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Will apologizes to his viewers for doing terrible, ratings-driven news and promises that from here on out, his show will report facts and be better. He likens this to Richard Clarke's testimony before the 9/11 Commission, because being a ratings-hungry anchorman and being the counter-terrorism advisor when 9/11 happened are totally the same thing. Will's new, fact-based, non-partisan news quickly turns into six months of Tea Party-bashing in the run-up to the midterm election. Will watches good Republican incumbents lose their seats to stupid Tea Partiers in the primaries, exposes the Koch brothers as being the main funders of Tea Party causes, and then watches as Tea Party candidates do very well come election night. So I guess all that public-informing didn't save the world after all.
In the meantime, Jim watches Maggie and Don break up and make up over and over again, stepping in only when Maggie leaves a meeting in mid-panic attack and uses his embedded military knowledge to make it go away in like three seconds. Why bother with Xanax when you have Jim around? MacKenzie has her own issues, as she has to watch Will go out on dates a few times and reacts to this with her now-standard manic weirdness. Then she goes into hiding for most of the episode, resurfacing at the end with a new boyfriend. As for Neal and Sloan, they have very little to do, as usual.
And finally, the day after the election, Charlie is called into a meeting with ACN's parent company, AWN, and the people in charge to discuss News Night's declining ratings and liberal slant. Reese only cares about numbers and demographics. Charlie only cares about quality news and alcohol. Leona Lansing (Jane Fonda!), AWN CEO and Reese's mother, allows Charlie to bicker with Reese and defend News Night for the hour, then informs Charlie that with the Tea Party people now in powerful positions, she can no longer afford to allow one of her employees to antagonize them. She tells Charlie that if he doesn't tone down News Night, she'll fire Will. And then there won't be a News Night for everyone not to watch.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!This episode was co-written by Gideon Yago! MTV News' Gideon Yago! Please tell me there's an episode co-written by Sway on deck.
Tonight's episode begins with News Night, which is a change from the other two episodes, where we had to wait an hour to see the only relatively good part of the show. Way to play to your strengths, Sorkin/Yago. Oh, no, wait. It's turns out this isn't a news broadcast at all, but cleverly disguised lecture-speech pretending to be a heartfelt editorial from Will. The show opens with "Richard Clark" testifying before the 9/11 Commission and apologizing for failing the victims of 9/11 and their families. I'm sorry, but how did Dick Clark fail anyone on 9/11? He just counts down the ball drop on New Year's Eve. Oh, hold on a second. I believe that's Richard Clarke we're watching right now, who was the counter-terrorism advisor to the Bush government when 9/11 happened. That makes much more sense. You know what doesn't make sense? That this show got the spelling of his name wrong. That's just inexcusable. You can use your 60 minutes of airtime to lecture your audience on what a quality newscast should be or you can misspell the names of fairly prominent people, but you can't do both.
Anyway, the Clark(e) clip is from a 2004 hearing about events that happened in 2001, so what's it doing on a news show that takes place in 2010 but is airing in 2012? Well, Will is using it to demonstrate his point: "adults should hold themselves accountable for failure." Yes, that's right: he's saying that trying to get ratings for a basic cable news show is a failure akin to failing to prevent the worst terrorist act on American soil that killed almost 3,000 people. Just so you know what level of douchiness we're in for this week.
As Will talks and talks, we see him sitting down with a pad of paper, a pen, a beer, and a cigarette and writing the first draft of this speech out. Will says he is only apologizing for himself and not anyone else on ACN or any other news channel. Just for his own "trainwreck of failures." I hope he means last night's show, because that certainly was a trainwreck of failures. I'm not sure how any of his other shows qualify, though. Will says he is the "leader" of an industry that has "miscalled election results" (as opposed to those awesome newsmen in the late '40s, who totally rocked the Truman-Dewey election results), "hyped up terrorist scares" (again, that is definitely not isolated to our modern times), "ginned up controversy" (whatever), and "failed to report on tectonic shifts in our country" (I fell asleep).
Jim is woken up in the middle of the night by a fax from Will. Jim is a dork who: a. has a fax machine and b. keeps it to his bed. Neal apparently has a sex life, which is cut short by a call from Jim and an email forward of Will's message. And then Jim, Neal, and MacKenzie (wearing a fairly accurate representation of "you just got me out of bed in the middle of the night" clothes) have to go into work at two in the morning to hash out Will's big important message: that news shows shouldn't have to depend on ratings and advertisers and Congress should have thought to make that a legal requirement from the get-go. Huh. The ratings and advertiser-driven model seemed to serve everyone just fine for decades when it was bringing us all those great newsmen. Then, apparently, cable came along and ruined everything by forcing news programs to compete with shows like Jersey Shore.
