5 Predictions For The Newsroom Series Finale
This list feels almost too easy to write. If you’ve followed Aaron Sorkin’s TV career, from his short-lived dramedy Sports Night, to his award-winning triumph with The West Wing, down to his current almost-concluded three season run of The Newsroom, you start to pick up on the patterns. The fast-paced, borderline unnatural verbal patter. The characters who are super brilliant at their jobs, but positively hopeless when it comes to their personal lives. An adherence to a defiant moral high ground that no living person could ever reach in their lifetime. The coincidences, huge plot twists, and last-minute rescues of its characters from the gaping maw of oblivion.
So, with Aaron Sorkin’s TV career, and the short final season of The Newsroom both lumbering towards their respective conclusions, I thought I would apply my distressingly vast knowledge of the Sorkinverse to make some admittedly snarky predictions for what will befall the characters in the HBO series during its final episode, airing this coming Sunday night.
1. The death and resurrection of NewsNight with Will McAvoy
The arrival of Lucas Pruit, the tech billionaire who purchased Atlantis Cable News with plans to turn it into a fast-paced, crowdsourced, Gawker-style network, has spelled doom for Mackenzie, Will, and the gang. How can their holier-and-smarter-than-thou approach to covering the important events of the day keep up? Well, if we’ve learned anything from Studio 60 and SportsNight, we should know that all is not lost. I foresee the entire staff of NewsNight being booted from the building at ACN after the blowup that went down in last Sunday’s episode following Sloan’s excoriation of the company’s celebrity stalking app, with all of them decamped at their favorite bar, drinking away their collective fates. Then, like an apparition from afar, who should show up but Dana McCall (former producer of SportsNight and current head of programming at fledgling Continental News Corporation, played by Felicity Huffman), to offer all of them a place on their network. That’s right: the crossover episode you never expected, nor particularly wanted!
2. The engagements of Jim & Maggie and Don & Sloan
The episode opens in a jewelry store—probably Tiffany’s because these venerable news folk are making a fortune at their jobs. Inside, Don is hemming and hawing over which engagement ring to pick for his beloved Sloan, while also giving an impassioned history lesson about the origin of so-called “blood diamonds” to the withering young woman assisting him. Then, who should he bump into, but Jim—his co-worker and former romantic rival—back from his failed effort to interview Edward Snowden, energized by his love for Maggie, and ready to buy his own engagement ring. The two spend the next 20 minutes of the episode arguing about whether it is too soon for Jim to be asking for Maggie’s hand in marriage and the necessity for wedding traditions like these. Don succeeds in talking his friend out of the engagement, but then right after he pops the question to Sloan in the middle of the newsroom, he hands Jim the perfect engagement ring and whispers in his ear, “Now it’s your turn.”