The Social Reckoning

Or: A Bullet in the Echo Chamber

Aaron Sorkin knows how to write both a hook and a button. He has his favorite touchstones (musicals, briefings, slightly unnecessary belligerence, people calling eachother stupid while they explain complex concepts) but when it comes to storytelling he can set an opening scene as poignant as Proust’s madeline or shoot down to the end of his story as clean as Odysseus  through the axes. I still think about the last shot of The Social Network, with Mark Zuckerberg, then played by Jesse Eisneberg, staring at his ex profile screen seeking the connection he’s tried to facilitate to the world. The Social Reckoning’s first shot, of a woman (Portia Doubleday*) by a roadside, promises likewise to stay locked in my memory.

Now Zuckerberg has evolved into Jeremy Strong, leaving behind his earlier incarnations cockiness for cold, upright reason, a billionaire lost to the voices in his own head, or at least his own boardroom. The story toggles across three years. In 2021 Mark prepares with his crew for a senate hearing (another Sorkonian favorite), manner massaged by crisis manager Raya (Wunmi Mosaku) and conscious nipped at by reporter Charlie Garrigan (Bill Burr*), while in 2019 Facebook data engineer Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) contacts Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) over concerns relating to the same women on the roadside.

Like Molly’s Game or Moneyball, The Social Reckoning has to keep its audience in a close dance of social, political, and scientific facts salting with characters who knows those facts perhaps a little too well (and at least one character handy to have explanations kicked at). Splendid actors though they are, I’m uncertain if Maddison and White were the right choices for this particular salsa. It’s always difficult to base your performance on two people currently living and (presumably, hopefully) inputting on the production, but while White is brusquely soulful and Maddison thornily knotted-up, and together they hammer out a precarious relationship between Mephistophelian reporter and weary source, neither give quite the snap and spark and conversational cuttlefishery that the dialog requires. Maddison can’t quite sell Frances’s love for and belief in her work though she aces the sense of betrayal afterwards, and White, for his part, seems to have ambled over from a comedy about a altruistic vampire whose gotten into reporting as a replacement for bloodlust. In contrast the tense chamber talk between Strong, Mosaku, and Burr, as the stakes begin to rise, and morals get sharpened, is everything one could wish for.

At some point during this delicate dance or time and information, we begin to see shots of boots on a street. What this has to do with boardrooms and newsrooms is only lightly touched on until it hits like a thunderclap, a masterful piece of storytelling that left me gasping. Meanwhile, pale as their performances are, both of our heroic leads get their acts together, in all senses of the word, and step into it, one thrown towel at a time. The last we see of them is another one of those perfect little snaps, long set up, the button on the end of the story, (though not sadly, of the history.)

*Contender for The Aven Tavishell Nifty Name Award 2026