillary Clinton as the badass she’s so publicly become these days. Some of the best parts of the show are watching Weaver’s Secretary of State character handle international crises while navigating internal White House politics and personalities.

-Carla Gugino plays an actually believable veteran journalist who manages to be both professionally competent and an occasional screwup in her personal life without ever “slipping on a banana peel” or forgetting how email works (take notes, Aaron Sorkin). I don’t buy her massive, massive lapse of judgment in last week’s episode, but — focusing on the positive here!

-The newsroom of Gugino’s paper actually somewhat resembles an actual newsroom, complete with at least a token nod to the importance of blogging and online publication in the 2012 media universe.

-The relationships, especially the non-romantic professional ones, are wonderfully complex. I’m not enthralled by the Gugino-editor-blogger triangle, but I really enjoy Gugino’s interactions with the younger blogger. She’s a personal and a professional threat, but also an inexperienced journalist who needs Gugino’s mentoring, and also a colleague who has some information Gugino needs and who will withhold it unless she gets to share the byline. Like the wary relationship between Gugino’s character and Weaver’s character, there are a lot of nuances and the show takes the time to at least nod to most of them. (I wish the show would focus on them and drop some of the tedious gay-suicidal-addict son shame-spiral, but again - focusing on the positive.)

Political Animals has its finale tonight at 10. It has yet to be renewed, so my fingers are crossed for another Bunheads miracle, if only so I don’t spend all of next summer only inside Sorkin’s newsroom.

TV I like: Bunheads, Girls and the chronicles of failure

As an alternative to my griping about The Newsroom, here’s a summer TV series I’m enjoying: Bunheads, Amy Sherman-Palladino’s ABC Family followup to Gilmore Girls. It works more like a prequel — Sutton Foster’s Michelle is what Lorelai Gilmore would have been like unfettered by a teenage pregnancy, or at least before it. (I still expect Michelle to wind up with a pregnancy from her dead stalker husband by the end of next week’s episode the season.)

Bunheads isn’t perfect by any means. Jacob Clifton at Television Without Pity is one of the few writers recapping it regularly, and I totally get and enjoy his mounting hysteria at how nonsensical the show can be. (Though I’ve kind of embraced it and all its crazy, inexplicable Istanbul (Not Constantinople) dance routines.) The pacing is totally off — major plot points often happen as the credits are literally rolling. And I’m disappointed that the show a) killed off Michelle’s stalker husband at the end of the first episode and b) has largely bungled the handling of his death’s aftermath. Michelle’s hysterical breakdown tonight in the bed of her random date was not convincing after several episodes in which the show’s bright colors and strummy Gilmore Girls guitar music and quirky small-town-shenanigans took far more precedence than actual mentions of the death of a longtime resident and son and last-minute husband.

But while I don’t love all of its execution, Bunheads is still one of the most fascinating shows on television right now, largely because it’s a show completely about failure and moving on from failure. Every significant character in the show has failed, and failed big. Fanny abandoned her professional dreams when she became pregnant, building a life around a son who died off-screen. Michelle frittered her ambitions away when she left ballet for the party life of a Vegas showgirl. Boo, the most sympathetic of the younger generation, knows and is regularly told that she doesn’t have the body to succeed in ballet, despite all of her efforts to prove otherwise. Sasha, the least sympathetic of the younger generation, has all the physicality and talent to succeed in ballet but is hell-bent on throwing it away and becoming a second-generation Michelle. 

I’m watching this while I’m trying to get caught up with Girls, which is fine and interesting in some parts and has me largely admiring Lena Dunham, but which still feels like a chore to watch rather than something I look forward to. Girls isn’t ultimately about real stakes to me, because its characters are too young or diffident or uncommitted to have real stakes in play, or at least stakes that I buy into. Girls flirts with the fear of failure rather than its actuality.

“You squandered a lot of potential.”

“I know.”

“Are you sorry?”

“Every day of my life.”

Bunheads could be grim and devastating on a channel like AMC or HBO, in the hands of a different writer and a cable network devoted to Serious Drama That Says Something About Humanity. ABC Family is anything but — and to be fair to it, grim isn’t in Sherman-Palladino’s paintbox. I’m sorry that Michelle’s brief husband died, because I really wanted to see them navigate a marriage where both knew that she wasn’t in love and had accepted him as an escape rather than a life partner. But that would probably be a different show and a different writer. Somehow, with its cutesy name and awful title sequence and quirky-comedy veneer, Bunheads still manages to come at failure and its consequences sideways, sharply. It’s probably the best, most light-hearted show about tragedy I’ve ever seen.

More musings on The Newsroom, Gabby Giffords and The Good Wife

I’m increasingly trying not to give The Newsroom my full attention while I watch, answering email or paying bills or cleaning or anything to distract from Will McEvoy’s infuriating “mission to civilize” all of us ditzy, celebrity-gossip-writing, reality-television-watching, hidden-handgun-toting ladies. At this point, I just figure that this is what it’s going to be with Sorkin as long as I’m watching the show, which may not be forever. (I was willing to subscribe to HBO in part for The Newsroom and in part to catch up with Girls on demand, so once that’s happened I’m not sure I’ll be willing to keep paying for this.)

