The Tribune

The stacking of simultaneous action has some of the same enjoyability of this season's fifth episode, News Night With Will McAvoy. As much as it'd be good to see this as the standard for the series, one can easily imagine it becoming exhausting to create and perform. In the wake of the last episode's cataclysmic mis-reportage, however, this episode is lighter on massive character developments than its forebear in the season. Perhaps it's a testament to the team's news reporting superpowers that the election coverage largely seems to go off without a hitch. Their multi-tasking capabilities are truly beyond compare - you can almost understand Charlie going to beg that his resignation be accepted in order to save everyone else's jobs, while the broadcast is running, but a running gag about Mac wanting to correct her Wikipedia page doesn't always land as it should. Mac is a rather sorry figure in this episode, sleep-deprived and grasping desperately for control. Again, not great for The Newsroom's record of female representation, but Emily Mortimer elicits buckets of sympathy with her deflated performance, and really shines in scenes opposite Jeff Daniels. (Do we have a collective term for Newsroom fans yet, by the way, in the vein of Whovian or Browncoat? I'm going to go with McAvoyeurs for now.) As McAvoyeurs will remember from the top of the first season, Mac was hired as an executive producer at ACN with the unorthodox proviso that only Will is allowed to fire her. That puts the power of putting Mac out of her misery in Will's hands, and he's understandably reluctant. She hasn't been guilty of any more misconduct than any of the other unprofessional mavericks that populate the newsroom, but Jerry Dantana's lawsuit, a manifest of executive oversights that were made in the Genoa story, is set to be published the day after the election. Wait, back up a second... Are we now to assume that ACN's failure was so massive that such a publication, in the aftermath of a presidential election, would still make big news and embarrass the team? Granted, once it's out there, it's out there, but the thing that doesn't ring true about the Genoa plot is the assumption that the viewers are up to the same ideal as receivers of News Night's mission to civilise, as its proponents and architects profess themselves to be. If that's not the assumption, then we don't have enough information to show otherwise and there's still no context of the audience reaction to ACN's story, beyond the sweeping statement that the team has lost the public's trust. It starts to feel a little melodramatic. The best of the subplots this week is distilled into one scene between Don and lawyer Rebecca Halliday. Jerry is asking for another $20 million because Don called him a sociopath in a job reference. As Rebecca points out, he was probably only listed as a reference in the hope that something like this would happen, but you side with the increasingly excellent Thomas Sadoski, in his righteous frustration. It'll be interesting to see how this potentially very expensive development plays out for Don. Even if Sloan's plot is considerably less substantial this week, she's the other standout throughout the show, whether bickering with her co-anchor over a senatorial race that already sounds like it could be turned into an amazing, if implausible film, or full-on charging the elephant in the room by pointing out that Genoa counts as Will attacking a Democratic president, and not just the Republican opposition. She's been fantastic this season too, so it would be nice to have had more Don and Sloan this week.