Media Trip Report: THE NEWSROOM (Season 3)

(Originally published on facebook, November 22, 2022)

TL:DR; not enough time

Content begins.

For those who don’t know, my birth father died just about a year ago, after a prolonged battle with a cancer he’s had about as long as we knew each other as adults.

I bring this up now, because the latter part of Season 2 and ALL of Season 3 of this show are/have been about loss, and grief, and what those mean to you when you deal with neither.

I am emotionally compromised by the 9 or so hours of television I watched today, and couldn’t be happier about it. I didn’t think that I still had that level of sadness in me, but apparently I am a human being after all.

Just about a year ago, as mentioned, my father died. In the ensuing year, a good number of older male and female friends have died, one as recently as last week. Friends of mine have lost their parents, their children, and their spouses. The world reels from the loss of loved ones and celebrities every day, and I choose/chose every day not to prioritize my own sadness over that of others.

As the great prophet Micheal says, “Everybody hurts, sometimes.”

Aaron Sorkin put his daddy issues on the screen over multiple shows, as reported online early in the show’s 25 episode run in one of the media outlets it decried as gormless and vapid. Not in so many words, perhaps, but his characters sure felt so, and as the wizard behind the curtain who created them all I have to imagine that was his intention.

If you’ve read along this far, you’re probably not afraid of SPOILERS, but here goes.

Will MacAvoy lost his father in the middle of a broadcast in Season 2, but in “reality” he lost him years before. We were teased with anecdotes about how Will became the man he ”is,” and how the man he wants to be is nothing like that father.

But as bit of redemption, he found another one in Charlie Skinner, ably played by Sam Waterston. Charlie was there for Will when he needed a friend and mentor, a champion only too happy to let him tilt at windmills through the course of the show.

Charlie Skinner is not, and was not real. But I feel his loss every bit as much as those I/We/They have suffered over the last year. I feel it as I am meant to feel it, as a surrogate for my own grief, and as a reminder that what you do should come passably close to what you want as often as possible.

While Charlie is dying, Will is engaging in catharsis, having an imaginary series of conversations with a cell mate who has an eerily similar life track to that of Will’s father, and whom the narrative suggested to me was in fact not real at all.

The reveal that Will had re-invented his father to have those conversations was well timed and well paid-off, and never spoken of aloud.

That’s what I want, what we all want. Just a bit more time, to say the things that should have been said, that we needed to say, but never can.

I want that. I want more time, and I can never have it. But when Will gets his, at the same time he loses his surrogate father Charlie, I wept for him. For his happiness, for his wish fulfilled. For his two-fold loss, so similar to my own.

I wept for Will, as I rarely do for myself. I wept for Don as he begged a rape victim not to cheapen her life with revenge in exchange for ratings. I wept for Charlie, as his life’s work was torn down around him.

I wept for Mac and Maggie and Jim and Sloan as the windmills continued to win, even as they fought for the right, without question or pause.

Season 3 of THE NEWSROOM has but 6 episodes, and as such does not carry the same amount of water as the two before it. It can’t go where the brave dare not go in exactly the same way, but it can bear approximately the same amount of unbearable sorrow.

There’s just not enough time, either on screen or in real life.

And that’s our show. Now on to Terry in DC with the Capitol Report.