Goodbye, Newsroom. How Little We Liked Ye *spoilers*

The Newsroom wasted no time in causing massive eye rolls in its series finale.

Within seconds of Charlie Skinner’s (Sam Waterston) funeral, Mac (Emily Mortimer) took a phone call outside and nearly shat her pants after hanging up. Did she land an interview with Edward Snowden? Paula Dean? Nope. One with the Stork.

As if last season’s finale with the engagement wasn’t cheesy enough, this one included a pregnancy! Aaron Sorkin pulled out all the stops to make audiences remember why this show was subsequently renewed then canceled, resorting to whore-y tricks like this one.

Although in Sorkin’s “Inside the Episode” last week, even he didn’t seem to know what the hell was going on with the show he created. Here’s this little gem of a quote from the clip below:

“When we all started in the writers’ room at the beginning of the season, everyone wanted to talk about how Jim and Maggie are going to get together. And I was actually the one saying, ‘Do they have to get together? Maybe that’s not what happens.’ And everyone reminded me of the promise made to the audience in the pilot episode when MacKenzie says to Jim, pointing at Maggie: ‘She’s me before I grew into myself and got hotter with age. Go introduce yourself to your wife.’ I was pretty easily convinced that they do need to get together.”

Maybe Sorkin took some advice from his writers because the WHOLE finale was a throwback to the first episode. In fact, about 50 percent of it took place in the past, and it didn’t offer very much new in the ways of stuff we didn’t already know (Sloan had a crush on Don? Who knew!).

These flashbacks were interspersed with views of the present funeral, where Maggie and Jim were already fighting in day three of dating, Sloan and Don were continuing to speak in constant ironic dreck, and Will got into a musical hootenanny with Charlie’s mourning grandchildren who got a lot of exposition (poor teenage-bass player Beau had sought Charlie for comfort after his parents’ divorce – FILE NOT FOUND).

Was this melodious scene Sorkin’s bid to place the show in the musical category at next year’s Golden Globes? Who knows.  It was certainly worthy of the comedy portion.

So how did it all end? Mac ended up taking over Charlie’s position, Jim moved to Mac’s, and Maggie finally grew some kahonas and interviewed in D.C. (the reason why her and Jim’s long-distance romance will work was one of the cutest moments of the episode). Meanwhile, Sloan and Don planned to continue to work side by side, and Will was about two days away from being an overbearing father with a camcorder, since he was trying to figure out the fastest way to the delivery room before Mac had even passed the first “semester” mark (his words, not mine).

All in all, this limited third season reminded me how far gone this show was about being a newsroom. One of the things that was fun about the first season was how it portrayed an inside look at the modern news. The second season became more of a legal drama, and this third season was a bit of a carry-over from that. In essence, “The Newsroom” could have been one of TV’s great dramas. And it ended up being just one of the puff pieces Will McAvoy would have hated.