Maggie, who was not invited to the late-night meeting, gets word of it via her BlackBerry, which somehow survived last week's BlackBerry executions. Don is in bed to her, so it looks like they are no longer broken up. Phew! I was definitely worried about my fave new supercouple.
And then Will reads his speech to his staff, telling them that he will no longer be a part of the news "circus" in favor of joining a team of fantastic newsmen no one watches because they're boring and presenting only the information that Will thinks is necessary for a "well-informed electorate." "We will be the champion of facts and the mortal enemy of any one-note speculation, hyperbole, and nonsense," Will says. Good thing they championed the fact of how to spell Richard Clarke's name.
Charlie reads Will's copy and approves it.
Will continues: his awesome new show won't just serve people the news, nor will it spit out facts with no context. Will is going to have opinions, and also "expose" his audience to the opinions of others that differ from his own. Wow, so generous. You know who else does that, by the way? Bill O'Reilly. Will thinks his audience is wondering who "we" are to make such decisions, and then introduces us to MacKenzie McHale, who, in case you forgot, is really good at her job even though last week's episode had no indication of this. "Her credentials are readily available," Will says. Not on this show, however, as Will quickly moves on. Go look up those facts for yourself, well-informed electorate! Will says that, as managing editor of the show, he has the final say in everything that makes it on the air. Even though last week he had to sneak a Palin clip on because he was afraid his EP wouldn't let him do it. "Who are we to make these decisions? We're the Media Elite," Will says. If anyone was still watching, he's surely turned this show off by now. Does Will not understand that the American people don't, by and large, appreciate being told what to do by a class of self-proclaimed elites?
And then we go to a PowerPoint presentation in a large, wood-paneled conference room. Matt Long is giving the presentation, and why isn't he in more stuff? Matt Long will be showing us the results of his "performance analysis" of NewsNight (apparently, it's all one word and I've been spelling it wrong this entire time. Which makes me an excellent newsman, if what Will says is true!) from April to November 2010. Which means this presentation is taking place IN THE FUTURE, but not exactly because it's still IN THE PAST, just not as much. Matt Long says "it" began with Will's "on-air apology." Charlie asks what Matt Long is talking about. Reese says it wasn't cool of Will to basically go on the air and say that everything ACN had done before was "trash." Charlie says Will made sure to blame himself and not the rest of the network, so what's the problem?
A few hours after Will's apology show, Don staggers into work and sees that Jim is still there. "It was either this or go home," Jim explains. By the way, the Rodney Dangerfield-looking extra is also still at work, probably because he don't get no respect at home. Don slurs that he just saw NewsNight at a bar that clearly has no idea what its patrons want to see on its TVs. Don is drunk because of his time at said bar, and thus will admit that he "loved" Will's editorial. And he could have done the show Will apparently wants to do (since he just heard Will basically say that the show he was doing, which Don was the EP of, sucked). Jim says he still can -- he's the EP of Elliot's show. Don says it's not that simple: he has to get ratings. If he doesn't, they'll fire him. And Natalie Halloway is ratings. Even in 2010. "You guys just set me up to look like an asshole before I got started," Don says. Good point. Jim says that wasn't their intention. "Shut up," Don says. He walks away and heads for Maggie. He's not thrilled with her for hiding this from him. She says she was told not to show the BlackBerry message to anyone else. Don's feelings are hurt, but he should be well aware of the importance of keeping secrets in the journalism world at this point.
Matt Long says the Times Square bomb happened a few days after Will's apology -- an event that Will's show should be willing and able to cover and that the audience would expect to see coverage of. Charlie says "artificially hyping" a bomb threat is not "News 101," but "Douchebaggery 101." I'm sorry, but it's not artificial hype to say that a guy put a bomb in Times Square and if it had gone off, a lot of people would have been injured or killed. Charlie keeps asking why he's in this meeting in the first place, but Reese doesn't want to tell him.
Cut to Will in Charlie's office, looking like he hasn't shaved or slept in a few days. Will explains that he woke up at 2 AM to break down polling data from a primary race in Utah that randomly made its way through his fax machine. It turns out that Utah's incumbent senator Bob Bennett, a very conservative Republican, is about to lose the primary to an even more conservative guy named Mike Lee. Will likens what he thinks is happening with the Tea Party to how Abbie Hoffman took over the Students for a Democratic Society and turned the progressive anti-war movement into a bunch of peace-loving hippies for the forty years. Now the Tea Party has people like Mike Lee who want to repeal the fourteenth amendment and it looks like he's going to win the primary by "double digits." By the way, Lee actually won by a very narrow margin over some guy named Tim Bridgewater that this show didn't feel like mentioning at all.
