The Newsroom 1.03 ‘The 112th Congress’ review: I didn’t quite catch what you said

This week’s episode of The Newsroom was a whirlwind from the very beginning until the very last gripping moment when the credits finally rolled. If it’s true that Sorkin is happy he doesn’t need to create any fake cliffhangers throughout the hour, as you normally would for a broadcast show, then viewers are probably a bit disheartened he decided to seriously give zero moments to breathe within an entire hour. That’s sixty minutes—sixty minutes of having to listen to every single, rapid, intense-sounding detail of people spewing out words from their mouths faster than goodness knows what.

By the time Maggie had her panic attack, I was able to relate completely. Please, let that scene be completely meta? I’d like to say that this hour was a very clever parallel to the fast-paced world of news, but having watched two other Sorkin projects before, I’m pretty sure it’s just come to be the norm. And while I may have been exhausted by the hour’s end, I liked this episode much more than the previous one.

Be careful what you wish for, they always say. And I have said that I wanted more of the live news moments since that’s when the series is at its best. But geez! Okay, disregarding politics, let’s just break this up and talk like vapid schoolgirls, shall we?

Maggie and Jim: Ugh, I hate that I now “like” a couple on this show…that’s not really a couple…and now I’m rooting for them, even if I don’t exactly appreciate the very blunt “look who cares for her more!” scene. Either way, John Gallagher Jr. is putting in work to make the chemistry work between these two. That said, wasn’t a lot of the fun about them the newness? We don’t really get to see any of that due to a crazy — what was it, six months? — time jump. The same goes for Will and Mackenzie, which we had to settle for Will going on date after date as some sort of conflict between the two.

And that’s not all — Don’s struggles at 10PM were fast-forwarded, it’s three episodes down and we still haven’t seen much of series regular Olivia Munn, and so on. The one “good” coming from the time jump is that it jumped to the moment in which News Night 2.0 and the network will begin to truly bump heads.

But in all fairness, that’s a helluva plus. And it couldn’t have unfolded any better. Sure, we may have liked to see the intricacies of some of the relationships, but for the most part the episode left the series in a sort of general stasis that we had just six months ago. Will is familiarizing himself with his team, Maggie and Jim are still will-they-won’t-they, Will and Mac are still abrasive and friendly. The true conflict here relies on if this team can keep the show on the air while still hanging on to their integrity (however they define integrity is up to them, and I assume some people may not agree).

Overall, much better than episode 2.