The Newsroom Review

The pilot opens with Jeff Daniels's Will McAvoy, a popular, inoffensive cable anchor, losing his temper on a college panel and telling a student that America is not the greatest country in the world anymore. It is one of the best scenes Sorkin has written, and the series spends three seasons trying to live up to it. Each episode of the first season is built around a real story, the Deepwater Horizon spill or the killing of Osama bin Laden, so that the News Night staff can cover it the way Sorkin wishes the networks had.

Daniels won the Emmy, and Sam Waterston's news chief and Olivia Munn's financial reporter are good company. But Emily Mortimer's MacKenzie McHale, supposedly a gifted war reporter, is written as unable to manage her own email, and the office romances are dismal.

Hindsight is the structural flaw. The team is always right because the writers already know the ending, and the result is often smug and partisan, as critics from Time's James Poniewozik to ABC's Jake Tapper said at the time. The second season's arc about a false report of a war crime and the third's run at citizen journalism are sharper, and the dialogue still crackles, but the lectures never stop.