Will says he understood the Tea Partiers at first and maybe even agreed with some of their demands, but now they've been "co-opted" by the extreme right and the rest of the conservatives have to bow to their whims. "Get there!" MacKenzie says from the back of the room, startling Will who apparently didn't hear or see her come in. "Get there!" MacKenzie repeats herself. Three episodes in, and I'm sorry to report that Emily Mortimer is still not able to deliver these lines. I know Sorkin is holding her family hostage to make her be on this show and she's upset about that and all, but he has Jeff Daniels' family, too, and Daniels is really doing his best here. Suck it up, Mortimer. Will thinks we should all be "scared shitless" of the Tea Party. "My party's being hijacked, and it's happening in real time. How is this not our top story every night?" Will asks. "Thank you!" MacKenzie says. Oh, so we won't make bombing attempts and environmental disasters our top story for more than one night, but the Tea Party gets to be the top story every single night now? That doesn't make any sense to me. Will marches out, puffed up with righteous indignation. MacKenzie follows, asking Charlie if he was the one who faxed those poll results to Will in the first place. He just shrugs. He probably doesn't know because he did it while blacked out, and this is how 70-year-old journalists drunk-dial: by faxing Utah polling data to an anchorman at 2 AM.
Cue the Elvis Presley, because we're about to indicate that time has passed with a montage! May 8, 2010: Will yammers on about the Tea Party and interviews a scary-looking spokeswoman for Mike Lee, asking her to think of any scenario where Lee would approve raising taxes to increase revenue. She can't, and this is supposed to make her look stupid, I guess.
May 20: Will goes all Jeremy Paxman on us and sits opposite a Rand Paul spokesman and yells at him for not answering his questions clearly.
June 2: Sharron Angle, Nevada Republican senatorial candidate, says something stupid, and Will cracks a joke at her expense. The control room, including Charlie, laughs their asses off at his witty quip.
Boardroom: Charlie runs down Will's pre-anchorman life. He graduated college at 19, law school at 21, and then worked in the Brooklyn D.A.'s office. That just reminds me of how great Sam Waterston was when he played a character who worked in a D.A.'s office. Now he's on this show and he's awful. So sad. "The newsroom turned into a courtroom, Reese, because I made the decision that American voters needed a fucking lawyer," Charlie growl-slurs.
MacKenzie smiles and heads back to the bullpen as the show concludes. An attractive woman is standing there, so MacKenzie asks her what she's doing there. The woman says she's waiting for Will to finish up so they can go out on their date. "THAT'S FANTASTIC!" MacKenzie says. And then there's a lot more of Emily Mortimer over-acting and embarrassing herself, as you'd expect. Also, MacKenzie is an idiot, so when the woman says she's the "head of the flight crew" for the New York Jets, MacKenzie asks if she's a pilot. No, dumbass, she's a cheerleader. And she's working her way through graduate school, so stop thinking you're that much better than her. Will walks up. "Hey, dude," the woman greets him; "that was awesome." MacKenzie says she hopes Will doesn't get too tired during their date, as he is "old." Will introduces MacKenzie as his "secretary." "Multiple Peabody-winning Executive Producer," MacKenzie says. Brat. She has no right to be jealous or try to torpedo Will's date when she was the one who cheated on him.
MacKenzie ushers Will into his office, gets all angry at him for dating a "student," and accuses him of using the cheerleader to get back at her. Yes, it's all about you, multiple Peabody winner. MacKenzie lets Will on a little secret: the cheerleader may want to sleep with Will because he's famous. Will seems perfectly okay with that. "I loathe you right now," MacKenzie says. Ugh. And just when she's nearly stormed out of Will's office, screaming and with her hands balled into fists like a tantruming child, Charlie pulls her back in to congratulate the pair on the show and encourage them to keep talking Tea Party. Will asks what "the 44th floor" has to say about the show's new direction. Charlie assures him that they're fine with it.
As Jane Fonda peers ominously over her Glasses of Power, Matt Long (whose name is finally revealed to be Brad) says things went from bad to worse when Will went after South Carolina senator Jim DeMint.
June 18: Will tries to nail a spokesman for DeMint on his comments about gay marriage. Shockingly, DeMint is against it, saying homosexuals spread disease through their sinful sexual activities. Maggie runs into the control room and tells Jim: "18,000." MacKenzie relays the number to Will through his earpiece. Will asks the spokesman if he thinks WWI US soldiers were "good, moral people." Of course they were, spokesman says. Will informs him that 18,000 of them had to be treated for STDs -- a day.
Post-show, MacKenzie and Maggie, a duet of disaster, walk into the bullpen and see another one of Will's dates waiting for him. It's not the cheerleader, so I guess that didn't work out. MacKenzie, of course, heads right for her as Will runs over to try to rescue his poor date from having an encounter with a crazy person. He's able to grab MacKenzie away, and she asks if the woman is a spinning instructor. Will says she's actually a brain surgeon. Ha ha! Suck it, MacKenzie! Pretty people can be smart, too.
