Network Newsroom

Starting a series premiere of a political news drama with a monologue on the ills of America is brilliant – courageously, recklessly brilliant. It's politically incorrect. The kind of screed that would grind most shows to an entertainment halt. If this same monologue had occurred at the height of West Wing's popularity and had come from anyone other than a stock, political hack, the backlash would have been swift. Bill Maher's exit from network television following his crude comments about September 11 proved that certain corporations lack the conviction of their rights and prefer profit to scandal. The terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers exposed the fragile core of the American media. In the immediacy of the post-9/11 world, they abandoned nuance for jingoism and drawing reductive lines in the sand, civility pitted against nature, red in tooth in claw, us vs. them – a duality where Maher's dynamism was not welcome. Months later, Maher resurfaced with a new show on a new home, HBO, a network known for its progressive programming and at-times biting social commentary.

Therefore, it's fitting that Aaron Sorkin's new drama would also find a home on HBO. Newsroom is Sorkin's first foray into the sanctuary of cable television. The premiere espouses much of the trademark Sorkin charm – accidental hirings, awkward badinage, and savant-like idiots – but there's an aggressiveness that's downright un-Sorkin-like. Even at his worst, Jed Bartlet is an idealist reformer, but Jeff Daniels's Will McAvoy is a realist who needs reforming. The show hints that years ago, he and renegade producer Mackenzie MacHale were the Woodward and Bernstein of broadcast news, but much like the actual media, McAvoy's jounalistic zeal has deadened. He's now the Jay Leno or more aptly the Larry King of anchors who offends everyone by offending no one.

However, from the show's first scene, his patience with mediocrity has worn thin and McAvoy's ennui boils over into a rant for the ages declaring that America is no longer the greatest country in the world. Like Maher, we fear that McAvoy may be fired (even if temporarily, after all the show is called Newsroom). Smartly, however, the show avoids the easy melodrama of termination or rivals without having first earned it and instead positions the season's arc around a more imposing fate for a figure of McAvoy's stature: irrelevancy. Will his speech be his downfall or his first step on a path to redemption?


At his best, Sorkin's conflicts are internal rather than external, rooted in ignorance, apathy, and self-doubt. Governor Ritchie from West Wing is the purest example that Sorkin's antagonists are typically thin and underwritten. A stand-in for George W. Bush, Ritchie spouts half-chewed cliches about the virtues of small government and even smaller minds. But the greatest battle of that election season is not Bartlet against Ritchie but Bartlet against himself, Uncle Fluffy against the Nobel Laureate. “Will Bartlet let the pitch go by?” as Toby projects. The query is merely a symbolic continuation of season two and three's prime conflicts: Bartlet's struggle with living up to his expectations for himself.

Similarly, Sorkin's other protagonists at their lowest doubt everything – God, government, technology, the future, themselves – everything except their fellow man. Rather than themselves, their enduring optimism is rooted in each other. They are surrounded by lost passengers on the path of righteousness, but not lost causes. The masses are not the enemy; they are the downtrodden victims of misinformation that need to be persuaded more than defeated. Like a Greek chorus, Sorkin's proudest refrain has remained that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens, a few good men, can change the world. That is why the easy battle lines of the post-9/11 media are so disheartening to Sorkin's worldview: they forgo a faith in men and institutions for fear.

Newsroom is trying to restore that faith in the fourth estate. Sorkin attempts to do this by setting the show two years in the past on the day of the BP Gulf Coast oil spill. At first, because of its in media res opening, we're unsure of when we are. For a newsroom, the background is shockingly devoid of televisions turned to competing networks except for one solitary monitor tuned in to John McCain. A surprising image considering McCain's considerable lack of television presence since his defeat in 2008 that is typical of electoral losers. Later, a typed narration reveals the date, April 20, 2010.

A newsroom with no flatscreens though is hardly the only conscious choice to deprive the show of verisimilitude. The episode's resolution is propelled forward by an unemployed assistant's sources and a blogger's geological hunches. In typical Sorkin fashion, the producer in charge (the villain of this scene) is an obstructive, micromanaging dimwit who cuts off his nose to spite his face. He'd rather have the boring safety of no news than the risk of news that might piss people off, the kind of gutless paper-pusher that plagues the mainstream media. As the newsroom comes alive with investigative fervor, he smugly sneers, “I'm the only one not dramatically doing anything,” and sadly, he's right because he's the most realistic character in the scene and that's the biggest disappointment.

When the revelations about the Gulf Coast oil spill and BP's culpability come fast and furious within minutes of the report hitting the wire within the show, Sorkin discards reality for the cinematic power of reclaiming legitimacy. We are not seeing the way actual newsrooms reported in the immediate aftermath; we are seeing the way we and Sorkin wished actual newsrooms reported and reacted to the tragedy. The poignancy trumps the fiction. While it's a gamble to set a critique of the media, an industry obsessed with daily business, two years in the past, it allows Sorkin the freedom to rewrite history to improve the present without having to predict the future.