“The Newsroom” – The Blackout Part I: Tragedy Porn episode review

Will and Mackenzie react poorly to learning they’ll have to cover the Casey Anthony trial

“The Blackout Part I” begins with Will “auditioning” a writer for New York Magazine. Apparently he’s been hounded by reporters far and wide, all clamoring for a cover story on him, and he’s finally chosen someone to write it. The someone in question is named Brian Brenner (Paul Schneider). Brian desperately needs a cover story to get his name back out there, and Will needs a reporter he can set conditions on; it’s a win-win situation.

Brian will be observing Will and his crew at work for the next few days as his audition. Everything he observes and learns is off the record until Will gives it his approval to go into Brian’s piece. He’s particularly keen on only having his relationship with Mackenzie explained away in a parenthetical in the middle of the story. Way to keep that flame of journalistic integrity alive there, Will.

Will then meets with Reese along with Charlie and Mackenzie to discuss the recent ratings for News Night. They lost literally half their audience to Nancy Grace over the past week because they haven’t been covering the Casey Anthony trial. Reese blames Mackenzie and her ideals for their lack of Casey coverage, but he can’t actually tell them what to put on the air. He can only give them the facts and then heavily hint at a solution.

Charlie takes him up on that hint, and tells Mac and Will that they will be covering the Casey Anthony story starting on Tuesday. In fact, they’ll be leading with it, and devoting a full twenty minutes of air time to it. Mackenzie protests on the grounds that the story is grotesque entertainment, not news, but Will actually agrees that they need to do it. He wants viewers back so that they’ll be able to score the upcoming candidate debate. Their goal is to change the format of political debates, and he thinks that chance is worth the sacrifice of their lofty News Night 2.0 ideals for a few weeks.

Sloan and Mackenzie meet up at the bar after work, and Sloan asks Mackenzie for a few extra minutes on Tuesday night to go over the importance of the House vote on the debt ceiling. Mackenzie simply can’t grant her that time because so much of the episode is going to be devoted to covering Casey Anthony now, and they have no way of knowing what else they’ll have to fit into the show. Jim, at that precise moment, approaches Mac at the bar with the news that Anthony Weiner just “tweeted a picture of his groin to 40,000 followers.” Terrible timing for Mackenzie, but great comedic timing for us.

Sloan also asks what the deal with Brian is, relationship-wise, because he’s cute. Turns out, Mackenzie used to date him. Six years ago, in fact, and Sloan takes so long to put the pieces together that Mac finally blurts out that yes, he was the ex she cheated on Will with. There’s no way that’s a coincidental choice on Will’s part, either. Considering his history of emotional manipulation (remember that Tiffany’s engagement ring stunt he pulled?), I had to wonder what he was up to here.

Brian observes the next day’s meeting between Mackenzie and Will, who asks for three minutes to cover the Weiner story. He says it’s to show that he’s balanced and not just going after Tea Party politicians, but it’s really about the viewers and the mock debate opportunity. Mackenzie, thoroughly angry about Will’s abandonment of the News Night 2.0 principles, allows him the time anyway and storms off, as she tends to do.

After witnessing this exchange, Brian starts pushing Will on the issue of Leona Lansing. He wants to know if it’s mere coincidence that all the tabloid stories about Will started coming out right after the Congress election. AWM has to do business with Congress, he says, and Will is making that job harder. Is he worried about Leona firing him? Will declines to say anything out loud, but his silence means that Brian’s right.

The rest of the news team is in the conference room, all practicing for the mock debate. They’ve each taken on the role of a candidate and have studied their quotes and their positions. Maggie asks Jim, who’s being Michelle Bachmann, that since she said God told her to run for President, what does God’s voice sound like? The rest of the team starts to laugh off the question, but Maggie is utterly serious.

Gary and Jim point out that they don’t want to alienate Christians (83% of the population, Gary says) by making fun of Bachmann with this question. Maggie’s not making fun of Christians, though; she’s defending them because she’s one of them. If Michelle Bachmann did in fact hear the voice of God, then she’s the first prophet since Moses, Maggie says, and she wants to know about the experience. Biblically speaking, there were plenty of prophets after Moses, but that’s not the point right now. The point is that Maggie is sick of being represented as a Christian by politicians who use her religion as nothing more than a political tool, and she’s sick of them reducing God to “a political hack” who take sides in elections.

Thus far there hasn’t been too much discussion of religion on the show—for which I am so grateful; the sheer volume of bombastic speeches would probably increase to critical mass—but I was pleased with how they handled Maggie’s position here. Not only is it a previously unknown facet of her character, but it was actually a nice balance to illustrate: just because somebody shares a religion with somebody else doesn’t mean they’re the same or hold the same positions on issues.

Mackenzie interrupts the mock debate to have their story meeting for tonight’s show. They have to decide which of the stories on the board they’re going to have to cut to fit in all the Casey Anthony coverage that they need. She’s even enlisted Don to help them cover it in the way that will get the most viewers back. “Forget everything you know about the news,” he says cheerfully as Mackenzie quietly dies a little bit on the inside.