Meanwhile, at the after-work hangout known as Hang Chew's (which is right door to a pub that I refuse to believe isn't open after nine o'clock), Jim is showing us what a great reporter he is by saying he's not interested in Wikileaks at all. "You're nuts," Neal says, then yammers on about how it'll be an "absolute gamechanger" for journalism. Jim calls him a nerd. "Future paradigm interface," Neal says. Maggie walks in. Jim smiles and stands up. She smiles back, but it's because she's meeting Don there. Somehow, Jim didn't notice that Don was sitting behind him on the couch this whole time. Nice observation skills, journalist.
"I've been sitting here for two and a half hours and I still don't know why," Charlie says. I know how he feels. In fact, I'd imagine most of the people who managed to get this far into this series feel that way. Charlie claims that NewsNight covered a bunch of international stories along with the Tea Party stuff (international stories? American audience = zzzz), so it's not like the show was all Tea Party bashing all the time. Except it obviously was.
Skipping all the way to August 31, Will has an interview with Bryce Delaney, a fictional senator who just lost the primary to a Tea Party candidate. Will points out that Delaney has a ton of experience in being a senator and therefore should never lose to a mere dentist. Because the fact that someone has done a certain job for a long time means he must be good at it. Even though it seems that most of his constituents were unhappy enough with however he was doing to choose someone else. Which is, you know, the democratic process. I can't imagine why people didn't want to vote for Bryce Delaney, who is all old and tired-looking and tired-sounding as he blames his loss on the fact that he once said that Obama was not a socialist and a he co-sponsored a bill with a Democrat that gave homeless veterans housing, counseling, and job training. "Thank you for your service to your country, sir," Will ass-kisses; "you'll be missed in Congress." Not missed by his constituents, it seems, the overwhelming majority of whom voted for someone else to represent the Republican party. "Good luck," Will says. I'm sure the ex-senator will be just fine with his lifetime health insurance benefits and pension.
Will and Charlie leave for the day. Will blows off the fans waiting outside the building to get a glimpse of him and asks Charlie, again, what the response has been from the mysterious 44th floor. Charlie says there hasn't been one, and that "she" never watched the old version of Will's show in the first place. Charlie doubts she's watching it now.
Reese says he and his mother weren't invited to a special retreat in Telluride for the first time in nine years, and he blames NewsNight for that. Charlie wanders off to drink bourbon and mutters something about wanting to punch Reese in the face yet again. "You've had enough bourbon for one lifetime," Reese says. Reese is right. If Charlie thinks he can get away with openly drinking and threatening violence in meetings, then they should fire him. And yet, he and Maggie are allowed to stay at ACN and we're supposed to think they are the best the news has to offer. "We lost David and Charles," Reese says. This gets a reaction from both Charlie and Jane Fonda. I believe Reese is talking about David and Charles Koch, and Telluride is their exclusive little annual retreat for rich people.
Aw, crap. MacKenzie is trying to be a newswoman again. She leads a meeting of her awful staff, and Will quickly makes fun of her. "You know what, Hef? There's a Hooters a few blocks from here just filled with waitresses who are stocked like a game fishing pond for you to go ... out like a fish ... with a ... " and then she trails off because she can't even insult her boss without turning into an idiot. Also, she's lucky not to get fired for being so unprofessional and also sexually harassing her boss in front of everyone.
MacKenzie decides to call on the one person in the room who will embarrass herself more than MacKenzie already has: Maggie. Maggie stammers out that the Tea Party claims it's a grass roots movement, so it should be resistant to "traditional power structures." The woman who looks like Melinda Clark(e) and has the misfortune of sitting to Maggie looks at her like "get your shit together, woman" while Jim is, of course, concerned.
Will welcomes his latest guests, two rubes who represent the Tea Party, to his show. His audience has got to be so sick of tea. How is this show any better than, say, a show on Fox News that shoves the same points down its viewers' throats over and over, again?
And then we're back in the meeting (the MacKenzie meeting, not the Reese/Jane Fonda meeting. I know -- it's hard to keep track of everything now that we're going back and forth between at least three points in time). MacKenzie predicts that the two rubes will say they're the "true voice" of the American people.
On the show, Rube One says the Tea Party is about taking the government back from politicians who are controlled by corporations. Rube Two says the media seems to be "confounded" by the Tea Party's grass-rootsness and lack of a central governing body. "I'm sorry?" Will says. "It's what the media doesn't get," Rube Two explains, apparently thinking that Will just doesn't know what the word 'confounded' means; "we are 'We, the People,'" Rube Two, whose accent is suspiciously similar to Sarah Palin's, says. "There it is," MacKenzie smirks.
