With the final episode of series 2 on Sky Atlantic HD this Monday, I thought I would blog about the series so far and my thoughts on series 3.
Initially the format, switching between the present and past events was hard to follow but then again writer Aaron Sorkin does like to tease his viewers!
But the more you got into the guts of the story - a shambolic failure which resulted in a completely
made up story going to air - the better it got.
Jeff Daniels (Will) is winning Golden Globes aplenty at the moment and you can see why, the closing two minutes of episode five are some of the most emotional I have seen on television.
But Emily Mortimer (Mac) and Sam Waterston (Charlie) deserve huge praise, each in their own way has added to the drama and made journalism accessible.
Every journalist takes on the big stories and has to ask 'is my source credible' and sometimes it does get as far as print/broadcast.
'If something is too good to be true it probably is' does not necessarily apply in journalism, sometimes the truth is out there but proving it can be the nightmare.
What makes this show great is that nothing about the newsroom itself has been glammed up, what
you see it what goes on in newsrooms all over the world.
But it needs actors to bring it alive and Aaron Sorkin has enlisted the best, Daniels, Mortimer and Waterston not only shine but drag Thomas Sadoski (Don) John Gallagher Jr (Jim), Alison Pill
(Maggie) and Olivia Munn (Sloan) into the sunshine with them.
The Will and Mac love story has been sustained into the second season with the right amount of love/hate typical of a once linked pair.
Pain and humour are inter-twined and I love Will's sarcasm throughout this series and his sometime complete lack of understanding of the world away from the anchor desk.
The reveal that 'Genoa' was spectacularly wrong was brilliant, Sorkin spent six episodes building the story and smashed all the very plausable sources for the story in just an hour or so.
One of the highlights of series 1 for me was the use of music to close the episodes into the titles, this has been missing this series.
However, Sorkin has replaced them with killer lines such as Charlie's: “The broadcast finished at 10pm, by five past we knew we had a problem, none of it was true.”
Maggie's emotional turmoil is explained well enough, I would have liked a bit more but I guess that could be in the series finale.
Series 3? Yes please, I just hope Sorkin has enough material to play with away from the news stories on which every episode is built.
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