Election Night Part 1 is the eighth episode of the second season of the Newsroom and continues on the character reactions following the Genoa catastrophe last week. During election night we see all main characters including Mackenzie, Will, Sloan, Don and Charlie all deal with the disappointment of both publishing a false story and losing their credibility along with managing their anger and stress as they continue to work and deal with their failings.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS_weey1Sos[/youtube]
The main plot in this episode resides around covering the Romney vs Obama election night, hence the title of the episode. The main stress factor for the characters in the team is not to create a situation where they have to retract a story or a comment such as calling a State early as Jim did with Michigan. The day most likely creates extra stress for the team in The Newsroom because of the Genoa retraction, they don’t want to be making mistakes, they don’t want to be losing more of their credibility.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZDyjj2TrM0[/youtube]
Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) in this episode takes a strong leadership position at ACN and places himself in charge of morale for the team. He has some funny moments and conversations and plays the big brother role that his character seems to be increasingly moving towards. Will’s character is interesting in that he seems to be at his best in this role and flounders when not, I guess possibly he has resolved or is in the process of resolving his crisis of character he has been suffering all season.
I don’t think the big brother character position works well for Will in this episode for dealing with Mackenzie Mchale (Emily Mortimer). Mackenzie as Charlie says is taking the aftermath of the Genoa story the hardest and in this episode shows more stress on her character than any other characters. She argues with Will about not forgiving her for cheating on him 6 years ago and the two seem increasingly aggravated as the episode continues. I’ve always been a fan of the Mackenzie and Will scenes in The Newsroom and this episode had some good ones.
Charlie Skinner also has some of the great scenes in this episode as well. Charlie is completely obsessed with the credibility of ACN being lost because of Genoa and goes to many lengths in this episode to get fired. He sees this as the only way ACN can move on. Charlie has a very funny conversation with Reese Lansing (Chis Messina) about why he can’t just fire him in which Reese reply’s, “because my mom won’t let me” and goes on to reveal quite a lot of the conversation about why he doesn’t give Leona Lansing (Jane Fonda) any grandchildren.
The Newsroom is a funny show in that it does have a great mix between some very funny comedic type of scenes and episodes and some very serious dramatic episodes. Sometimes both in one episode to offset each other like in Unintended Consequences. This episode leans more towards a comedic tone but does have a few serious moment such as the fight between Will and Mackenzie.
One of the most important plot points of this episode that will likely continue into Election Night Part 2 is the uncovering of the General Petraeus story for the team to be reported on. Could this be just the story that everyone at ACN needs to get their credibility back? I’m more interested to know if they are going to beat Jerry Dantana in the court case. That guy totally wrecked the team and I don’t want anyone to resign over this, so I hope Leona Lansing doesn’t give him a cent. So overall it was a good episode and very funny and entertaining. Looking forward to watch and review the finale next week.
