HBO

Deadline for “The Newsroom”

Aaron Sorkin’s fascinating but flawed HBO drama returns for a final season to file its last story.

The advertising tagline for the final season of "The Newsroom," which kicks off Sunday on HBO, rings with a perhaps unintended blend of foreboding and relief: "Every story needs a final word."

That even an ad is subject to differing interpretations is typical of an atypical show that inspires mixed emotions, all of them strong. Aaron Sorkin’s take on cable news and on modern love has proved, by turns preachy and mushy, with just enough intelligent and exhilarating moments to keep us watching and hoping for better.

“The Newsroom” returns for a short six-episode season with deadline rapidly approaching on the final word on its place in the annals of TV drama.

The first season introduced us to smugness-prone anchor-in-existential-crisis Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), his brilliant, if sometimes embarrassingly shrill ex-lover-turned-producer MacKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer) and their high-maintenance, hand-wringing news team. Some lowlights – including the contrived accidental mass sending of a cringe-inducing personal email – sent eyes rolling, in real newsrooms and elsewhere.

Sorkin, to his credit, worked hard to improve the show in the second season, and succeeded in part. The season-long plot about the airing of a flawed story and its fallout proved compelling. But the hokey finale with Will and MacKenzie’s election night 2012 engagement – and the subsequent montage of various inter-newsroom love stories and President Obama’s victory set to Luminate’s version of Pete Townshend's "Let My Love Open the Door” ended the season on a sour note.

Season 2 at least left the door a crack open for a strong finish from a show that occasionally finds its rhythm mingling real news stories (the Boston Marathon bombing is on tap this season) and fictional storylines based on real news stories (McAvoy’s team grapples with an Edward Snowden-like classified document dump in this go-around). 

Human relationships are trickier on "The Newsroom" – Sorkin doesn’t always make it easy for us to root for a happy ending. His dialogue, at its best, can be inspirational, and, at its worst, sanctimonious. As previously noted, he’s fortunate to have some fine actors – Sam Waterson and Alison Pill among them – who are capable of letting insecurity seep through lines built for characters with higher IQs than EQs.

Sorkin's record of TV hits (“The West Wing”), misses (“Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip”) and valiant, underappreciated tries (“Sports Night”) demands our attention, at least for six more hours. This season will determine which Sorkin category “The Newsroom” falls into – or whether it lands in a class by itself.  

Jere Hester is founding director of the award-winning, multimedia NYCity News Service at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. He is also the author of "Raising a Beatle Baby: How John, Paul, George and Ringo Helped us Come Together as a Family." Follow him on Twitter.

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