Meanwhile, Charlie is on his way to meet Late for Dinner, his mysterious informant from last episode, at the public library. His real name is Solomon Hancock, and he started out working for the Navy fighting Soviets. Now after a stint in the private sector, he’s working for the NSA as Deputy Director of Technology and Systems Cryptography and Mathematics.

He tells Charlie about the project Global Clarity, which Hancock describes as essentially the machine from The Dark Knight that Batman uses to find the Joker. Charlie doesn’t get the reference, but I thought it was pretty awesome. Hancock says this project involves an immense amount of warrant-less, fourth amendment-defying wiretapping, and he gives Charlie the transcripts of his testimonials about this project. If Charlie runs his story, Hancock will give him more information on the wiretapping that TMI has been doing at the order of Reese Lansing.

Brian shows up to the staff meeting, where Don is analyzing the structure of Nancy Grace’s coverage of Casey Anthony.  His breakdown of the footage is actually pretty fascinating. He points out that Nancy’s always in the center, and that she’s placed three experts around her along with a loop of home footage of little Caylee. Her show switches the images often no matter the verbal context because, as Don points out, “Tess was about to look somewhere else.” It’s all based on an emotional appeal to the viewers rather than facts. Will and the rest of the staff hate it, but he yells at them to put up with this way of covering it until the debate has been secured.

Charlie returns from his secret meeting and fills Mackenzie and Will in on the situation. He needs someone to vet this source so they can do the story, and Mackenzie suggests having Jim do it. “I taught him how to do the news,” she said, which is apparently proof enough that he can do the job. They end up giving the task to Jim, with the caveat that he’ll have to be able to do this research without raising any flags at the NSA.

Reese runs into Will the morning after their broadcast of Casey Anthony coverage: they’ve gained back 150,000 viewers overnight. He starts heavily dropping hints about the extreme weather, but Will shuts him down. He has not yet been reduced to doing a weather report; he says it’s not news. The news is where this reviewer turns for coverage of extreme weather, but I guess News Night is above, you know, serving vital information to the people who watch it.

Brian is waiting in Mackenzie’s office for an interview, but it naturally devolves into a conversation about their past. Mackenzie actually delivers a great line when he asks about the principles of the show changing: “I’m no longer required to live up to your standards.” More of that Mackenzie, please! Brian has of course read the email that Mackenzie sent out to hundreds of thousands of people, and he takes issue with the “I cheated on Will” part of it. He says that she, in fact, was cheating on him with Will. Considering they weren’t together at the time (unless you count drunken booty calls, which naturally Brian does), Mackenzie sticks with the original phrasing.

Neal interrupts the mounting tension with a story to pitch about internet trolls (though given his story idea history, it was not farfetched of Mackenzie to assume living-under-the-bridge trolls). He wants to go undercover and infiltrate the trolling community sites, but to do so, he’d have to be able to point to an actual incidence of trolling. He doesn’t want to do it to an innocent person, so he asks for permission to troll someone on the staff. Mackenzie approves this idea, though I think it’s probably a bad idea image-wise to spread lies about a staff member on the internet for the sake of a story. Neal asks Sloan for permission to troll her, but she refuses, even slamming him against the wall a couple of times. It’s terribly unprofessional, but it was fun to watch.

Will and Lonny take some time out of their day to drop in unannounced on Dr. Jack Habib because Will is having an emergency. He interrupts Dr. Habib being with a patient (because Will’s problems are obviously more important than anybody else’s problems) to tell him the situation. Will is fine with all the principle abandonment he’s been doing; his real concern is why he would pick Mackenzie’s ex to do the story on him. Dr. Habib suggests that perhaps Will is too busy pretending not to mind to actually forgive Mackenzie.

Maggie in the meantime is meeting with Sandy, a young woman in possession of graphic tweets sent between her and Anthony Weiner. She wants the world to know what kind of person he is. She’s appearing on three other shows, though, so they’re going to have to pre-tape her segment when Will returns.

Charlie confronts Leona on her way to her limo. “Charlie, with that bow tie you look like a balloon salesman,” she says by way of greeting. Charlie ignores the comment, and tells her they know where the tabloid stories are coming from. She’s having none of his veiled threats today, and says Will is one tabloid screw-up and a ratings dip away from being fired.

Back in the newsroom, Sloan is trying to get Mackenzie to give her time at the top of the show to cover the House debate on the U.S. defaulting on its debt. She’s angry because they should have been covering this story for weeks to give people time to contact their Congressperson and now it will be too late.

The episode ends with the taping of Sandy’s segment about Weiner. Mackenzie is having a real moral dilemma with this story, and prays for a sign that she’s not about to do a big thing badly. With that, the whole building loses power, and the titular blackout begins.

Overall, this was a pretty average episode—nothing too terrible, but nothing too fantastic, either. I’m more excited to see the resolutions than I was about the set-ups here, especially in terms of the mock debate. The show is clearly gearing up for the season finale in a couple weeks with all the drama about Will potentially getting fired; hopefully they can finish strong.