Will asks the rubes where their funding comes from. Rube Two insists it's all from people who don't have much money but are willing to part with it because they believe in this cause so very much. Will asks them if they've ever heard of David or Charles Koch or Koch Industries. They have not, although Rube Two thinks Will is talking about Coca-Cola. Will is happy to enlighten them: the Koch brothers own the second-largest private company in America and are billionaires.
Maggie continues to have problems getting words to come out of her mouth as she explains that there was a Tea Party event last weekend.
Will reads the invitation to the event over the air and says it was paid for by a group called Americans for Prosperity. AfP has given lots of money to Tea Party candidates, and guess who founded AfP? The Koch brothers. "I'm confounded," Will smirks at the rubes. Or, he would smirk if he wasn't doing his Keith Olbermann raising-just-one-corner-of-his-top-lip-to-speak impression.
Maggie bolts out of the meeting. Jim follows her. The Rodney Dangerfield guy appears to have fallen asleep again. Don wanders through the bullpen even though he's now long since left NewsNight for Elliot's new show, and Jim asks him where Maggie is. "She's okay. She gets panic attacks," Don shrugs; "she's fine. She just needs to be left alone. She went out on the terrace to get some air." Sounds like Don and Maggie have things reasonably under control. Jim makes a sarcastic comment about Don's show and its coverage of the McRib sandwich (apparently everyone is at work in the middle of the night, as we know that Elliot's show ends at 11 PM). "Yeah. Go fuck yourself," Don says awesomely.
And then we're at the other meeting, with Charlie and Reese and Jane Fonda. Is Charlie telling them about Maggie having a panic attack? No wonder their meeting has been going on for such a long time. Also, Charlie is now openly drinking. Reese points his finger at him and says he can't let NewsNight attack the Kochs without clearing it with the 44th floor first. "Get your finger outta my face, Reese," Charlie says. "I will always wave my finger in your face!" Reese Alicias. "We stand for something. It's a moral obligation. Get used to it," Charlie says. Oh my god, Charlie. You guys aren't trying to end slavery or liberating concentration camps. You're writing a bunch of words for some guy to speak for an hour a night. Get over yourself.
Maggie is on the phone with her roommate, freaking out because she's having a panic attack. Worst panic attack acting ever, by the way. Someone please tell Allison Pill that she isn't on stage. She's on television, so she can tone it the fuck down. She doesn't have her usual panic attack medicine because the guys her roommate brings home apparently stole it out of the medicine cabinet. And from what Maggie says, this happens often. SO STORE YOUR XANAX IN YOUR ROOM AND NOT THE MEDICINE CABINET, IDIOT. God! How is it possible that she even sucks at having a panic attack?
Jim walks out, and Maggie puts the phone down without hanging it up. She tries to get to her feet, but she can't because she's horrible at everything and Jim tells her to sit back down anyway. He takes her pulse and asks her some questions. "Are you a nurse?" Maggie asks. Jim says he has some panic attack experience, having been embedded with a few Marines who suffered from them. "I'm gonna pass out," Maggie says. "It feels like it, but you won't. You're in the second stage of the blah blah blah Army field manual," Jim says. Great. So he knows Maggie's panic attacks better than she does. He tells her to breathe from her abdomen and imagine she's in a safe place with kittens. I'm sorry, but Maggie has had enough issues with panic attacks to have medication for them and for her boyfriend and her roommate to know about them, but not enough to figure this out for herself? "I wish your face would stop moving so I could punch it," Maggie tells the guy who's only trying to help. Jim doesn't just stand up and leave, even though he totally should. Instead he says "you're here, you're part of this group. Everyone likes you." I would hope Maggie's panic isn't about the splash she's made on the ACN social scene but more about all the stress she's built up over time because she is terrible at this and sooner or later someone is going to figure it out.
Jim assures Maggie that all her work is done so she doesn't have to go back inside just yet. Good move, Jim: put Maggie's work off on the other, more qualified, people. He asks if she's seen a doctor about this. Maggie says she did, and got some Xanax. But she doesn't have any with her to take. "Someone like you should always have one in your pocket or in your purse," Jim says. No shit, Jim. Even Maggie must have figured that one out by now. Jim checks Maggie's pulse again, and lo and behold, she's doing much better! Way to cure a panic attack with two minutes of talking, Jim. The rest of us have been doing this thing all wrong. Maggie asks Jim about his Marine friends. "They were the best people I've ever met," he says. I bet they hated him, though. "You guys are a close second," Jim says. Sucks to be Jim's roommate or sister who put their jobs on the line for his story, who I guess are a distant third at best.
