The Newsroom
The Newsroom opens with Will McAvoy on some panel being asked why America is the greatest country in the world. The question is designed for a soundbite. Will just unloads. He’s angry and brutal and completely certain he’s right. That’s the whole show right there. Aaron Sorkin’s new series on HBO is about news people trying to actually do journalism at a network that wants ratings and conflict instead.
Will’s a cable anchor who’s basically given up. MacKenzie was his ex and she’s been reporting in war zones, and when she comes back they start working together. There’s an ensemble of producers and other people, and most of the show is just them in a room talking about how to run a broadcast while everything falls apart. It’s pure conversation. Some people hate it. I find it actually works.
What interests me about it is the attention to real work. I work in design and I notice the difference between something that’s actually good and something that performs being good. The Newsroom cares about real journalism the way I care about real craft—not for the drama of it, but because the thing actually needs to function. The scenes that land are the ones where someone realizes mid-story that the information’s bad and they have to handle it live, or they’re making a call with real consequences. That’s actual work. Most shows don’t care about work. They care about how work feels.
Everything else on television right now is either melodrama or spectacle. Girls is basically wish fulfillment for people with no actual sex life. Game of Thrones has incomprehensible plotting and everybody’s just watching for the dragons and the breasts. There’s no middle ground. You either get empty sentiment or you get pageantry. Nothing that just does the work and trusts that you’ll notice if it’s done right.
The Newsroom trusts you. It assumes you can follow a conversation. It believes competence is interesting. That’s probably exactly why it’s going to get canceled. Television doesn’t survive bets on the audience having taste or paying attention.
But right now it’s the only thing worth watching.