While The Newsroom's first season often mistook ripped from the headline fact for character and simplistic moralizing for profundity, having watched the first four episodes of season two we are happy to report that showrunner Aaron Sorkin seems to have fixed many of the problems that plagued the first season... and in a few cases replaced them with all new problems.
Episode four of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom, "I’ll Fix You," is a fairly engaging episode which delves the furthest into Will’s personal and emotional life thus far. Despite the strong character moments for McAvoy though, it's beginning to seem as though the female characters on The Newsroom exist pretty much only to instigate plot.
In many of the series reviews I've read of The Newsroom, critics unanimously declared that the pilot, "We Just Decided To," was the strongest of the first four episodes. For me, however, this Sunday's episode, "The 112th Congress," is easily Sorkin's strongest stuff thus far, at least partly because of the episodes effective structural reliance on a device that Sorkin memorably used in David Fincher's The Social Network.
After a promising but problematic pilot, the second episode of Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom should have brought things together and smoothed out some of the rough edges. Instead, it's very clear that the series is still struggling to find its feet. Worse, it almost squandered what interest we had in the series by repeating itself in just the second episode.
Pilot episodes are notoriously hard to pull off. The writer must introduce characters, themes, and settings, all while telling a very specific type of “jumping off” story likely bearing little resemblance to the episodes that will follow. Such is the case with “We Just Decided To,” the first episode of super-creator Aaron Sorkin’s new show The Newsroom.
It's hard to believe the season is already half over, but HBO's Game of Thrones continues to go strong in its fifth episode, entitled "The Ghost of Harrenhal." Gruesome deaths, political schemes, hard truths, and revenge are par for the course in this series and nowhere is that more evident than in this episode.
Starting with a fart joke and a direwolf mauling, "Garden of Bones" is an episode full of timely interventions and fateful confrontations, as well as one of the most disturbing cliffhangers you're ever likely to see on TV. Despite some missteps, HBO's Game of Thrones continues to be one of the most compelling shows on television with this fourth episode of the second season.
Noah Taylor tags in for our weekly recap of Game of Thrones - Episode 2.3 - "What is Dead May Never Die."
The second episode of the Clash of Kings season of Game of Thrones, entitled “The Night Lands,” is extremely well developed, but it’s also the most gratuitously smutty of the four episodes of season two that Dork Shelf has seen. We get lots of Tyrion, we get some fun original scenes, we’re introduced to a colorful pirate in Salladhor Saan and we finally get to glimpse of Pyke and the Iron Islands. With season two, the showrunners continue to demonstrate impressive juggling ability.