Maggie decides to talk about Don now, and how he'd love to do the kind of terrible show NewsNight has become, but there's too much pressure on him to get ratings and Elliot is no Will. "He's a great guy and you two should be friends," Maggie says of Don. Jim says in the past five months, he's watched Don and Maggie break-up and get back together four times. "I never knew what the word 'smug' meant until I met you," Maggie says. I'm sorry, but is that supposed to be charming, that she feels free to threaten and insult her boss like this? Because it's not appealing at all. Jim just makes fun of her for taking 26 years to figure out what "smug" means, then says that Don and Maggie "obviously have something" so they should stop breaking up all the time and "learn how to have a fight." With that, he heads back inside to do his job. Maggie grabs for her phone. "Are you still there?" she asks her roommate. She probably isn't, having killed herself two minutes into this scene. "Yeah. That was him," she says. I guess we're supposed to find it significant that Maggie has clearly talked about Jim to her roommate before, but Maggie seems like the kind of person who just follows her roommate around the apartment all weekend talking at her about whatever pops into her head, not noticing that it is her roommate that is stealing Xanax because it's her only escape from the nightmare that is life with Maggie.
"I think the best analogy I can use is Rocky 2," Brad says. Reese asks if there isn't perhaps another analogy, since he doubts his mother has seen that movie. And that's when we learn that Jane Fonda is, in fact, Reese's mother. Brad explains that Rocky was left-handed, but Burgess Meredith made him fight with his right hand until his left hand was needed to deliver the crushing blow. Or something. "What the fuck are you talking about?" Reese asks. For real, Reese. You are the audience. You are our voice. There's some squabbling over who gets to be Burgess Meredith (Will is Rocky) in this analogy, similar to the Don Quixote analogy wars we saw just two weeks ago. This leads to Sam Waterston trying to play Charlie trying to be Burgess Meredith while the camera gets way too close to his face. Everyone in the room just looks kind of embarrassed for Charlie. Reese asks if Charlie finds this situation funny. "Yeaaaahhhh," Charlie slurs; "WE'VE BEEN TALKING ABOUT ROCKY TWWOOOOO!" And this show just made me hate Sam Waterston. I didn't even think such a thing was possible. Thanks for that, Sorkin.
Will's latest date is blonde. MacKenzie watches them leave. Maggie watches MacKenzie watching them leave. None of these people have lives.
Jim finally managed to leave the office, only to take his computer to the karaoke bar that has no karaoke and work there. Neal announces that Don and Maggie broke up last week. This time, Neal reports, "it's real." He knows this because every woman in the office except MacKenzie (and Sloan, if she even still works there) has been gossiping about it. "Get in there!" Neal says. Jim refuses to "swoop in," adding that he would look like a hypocrite anyway since he's the one who told Maggie to stop breaking up with Don. Neal asks what qualifies Jim to give out relationship advice. He probably was embedded with Marines who were relationships. Duh.
Montage of Will channeling Keith Olbermann ranting about the Tea Party. God bless you, Jeff Daniels. You are TRYING. Sorkin won't kill your family.
November 2. It's election night, and ACN anchors Will and Elliot are combining forces for an Election Night Special. That means Don gets to return to the bullpen and run around with the others as updates on election results pour in. Don tries to give a post-it to Maggie, who rushes past him a bunch of times and ignores him. Very professional. Jim shows Charlie another result, and it looks like a Democrat friend of Charlie's just got voted out of office. "He was a great public servant. Call it red," Charlie sighs. I guess he wasn't that great if his public voted for someone else.
Don and MacKenzie split EP duties in the control room. MacKenzie reads off the new governor of Wisconsin's victory speech to Will, wondering how he can say he's an ally to businesses and workers when he also wants to bust the unions. I guess he thinks that the workers and the businesses are better off without unions. It's not like he wants to be the governor to make everyone miserable. Oh my god, this show is so bad that it's making me sympathetic to Scott Walker.
Don asks MacKenzie to ask Will to throw it to Elliot more often. MacKenzie asks Don to ask Elliot say something besides how awesome it is to see democracy in action. "I'm trying!" Don snaps.
On stage, we have Sloan (oh yeah, remember her? How did she not get to appear in any of the time passage montages?), Will, Elliot, and some guy who I think is Elliot's analyst sitting behind their laptops. Way to connect with the American people behind your shiny MacBook Pros, there, guys. Will asks Elliot for his opinion on the night. Elliot says democracy is in action and it is beautiful. Will is disgusted and turns to Sloan for analysis. Sloan says the voting public is old and conservative. Will asks Elliot's analyst why people who are on social security are voting for candidates who could destroy social security. Elliot's analyst has no explanation for this. The segment ends, and Elliot's analyst is not very pleased with Will. Don is not pleased with Elliot. He pulls him aside and asks him to "get in the game" and stop saying stupid things when Will is good enough to give him a chance to speak. Shockingly, Elliot does not appreciate Don's advice. "Don't talk to me like that," he says; "don't talk to me like I am a disappointing child." He tells Don he can either get back together with Maggie and stop being such a dick, get over Maggie and stop being such a dick, or get fired. Don takes a second and says Elliot is right. All is forgiven. Well, thank god they resolved the Elliot/Don tension plotline! I was dying to know what was going to happen between those two! Meanwhile, who is Neal?
