The following story contains spoilers from Sunday's penultimate episode of The Newsroom. Read at your own risk. The Newsroom usually milks its drama from the real-life news stories the show's fictional characters are covering. [...] on Sunday'spenultimate episode, the drama hit much closer to home. The episode - which jumps ahead 52 days since Will (Jeff Daniels) and Mackenzie (Emily Mortimer) tied the knot and Will went to jail for failing to reveal the name of his source - shows just how much the vibe at ACN has changed since Lucas Pruitt (guest star B.J. Novak) took ownership. In addition to a new tagline/hashtag - #URACN does look like urine, doesn't it? - and a traffic-hungry digital team, News Director Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston) finds himself assigning stories about Lady Gaga and a "promotable" stunt that puts a Princeton rape victim in the same room with her attacker. Don (Thomas Sadoski) spends the better part of the episode trying to convince the Princeton student to not agree to the interview, and Sloan (Olivia Munn) intentionally turns an interview with the creator of ACN's new celebrity stalking app (a promotional segment Pruitt & Co. wants) into a an attack on the app's irresponsible violation of privacy. After seeing the coverage, Charlie flies into the newsroom in a rage. Charlie invokes his exclusive right to hire and fire - a leftover gift from Leona - and arranges a sitdown with Pruitt to talk about how the new direction is hurting the network. [...] before Charlie can head upstairs to clean things up, he collapses from an apparent heart attack and hits head on a desk. TVGuide.com chatted with Waterston about saying goodbye to his character and why fighting for his journalistic ideals literally killed Charlie. At what point did creator Aaron Sorkin tell you that Charlie was going to die? Check out TV's most heartbreaking deaths Once you read it, did Aaron tell you at all why he made that choice? [...] it's not a departure, and I think if he were a real person, and you could ask him, he would say that he would prefer to die in the newsroom than be put out to pasture. From an actor's point of view, Moliere famously died while performing one of his plays. [...] Charlie was having to assign stories he never would have wanted to do. Well, you never knew how to take it, but Aaron always had him saying that he knew everything that was going on. [...] what's actually going on in the news business is very bad news for the American public because that's where we get our information. [...] to me, it seems like a pretty realistic portrait of how it is, and if a few people are alerted, and object to the dumb-ification of the news, I think that would be a good thing. There's lots to lament from the actor's point of view about the fragmentation of the audience that is going on these days, but that's a definite plus. The Newsroom's series finale airs Sunday at 9/8c on HBO.
Reported by SeattlePI.com 18 hours ago.
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