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" Any regular Aaron Sorkin viewer knows that while the snappy walk and talk is near and dear to the Oscar-winning writer&amp;#039;s heart, the snappy therapy session and snappy boardroom chats, preferably while a Handycam is trained one or more subjects, are a close second and third. Somehow &amp;quot;Unintended Consequences&amp;quot; was a rare mix of the latter two that opens with a Kool-Aid-haired Maggie trading quips with Rebecca Halliday, hired as ACN&amp;#039;s legal counsel, about everything from Manhattan apartments, to the Dutch, Gary Cooper, and the traumatizing events of an African genocide.  Rebecca: How do you get to Uganda? Maggie: Practice.  Hilarious. But now down to business. According to Rebecca, Maggie&amp;#039;s testimony in Jerry&amp;#039;s wrongful termination suit against ACN revolves around two words: &amp;quot;It happened.&amp;quot; Did a General she and Jerry interviewed about Genoa say it, on tape or otherwise, and was Maggie in the proper state of mind to recall the events of that interview correctly six months after she was &amp;quot;messed up&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;damaged&amp;quot; or what-have-you from her trip to Africa? Especially after being prescribed anti-depressants upon her return to the States?  The cynical answer is I really don&amp;#039;t care. We&amp;#039;re no doubt heading toward an exciting Few Good Men showdown in which it&amp;#039;s one person&amp;#039;s word against another&amp;#039;s and someone can&amp;#039;t handle the truth, but with a show that so hinges on its reflection of events that actually happened in the news two years ago \u2014 that forces us to consider the deaths of Osama bin Laden and Troy Davis and the grassroots movements of Mitt Romney and Occupy Wall Street in new light \u2014 it seems strange to use this thin, fictional thread to create connections and tie together our feelings about those very real events. Yes, Genoa is based on CNN&amp;#039;s ill-fated 1998 coverage of Operation Tailwind, which suggested American troops used sarin gas on citizens of Laos in 1970. But is The Newsroom a show that uses current events to cross-examine the recent American news cycle or is it a show that creates &amp;quot;based on&amp;quot; events to question how the media operates? Because it genuinely suffers, as would any show, when it tries to be both. Which is why Sorkin was smart to keep the manufactured drama of The West Wing and SportsNight in workplaces that relied on how the ideas in the headlines would impact those watching, and not on the headlines themselves. The dichotomy between those two ideas leads to the aforementioned unintended consequences of the episode&amp;#039;s title. It&amp;#039;s why Will can question the validity of Occupy Wall Street to the point where he intentionally embarrasses Shelly to burnish his reputation as a moderate, and also why he&amp;#039;s willing to apologize and explain the movement&amp;#039;s failures in private. And why we still wonder if Mac will feel like a fool for brazenly making fun of Neal about OWS. It&amp;#039;s why we root for Jim, Hallie, and Stillman as they protest the Romney Press officers who won&amp;#039;t answer real questions, and why the group continues to cling to their values despite sexist, angry bosses and a cramped New Hampshire hotel room. It&amp;#039;s why Don isn&amp;#039;t shy about allowing Elliot to say &amp;quot;Niggerhead&amp;quot; on TV regardless of him being white, because neither one is interested in questioning whether the term was or wasn&amp;#039;t painted on a rock, they&amp;#039;re questioning why the word still exists at all. And it&amp;#039;s what leads Maggie to interview American troops sent to hunt Joseph Kony in Uganda, where she meets and befriends Daniel, a boy who accidentally sacrifices his own life to save hers. Daniel had never seen blonde hair like Maggie&amp;#039;s before, so she cuts and dyes it after his death, which no doubt led to questions regarding her mental state. Those are all the unintended consequences, real or imagined, of recent newsworthy moments that legitimately require our reflection, which is why focusing on how CNN failed in breaking a now more than forty year old story doesn&amp;#039;t mesh with the show&amp;#039;s own thesis, especially when we as an audience have no loyalty to Jerry and don&amp;#039;t really care if he succeeds.  If this was Jim or Neal chasing Genoa, or Sloan doing almost anything at all, things might be different. We might believe in the characters and in the road they were taking us on, even if it didn&amp;#039;t totally make sense at first. Which is apparently an unintended consequence of telling us that Jerry was suing ACN before we even met him or knew who he was. Don&amp;#039;t get me wrong, Hamish Linklater has been a great addition to the season, but I&amp;#039;m more interested in the unintended consequences of how fking with the Romney campaign got Jim laid by a Vassar girl\u2026 and if Stillman was still sitting in the corner of the room while it happened. Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a24150/newsroom-season-2-episode-4-recap-unintended-consequences/>