I do wish Will’s Adventures in Dating Down hadn’t take up the first 75% of the episode, because the idea of centering an episode around the Giffords shooting, and how news organizations react to events like that, is so much more interesting to me. This might be professional bias - do non-journalists care that much about watching journalists handle a breaking news crisis? — but as a journalist, that’s what interests me and I think that’s what Sorkin can and has previously done well, when he’s not writing his characters big speeches about what “men” do.

But I continue to wish Sorkin had chosen to go the Good Wife route and have The Newsroom staff cover thinly-veiled fictional versions of real-life events, instead of setting it in the past and having them cover the events themselves. The Giffords shooting, as portrayed in this week’s episode of The Newsroom, was almost anticlimactic - we knew the outcome, we knew she didn’t die despite initial new reports. And as others have pointed out, it makes the show seem smug and a little callous to reduce this real-life tragedy, in which six other people did die, to a plot device to show how great the journalists of The Newsroom are, in that they didn’t fall into the trap of rushing to report her death and getting it wrong. Maybe setting the show in a slightly fictionalized universe and writing about a similar assassination attempt on a fictional public figure would still seem somewhat callous, but it would also be so much more dramatically interesting. If we in the audience don’t know what the outcome has to be, doesn’t it make us much more invested in what the characters decide to do?

Aaron Sorkin’s Woman-on-Woman Problem

It’s Jane Fonda’s network CEO dismissing Michelle Bachmann as “a hairdo.”

It’s Emily Mortimer praising Alison Pill by offering to take her shopping.

It’s Emily Mortimer offering Olivia Munn a job, having Olivia Munn demure because there are more talented men out there, and having Emily press her case with, “The thing is, they won’t have your legs.”

Women don’t talk to each other this way at work. We don’t bring up each other’s cute shoes on deadline. We don’t decline job offers by calling ourselves unqualified. We don’t tell each other directly, “You’re only getting this job because you’re hot.”

We may think that, we may bitch about it to our friends, we certainly realize that being hot helps - and we certainly don’t have to spell it out for each other. We can be dismissive of Michelle Bachmann or interested in each other’s cute work outfits or resentful and catty when the thinner, prettier, blonder woman gets the promotion. That happens. It doesn’t happen like this.

I admit, this is just a sliver of the Aaron-Sorkin-misogynist narrative that came roaring back with The Newsroom, and honestly, it’s not the most important part of it. It’s not the thing that bothered me or most reviewers the most in the first three episodes — it’s hard to get worked up about Sorkin flunking the spirit of the Bechdel test when he’s got his veteran war correspondent melting into a puddle of hysterical-adulterer goo when faced with the deeper mysteries of e-mail, or the passive receptionist being schooled in the Art of Journalism and surviving panic attacks by her all-knowing boss, who also wants to save her from her jerk boyfriend. Sorkin has deep woman problems, and now “Internet Girl” problems, which are all infuriating.

But as a longtime watcher of his work, and someone who still holds out a faint hope for The Newsroom to get better, one of the most jarring problems with the show is how its women speak to and about other women. (Should Jane Fonda really dismiss Michelle Bachmann as a hairdo in an election cycle that also gave us the follicle wonders of Ricks Perry and Santorum?)

It’s an irritating tone-deafness from Sorkin, who otherwise can have a wonderful ear for banter and dialogue. His movies and television shows are all sound, words being thrown back and forth in friendly argument or righteous argument or romantic argument. The latter two are more on display so far in The Newsroom, which puts it at a disadvantage - Sports Night and The West Wing, at their best, reveled in the art of the friendly argument between smart people who respected each other. Most of the time those people were men, because it’s Sorkin and that’s who he’s comfortable writing. And when those people are women, like Dana and Natalie on Sports Night, 95% of the time they were talking about their romantic woes and not their work woes.

That’s ultimately what disappoints me the most. Sorkin’s never going to write a romantic relationship that I take seriously, and I’m not expecting him to take lessons from Lena Dunham or Shonda Rhimes or Amy Sherman-Palladino anytime soon. But he cares about workplace drama in a more intellectual, more idealized way than most television writers do, and he devotes most of his shows to the rhythms and relationships of working in an office, in the media business, surrounded by people who are passionate about their jobs. How women talk to each other and work with each other could be and should be a big part of that.

I’m still disappointed with him for The West Wing, for creating the character of C.J. Cregg and having her navigate the boys-club of the Bartlet administration without giving her a female professional equal to commiserate with - not just to have another powerful woman character in the show, but because I was a lot more interested than Sorkin was in how C.J. dealt with being regularly kept out of the White House’s most important discussions. He nodded at the problems for her as the most senior female aide, but wasn’t particularly interested in exploring them. Maureen Ryan pointed out a similar problem with the Mortimer-Munn “legs” discussion in last week’s Newsroom:

This is not news to anyone—the idea that, even more than men, women in broadcast news are judged on their looks. But what was really missing from that scene was a sense of camaraderie between women who recognize this unfortunate truth with a sense of rueful regret. That wasn’t the vibe at all.

Sorkin has written a television show about television news, where the professional stakes for women are amplified by an environment that prizes their physical appearance. I’d love to see him take his own set-up seriously.