Monday, July 09, 2012

TV TOPIC: The Newsroom's Infidelity Debate: Team Mackenzie vs. Team Will

This week on "The Newsroom," things got a little more complicated between Will and Mackenzie as their personal lives began to seep into their professional environment. Will started inviting his dates to watch the last few minutes of his broadcast in the pit every night. These stunning women, ranging from a ditzy professional cheerleader to an accomplished brain surgeon, stuck out amongst overworked, exhausted, and disheveled members of his team, including Mackenzie. She became threatened, combative, and judgmental to the point of shouting—in front of the dates. Maggie, seeing Mackenzie as an extension of herself ever since she basically referred to her as her mini-me, tried to get Will to stop rubbing his burgeoning sex life in her face. Moments later we are introduced to Mackenzie's boyfriend, the handsome and quite mature Jon Tenney ("The Closer"), causing Will (and us) to wonder why she feels the need to regulate his dating when she herself is taken. Next week, Will accidentally tells a gossip columnist about his romantic relationships, and Mackenzie flips and threatens to quit.

Forget for a second that Mackenzie did something similar two episodes ago, mass-emailing every single person in their entire team a confession that she was the one who cheated on him and not the other way around. That's mere crumbs besides the bullshit pie that she seems to be consuming. I haven't seen next week's episode yet. Maybe they'll throw us a curveball and even give us more insight as to why Mackenzie did what she did. But as of right now, based on her excuse from the pilot, that she simply "HAD" to sleep with someone else in order to be sure that she loved him as much as he loved her, I've decided that whatever emotions she has regarding his personal life are completely unwarranted.

You don't have sex with someone who is not your significant other to figure out if you love them. Mackenzie is a very intelligent and capable woman. She knows very well that she did love him. She just didn't want to. She was trying to love someone else. Because as we can see Mr. Will McAvoy is not an easy man to love. So as a human being reacting to another human, in spite of the fact that they're fictional, I just wish she'd consume her bullshit in private and stop trying to slice a piece for everybody else.

As far as I'm concerned, Will could entertain the entire cheerleading squad while they wore nothing but pasties and thongs in his office and it still wouldn't equal the amount of pain, humiliation, and self-loathing he's felt for the last three years. I don't pity her. I don't root for her. And I hope her boyfriend cheats on her, so that he can figure out if he loves her or not, because apparently, that's a valid method for discerning such a thing.

Oh and I wish Maggie would stop peddling love advice when she actually thinks an unsupportive, vindictive, self-propelling narcissist is far more worthy of her affection than a guy who takes the time out of his insanely busy schedule to be her human Xanax when her heart is racing so fast during a panic attack that it's the equivalent of a solider's in the middle of a war zone. Honestly, is the price of intelligence emotional instability and being romantically inept? Because if it is, these two women are on their way to becoming award-winning geniuses.

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