Maggie Jordan, what did you do to your hair? That was the collective response to Sunday night’s premiere of “The Newsroom” on HBO. Jordan, played by actress Alison Pill, made her season two debut sporting a red pixie-cut, which Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) explained by saying that some terribly messed up stuff happened to her in Uganda.
Unfortunately, this is all we find out for now, as the episode then back steps to August 23, 2011, a memorable date for Washingtonians, thanks to the Mineral, Va., earthquake that rattled the Washington Monument to the state of disrepair.
At this time, McAvoy is still dealing with the fallout from calling the Tea Party “the American Taliban.” He’s been pulled off the anchor desk for the 10 year anniversary of 9/11. He’s responsible for ACN president Reese Lansing (Chris Messina) getting disinvited from a Capitol Hill meeting to discuss piracy. Lansing can’t believe the consequences. “The consequence was that you were left off of a guest list,” Sam Waterston’s Charlie Skinner inserts. “For SOPA, not the Met Gala,” Jane Fonda’s Leona Lansing screeches back.
Additionally, McAvoy’s Tea Party treatment doesn’t do Jim Harper (John Gallagher, Jr.) any favors either. Harper has had enough of his on-off flirtation with Maggie, especially since she’s back to exclusively dating executive producer Don Keefer (Thomas Sadoski), so Harper leaves New York and heads to New Hampshire to cover the Mitt Romney campaign in the run-up to the GOP primaries.
There, he has the best exchange of the episode, as Romney’s advance guy explains, “[he] wasn’t wild about the American Taliban broadcast” and tells Harper that there’s no room on the bus and that Harper would have to drive to the next event. “There’s like 40 empty seats,” Harper protests, adding that he’s been driving all night long. “Well, then you better get some gas,” the Romney staffer recommends. “What’s Obama got it at now? $4.50 a gallon?” Ouch.
Aaron Sorkin included a couple of other almost-forgotten news stories in the episode, including the antics of French politician and former International Monetary Fund director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the hunt for Muammar Gaddafi and the origins of the Occupy Wall Street movement. “I believe America is on the verge of starting its own Arab Spring,” Neal Sampat (Dev Patel) tells his cohorts in the newsroom.
But then, the story goes back to Maggie. (Still blond at this point.) She wakes up to find boyfriend Don moving his stuff out of their apartment. He’s found, on YouTube, a video of her going off on a bus filled with tourists taking the “Sex and the City” tour, a tirade where she publicly says that she’s in love with Jim.
“You should call Jim, tell him to get off the f—ing bus, we’re trying to do the news,” Don says. Too bad, Jim wasn’t lucky enough to get on it.
