HBO

“The Newsroom” Signs Off

The show that inspired “hate-watching” leaves us “hope-watching” for a strong finale.

In the most amusing scene from the third and final season of "The Newsroom," once-earnest young producer Maggie tells a stranger on a train that monologues are a sign of moralizing.

When her audience, an ethics professor, points out that Maggie is delivering a monologue herself, she replies: "Everyone does where I work."

It marked a rare, if gentle, moment of self-deprecation from a show whose tendency toward the preachy is partly credited (or blamed) for spurring "hate-watching" of "The Newsroom" – that is, viewers who tune in to make fun of the HBO drama.

But for fans of creator Aaron Sorkin, the wind behind "The West Wing," viewing "The Newsroom" has proved an at-times trying exercise in what we'll call "hope-watching." We keep coming back, optimistic that for all the cringeworthy moments over the past three seasons, that "The Newsroom" will end on a high note in its final episode Sunday. 

Not that Sorkin has made it easy to keep hope alive for a show about talky, self-important types who fiercely believe in the news and, in their own clumsy, outmoded – and often shrill – way, romance.

The strengths of “The Newsroom” include some fine acting, particularly from Jeff Daniels, who stars as Will McAvoy, a Republican former prosecutor turned newsman who decides to transform his cable news show into TV’s last bastion of journalistic credibility and civility. There are moments when the program soars (depicting breaking news like the Gabby Giffords shooting from the journalist’s point of view), though it’s too often dragged down by sanctimony (pedantic anti-Internet rants from the writer who gave us “The Social Network”).

Credit Sorkin, though, with improving consistency since the wildly uneven first season. This shortened final season shaped up as the drama’s best outing, at least for the first four episodes.

The vivid rendering of the social-media-driven confusion over the flow of information – and misinformation – during the Boston Marathon bombings helped get the season off to a promising start. So did a fictional plotline involving a classified document dump that sent tech-savvy young producer Neal Sampat (Dev Patel) fleeing the country and McAvoy to jail for refusing to reveal his source (but not before a hastily put together wedding to his producer and verbal sparring partner MacKenzie McHale).

All this came amid the backdrop of a corporate takeover of McAvoy’s news network by a young tech billionaire intent on using digital tools to pull in a younger audience.

What could have been a nuanced look at the rapidly changing news and media landscape went haywire, turning instead into an all-or-nothing, us vs. them battle, pitting traditional news gathering against the pitfalls of the digital age.

The fight stretched to bizarre and disturbing proportions in the most recent episode in which producer Don Keefer (Thomas Sadowski) visits a college student who says she was the victim of a horrific campus rape. He essentially tells her not to tell her story (for an excellent dissection, check out Emily Nussbaum’s piece for The New Yorker).

So Don didn’t come back with the interview he was charged with getting. Meanwhile, MacKenzie (Emily Mortimer) and anchor Sloane Sabbith (Olivia Munn) put on the air a new in-house digital producer who created an odious – but popular – celebrity-stalking app and eviscerated him on live television.

The defiant, fire-able offenses infuriated the new network owner Lucas Pruitt (B.J. Novak), and sent news director Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterson) – the onetime conscience of the operation – into a fury capped by his fatal heart attack in the middle of the newsroom. The melodrama ends as McAvoy is sprung from jail after being locked up with an uneducated, anti-Semitic, wife-beater who turns out to be just as adept at sermonizing monologues as every other character on the show.

Sorkin, who seems to be saying that old-school TV news as we know it is done and that’s a shame, has suggested that “The Newsroom” will be his last TV foray. That’s a shame, too. Excesses aside, he still has, well, a lot to say.

A little restraint might have helped with “The Newsroom,” a show that infuriated more than it inspired, yet leaves us hoping against hope for a satisfying ending, right down to the final moralizing monologue.

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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