Last night, at approximately 10/9 Central Standard Time on the AMC network an episode of the highly acclaimed series Breaking Bad went to air and early reports say that it was one of the season’s weakest, crippled by contrivances and forced, flawed logic. The episode, which sources say was titled Say My Name, simply didn’t live up to the standards that the show had set for itself; when a show is ‘highly acclaimed’ people expect perfection and anything less is seen as a let down. The show then was good, just not good enough.

A second show aired at the same time of the same night that people generally liked less, but were in turn less incensed by: the True Blood finale. Now, no named sources have come out to say that they thought this episode was in any way ‘better’ than Breaking Bad, but it was better than many expected it to be, better than the standard that it had set for itself. Admittedly, the show is schlock, porn with marginally more plot but it hit these posts even if it missed all the meaningful markers by a mile and so it was seen as something of a success by critics and consumers alike.

This brings me to our top story, the third show of the night (Sunday schedules, amiright?) which qualitatively would sit in the middle, equidistant from the high’s of Heisenberg and the lows of Louisiana, if I had the budget for a graph or graphic to show as much and yet this one was the most maligned program of the night and perhaps will be the show that racks up the most criticism of this season and perhaps this year. I talk of course about A Better Fool, the Newsroom finale. It was and has been ‘hated’ throughout its debut season and it seems to me unfairly so. That it was never aloud to set its own standard and instead had one set for it, set far higher than it could ever hope to hit. Newsroom then was destined to failure, and maybe even built for it.

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