The Newsroom - The Complete Second Season

If you're like me, you don't take television news very seriously, and you probably gave up on it a long time ago. You're well aware that every newscast has an agenda and most of them make very little attempt to be objective. When it comes to the way we inform ourselves we are all jaded, but one thing still gets to us - a good story.

In its second season, "The Newsroom" makes no attempt to be objective either, but it intellectualizes and romanticizes its subject to the point where we actually believe "the media" might have some integrity.

Writer and creator Aaron Sorkin began his career in the theatre and a theatrical voice shows up in all of his work. "The Social Network" is not a dry recitation of the facts in Mark Zuckerberg's life. It's almost a modern day Greek Tragedy, while "The Newsroom" reads like a screwball comedy for the hyper-intellectual. The dialogue driven scenes in this series are so wordy that you work to keep up. That's part of the fun of it all: You feel like an intellectual just watching an episode.

Even though the series takes place in a fictional network, there's so much that's true and familiar about the events we see on screen that it's easy to blur the lines and wonder, Wait a minute. Did that really happen? After all, the stories Will McAvoy (Emmy Award winning Jeff Daniels, Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series) covers are often actual events that happened just a few short years ago - there is the administration's anti-terrorism policy, Troy Davis, Trayvon Martin, and Benghazi. We get to return to, and relive, the headlines as the characters discover them for the first time.

In the second season, the action covers the course of a year, leading up to Election Night 2012, and the dubious lead that the "News Night" staff investigates has the mysterious name "Operation Genoa." Neal Sampat (Dev Patel) goes against the better advice of his executive producer, MacKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer), to follow an insignificant little movement that he feels may someday prove important - they call themselves Occupy Wall Street. Maggie Jordan (Alison Pill) gets the opportunity to prove her chops by going on assignment in Africa, while senior producer Jim Harper (John Gallagher, Jr.) puts his feelings for Maggie on hold to travel across the country covering none other than the Mitt Romney campaign.

This amazing ensemble cast continues for another nine episodes to bring veracity to television news, and what they end up providing is just a really good story.

Special features include audio commentaries with Aaron Sorkin, executive producer Alan Poul, and cast members Jeff Daniels, Sam Waterston, Emily Mortimer, and Olivia Munn among others, deleted scenes and episodic recaps. Also, get an inside perspective on each episode from a revealing interview with Sorkin.

"The Newsroom: The Complete Second Season"
Blu-ray / DVD / Digital HD
Rated TV-MA / 540 min.
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