Nobody Here Is Going to Shut Up
There’s a scene in the first episode of The Newsroom where Will McAvoy, a cable news anchor so self-satisfied he seems lacquered, gets asked by a college student why America is the greatest country in the world. He holds it together for about three seconds before going completely off-script on live television. That moment alone is better than the entire run of Girls.
Aaron Sorkin—the man behind The Social Network, Moneyball, and The West Wing—has described himself as a dialogue fetishist, and The Newsroom is what that obsession looks like at full power. The setup is deceptively simple: grumpy anchor Will, his recently-returned ex-girlfriend MacKenzie, and Dev Patel—yes, Dev from Skins, Dev from Slumdog Millionaire—all working together at a fictional cable news channel. They argue. They recite facts at each other. They fall in and out of professional crisis. They talk so much and so fast you feel like you’ve been sprinting the whole time.
HBO that same season was also selling you Girls, which is mostly interesting if you want to watch mediocre actors masturbate at parties and get fucked on grimy furniture while the show congratulates itself for being honest about female experience, and Game of Thrones, which is centuries of medieval inbreeding hidden behind sixty named characters and a mythology not a single viewer can actually explain. The dragons look decent. The blonde one is gorgeous. That’s the whole transaction, and everyone knows it.
The Newsroom is the one that earns your time. It gets inside the machinery that generates the news you absorb every day—the compromises, the ego, the weird idealism that somehow survives despite everything—and wraps it in actual human drama. It made me want to work somewhere that mattered and talk very fast and be perpetually exhausted by people I loved. That’s a specific feeling. Good television gives you specific feelings.
It’s on HBO and wherever else you find these things. If fast dialogue and American institutional drama mean anything to you at all, this is worth your evening. The first five minutes will do more work on you than most shows manage in a full season.