Maggie hands Will some election updates and some helpful, if inappropriate and unsolicited, advice. She knows this is "grounds for termination," although considering they didn't can her when she did all that other stuff, I can't see them firing her now, but she thinks Will's dates should meet him at the restaurant and not in his office. Will decides to be frank with Maggie: "Your head's up your ass." But he doesn't fire her. Instead, he says he can't stop thinking about MacKenzie sleeping with her ex-boyfriend. Still. Three years later. Might want to get some therapy about that, Will. He says he wasn't trying to hurt MacKenzie or rub her face in anything; he just wasn't considering her feelings. Well, that was awkward.
Will decides to make it even more awkward by going to the control room to talk to MacKenzie. He starts to apologize to her, only to be interrupted by some random guy who thinks the control room is awesome and then calls MacKenzie "honey." His name is Wade, and he's a big fan of Will and NewsNight and there's the 50,000th Murrow mention. Also, he's "more than friends" with MacKenzie, yet he doesn't seem to know that she's American and not British. MacKenzie has one of the underlings take Wade away to give him a tour of the studio so she can have awkward chat with Will. She says they've been dating for three months now, which is definitely more than enough time to bring the guy to her work on one of the most important and busiest nights of the freaking year. "I'm sorry," MacKenzie says. No she isn't. She's never sorry. And I don't really care about who she's dating or for how long because it's suddenly November on this show and last week it was April. Seven months have passed in these people's lives but we didn't really get to see any of it and the show is too young to have allowed us to feel like we know or are attached to these characters, so we don't care. Will tries to shrug it off and leaves. MacKenzie makes a series of pained worry faces.
Will manages to nail his knee on the desk as he tries to sit back down because no one on this show can do anything right. Sloan sits down to him and says he should ask the newly-elected Tea Party candidates about the debt ceiling because she can see the future and knows it will become a really big deal in seven or eight months. Will doesn't think it's a big deal, since raising the debt ceiling isn't about borrowing more money but about making it possible to pay money back. Sloan asks if he thinks the rest of the country is as knowledgeable about it as he is. Oops.
Will goes to new congressman Frank Guidry's victory party. Guidry is yet another fictional character, because that makes a lot of sense when this show is otherwise based in real events that have already happened for the purpose of giving it some perspective on past events, which is then ruined when you bring fictional characters into a historical narrative. Guidry tells Will he plans to bring his fiscal responsibility campaign to Washington. Will asks if he's going to vote to raise the debt ceiling. Guidry says he won't cast any vote that requires spending public money. His crowd cheers, and Guidry says he is unable to hear Sloan and Will's attempts to school him on what the debt ceiling actually is. Once again, NewsNight has failed to inform the public.
The show is over. Jim tells the staff they can go home. Charlie tells Jim that he'll probably be getting sweet, lucrative job offers and to talk to Charlie before accepting them. Yeah, or Charlie could give Jim a raise since he basically just said ACN isn't paying Jim what he's worth. "That won't be an issue, sir," Jim says. Idiot. Charlie invites him out for a drink with Will. Jim tries to beg off. "Be a damn newsman, would ya?" Charlie says.
Hey, remember how Neal was a blogger? Well, he's blogging! But he's doing it via a microphone instead of typing because those voice recognition things do so well with English accents. They know that when Neal says "colon" he means a : and when he says "sixty-three" he means 63. Amazing! He signs off even though some of the election results aren't in yet. Worst news station ever. Jim and Neal make fun of each other for being nerds, and then Neal points out that Maggie is sitting on the stairs by herself.
Jim is about to make his move when Don comes down the stairs and starts making out with her. Fire them both. Not appropriate. Also, does anyone care about this love triangle?
And now, Brad has brought us up to date on the NewsNight problem. Jane Fonda finally speaks up and asks everyone to leave the room except Charlie and Reese. They do. Jane Fonda launches into a speech about Moses and Jesus playing golf because all people do on this show is tell random stories that sort of maybe relate to what's actually going on but it take way too long to actually get there. But Jane Fonda manages to deliver the lines better than most people on this show, so good for her.
