The return of "The Newsroom" means another nine weeks with Maggie Jordan, the most discouraging woman on a TV drama in recent memory.
Season 2 of the divisive broadcast journalism fantasy, which begins tonight on HBO, quickly establishes that Aaron Sorkin's magical hindsight will still be on display. This season's narrative, featuring Marcia Gay Harden, will follow one story that ends in updated resumes all around.
As the season starts, Maggie (Alison Pill) has changed. ACN's "News Night" crew - the central focus of Sorkin's creation - is being deposed by lawyers after a since-retracted journalistic disaster. But that's not what's eating Maggie. "What are we counting as messed up?" she asks the network's legal team, who want to know why she went from blond and preppy to "Dragon Tattoo" in less than a year.
More time spent with Maggie this season will answer that question for us, but it hasn't cured what ails her. She's on a Sorkin show where a female reporter covering Mitt Romney's campaign says, "This isn't supposed to be happening to me. I went to Vassar." For those conceived as a foil to any nearby Y chromosome, it's an uphill battle.
Clearly, what Maggie needs is an intervention from another TV workplace heroine who started out meek, learned hard lessons and pulled herself up by the pantyhose: Peggy Olson.
"Mad Men's" secretary-turned-copywriter was in a bad place after her first season, too, and Maggie, "The Newsroom's" assistant-turned-producer, could benefit from her experience. Here's what Margaret "I Am the Person You Need to Impress" Olson might tell Margaret "How Come Nobody's Yelling at Me" Jordan:
It's about being a professional. Maggie has yet to land her journalistic equivalent of the Belle Jolie lipstick account because she lacks focus. If she wants people to take her seriously, that means no more ranting about Valentine's Day. It means learning the difference between Georgia the state and Georgia the country, and no more crying during Coldplay montages.
"The Newsroom" jumps back and forth between past and further past. In the further past, as Libyan rebels take Tripoli, a still-mousy, still-blond Maggie has screwed up again, blowing the fact-check on a segment about IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn's rape charges.
And as the second season gets rolling, our Manic Pixie Girl Friday schedules a trip to Uganda, then takes crazy-making anti-malaria meds, because she's still an adorkable mess.
Get a better mentor. Even though she's the allegedly brilliant executive producer of "News Night," Mackenzie (Emily Mortimer) has not learned to use her phone since last season. After Occupy Wall Street protests block her cab, she whines, "Do you know what happens to my shoes in the rain?"
Maggie needs her own Don Draper to tell her, "That's how this works. I pay you for ideas." And when she whines, as Peggy once did, she needs to hear, "That's what the money is for."
Stop dressing to bare your soul. Maybe what people wear to work shouldn't matter, but it does. Maggie's wardrobe has evolved from rumpled schoolgirl to sloppy tomboy. Both looks turn her into a vulnerable 12-year-old.
But no one should take her lead from Joan - sorry, Sloan, the "News Night" financial anchor who could flash cleavage through a trench coat and seven scarves. Sloan (Olivia Munn) is smart enough to care about drone strikes but stupid enough to let her boss (Sam Waterston) call her "Moneyskirt."
Keep your private life private. After watching Maggie spill her guts to a "Sex and the City" tour bus in the Season 1 finale, how likely is a secret baby, or even a secret flirty text? Nothing will keep her from confronting Jim (John Gallagher Jr.) at his desk to talk about their crush drama, not even Jim snapping "It's only awkward because you want it to be."
Peggy has slept with three married work associates, but everyone knows only about official boyfriend/stabbing victim Abe. It's called discretion, and it's another virtue better learned from Don Draper - or Roger Sterling, for that matter - than anyone at ACN.
Don't cut your own hair. Peggy got a bob from her friend Kurt in 1962 and left her secretary days behind forever along with her blunt bangs and ponytail. Maggie, who needed to lose her limp cheerleader locks, stares herself down in the mirror with a shaky pair of scissors. This is easily recognized code for "unhinged," and it's a good way to make sure everyone around you knows.
Embrace the idea of "this never happened." That's what Don tells Peggy about a trauma she can't change, and Maggie should be listening, too. Sending the show's tender canary deeper underground would be an exercise in sadism, but it could happen.
On personal and professional fronts, Maggie is poised to either take charge of her life or collapse into self-destruction. Either way, maybe she can stop talking about who's a Carrie and who's a Charlotte.