Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
I’ll be the first to admit that nostalgia moves at a frighteningly quick pace these days, but I was honestly not expecting wistful feelings for The Newsroom quite so soon. Aaron Sorkin’s divisive HBO drama ran for three seasons, from 2012 to 2014. It’s been 17 months since the series finale aired. And yet here were are, mired in the presidential election, and Bloomberg Politics has called upon Jeff Daniels to resurrect Will McAvoy to make sense of Hillary versus Trump.
“There’s absolutely no evidence to support the statement that Trump is the best-case-scenario for Hillary Clinton,” Daniels says, before rattling off a bunch of statistics that point out Clinton’s weaknesses in polls, interspersed with cutaways to the production room and Not Emily Mortimer standing behind the camera with a “He’s Not” sign. He also calls With All Due Respect hosts Mark Halperin and/or John Heilemann “Game Change guy,” which is pretty funny.
Even viewers who checked in and quickly checked out of The Newsroom in its first season will recognize this as a send-up of that much ballyhooed scene in the series premiere, when cable newsman McAvoy erupts during a college speaking engagement and just goes off on the supposed greatness of America.
For good or ill, it quickly became an iconic representation of Sorkin’s over-the-top writing, his fawning opinions on the Great Men that once made the newsmedia, and his inability to resist some prime grandstanding material.
The scariest thing in the Bloomberg video isn’t watching Daniels shift into McAvoy mode to point out all the free media coverage Trump will be getting from here until November; it’s watching Halperin and Heilemann try to hit their scripted marks. Leave the parodying to the professionals, fellas.