Charlie thinks they're having fun until Jane Fonda orders him to stop laughing. He seriously says the ratings "have stabilized" and he's going to get them back up. In the meantime, ACN has a great show. That no one likes. "What happened to human interest stories?" Jane Fonda asks; "he was great at that shit!" "He was sleeping during that shit," Charlie says. And now we are sleeping during this shit. Just in case you haven't been watching or paying attention for the past two episodes, Charlie informs us: "I engineered a situation wherein an executive producer with a unique ability to bring out the very best in an anchor with a unique ability were paired to do a news broadcast this company can and should be proud of." There is just no way to describe the premise of this show without boring us all to tears. Jane Fonda says they're doing news that appeals to the left. "For the center," Charlie says. No, it's not the center. Come on. "Are you fucking out of your mind?" Jane Fonda says. "Facts are the center," Charlie says. Yeah, but NewsNight has made an obvious decision regarding which facts it's going to address.
"He humiliated congressional candidates on my air!" Jane Fonda says. "It's not your air, Leona!" Charlie says. Yeah, actually it kind of is. She owns ACN so she owns whatever it broadcasts. Charlie is either too old or too drunk to remember that. "America just elected the most dangerous and addle-minded congress in my lifetime!" Charlie says. Jane Fonda doesn't care about that: "I have business in front of this Congress!" Well, that shut Charlie up for a minute. Not for long enough, though, as he then asks Reese to leave the room. "He can stay," Jane Fonda says. "Reese, get the fuck out," Charlie says. FIRED! You can't talk to your boss's son who is also your boss that way! But Reese is used to being bossed around by old people, so he goes.
"Look, pal -- " Jane Fonda starts. Ugh, stop with the "punk" and "dweeb" and "pal," Sorkin! No one can say those lines convincingly. Charlie and Jane Fonda trade barbs about Reese and then Jane Fonda whips her glasses off because she is Serious now and says her cable channel can't mess with the Koch brothers. Charlie protests, and Jane Fonda tells him to shut up and remember that they are not equals here and what she says is not up for discussion. ACN makes less than 3 percent of its parent company AWN's revenue. A very new congress just got elected that AWN will have to win over and that's going to be difficult since they're the same people Will has been relentlessly attacking for the last six months. Basically, Jane Fonda has as much respect for the new Tea Party congressmen as Charlie does, but she knows her company needs them.
Charlie has a thick skull, though, so he starts speechifying about how news organizations are a public trust and they have to inform and influence the national conversation. Except they don't, really, since ACN is a cable channel and it has to make money. "I know. That's why I bought one," Jane Fonda says, still being so awesome. "They're not candidates anymore. They are Congressmen. And he's going to lay off," Jane Fonda decides. Charlie refuses. Jane Fonda doesn't care. Charlie asks Jane Fonda what she would have done if she was Murrow's (mention No. 50,001) boss when he was going after McCarthy. Jane Fonda says McCarthy was a "genuinely bad guy." Charlie thinks the Tea Partiers are, too. "Michele Bachman is a hairdo. I'm not worried about Michele Bachmann," Jane Fonda says, pointing out that if anyone is on a witch-hunt right now, it's Will. Charlie says in that case, he believes in witches. So did Salem. This conversation is going nowhere! Fire everyone, Jane Fonda! Let Reese be the new EP and Brad can be the new anchorman. Best show ever.
"I'll fire him, Charlie," Jane Fonda says. Charlie kind of gasps and/or begins to experience the DTs. "He's gonna tone it down or I'm gonna fire him," Jane Fonda says. Charlie doesn't think that's a threat because Jane Fonda would be too scared that Will would just go to a rival network and they would get all the ratings. Yeah, because Will's just bringing in the ratings right now. Doesn't matter, since Jane Fonda points out that Will's contract has a non-compete clause in it, so it'll be three years before Will can go to another channel. Charlie says it would still be a PR nightmare. Jane Fonda says she'd make sure that the firing was seen as AWN sacrificing ratings for integrity. Charlie gasps that she'd be making something up. Jane Fonda says she would, and she's fine with that because this is her job and her company and she doesn't fuck around.
Various members of the NewsNight team have post-show drinks at the karaoke bar. "Where the hell are we?" Charlie wonders aloud, as if he's never woken up in a strange bar before. Oh, they even invited Elliot along! But Will is in a crappy mood because MacKenzie has a boyfriend and therefore isn't with them. It's "just the guys!" Will cheers. Sloan is all: "hi. I exist on this show. Sort of." "And ... yeah," Will nods at her. "I love doing the news!" Will says, and the group prepares to toast that. Charlie gets an email and decides he has to read it before any toasting can happen. He says he's been summoned to the 44th floor to meet with Leona Lansing. Charlie figures she's just going to tell him what a great job he's doing. Oops.
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