At the beginning of 2018, The New York Times reported that almost 500 original television shows had aired in 2017, a nearly threefold increase from 15 years before. For critics, the profusion of content may be harrowing since there are only so many hours in the day, and only some of them should be spent acquiring an intimate familiarity with the Freeform channel. But this is all a relative boon to consumers: No matter what you want to watch, it or something close enough is out there.
Even so, there is nothing quite like The Newsroom on television. The Newsroom, which weekend reports suggested is in the running for a reboot, was an HBO series created in 2012 by Aaron Sorkin about the inner workings of Atlantis Cable News, or ACN, a fictional cable news network. Episodes often followed this structure: A groundbreaking world event would happen (the death of bin Laden, the Boston Marathon bombing), followed by some protracted newsroom debate over the most ethical way to cover it (with the benefit that Sorkin was well-positioned to acknowledge all the potential pitfalls of such coverage due to the fact that he was writing about them long after they happened, and those pitfalls had been discussed at length). The show’s protagonist was anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), a former Republican who was narratively depicted as the voice of “reason” despite thinking and acting like a former Republican would; his cult of character spawned numerous smarmy Twitter accounts, at least one of which still comments on current events.
Today will be the last day we at ACN will refer to it as same-sex marriage.
— Will McAvoy (@WillMcAvoyACN) June 26, 2015
Starting tomorrow, it is just marriage, as it is under the law.
The Newsroom was a ridiculous, if not outright bad show for myriad reasons including but not limited to the pacing, the casting, the storytelling, the music cues, and the characters. But there was one novelty to its existence: Journalists could not stop watching and talking about how bad it was. It was a low-stakes way of engaging with and critiquing our livelihood that required no actual risk, since it wasn’t like any of them were going to be denied a job offer at ACN for their devastating insults about Will McAvoy’s haircut. The conditions of its popularity were, at the time, unique: It was the only contemporary show exclusively focused on depicting modern journalism (or at least the most high-profile); among Hollywood screenwriters, most of whom pass through life relatively unnoticed, Sorkin is a singular lightning rod for negative criticism (and is pretty much on record as being an asshole); the modern media loves to obsess over itself. And so, for the three years it was on it seemed like the majority of journalists had a working understanding of this show they all agreed was mostly terrible. (If this perception was exaggerated, it was because journalists are great at exaggerating the magnitude of whatever they happen to be interested in.)
Most shows collectively deemed terrible by an educated media class are usually considered too stupid to even specifically criticize, which is why only the most obscure websites recap Young Sheldon. But The Newsroom provided a rare opportunity for journalists to regularly criticize and reflect on their own industry without guilt — here, they were only responding to how someone else was doing it. During the show’s run Sorkin was the most widely consumed media critic in the world (which, given the show’s low ratings, is a depressing thing to consider) and hundreds of journalists became “insiders” prepared to testify about how he was “getting it wrong.” (Never mind the fact that pretty much all television deviates from reality whenever depicting a job; people love Law & Order: Special Victims Unit despite it existing in a reality in which New York City has alleys for murders to be committed.)
newsroom s4 e3, "covfefe"
— mark (@kept_simple) February 19, 2019
producer: the president tweeted "covfefe." abc, cnn, nbc all reporting he meant "coffee." we have to stay on top of this!
[the national's "mr november" swells]
jeff newsroom: the president is calling us "fake news." you want to prove him right?
Despite the The Newsroom being a bad show, it was at least an entertaining one: Sorkin excels at writing snappy dialogue (even when the ideas it contains are nonsensical) and his penchant for maudlin melodrama led to some creative decisions made with true bravura, like using Coldplay’s “Fix You” to score the conclusion of an episode about the Gabrielle Giffords shooting, that was also somehow about a bad relationship. It was a show you could easily follow, and it was barely a time commitment; it seemed reasonable to spend 55 minutes a week for ten weeks every 14 months to “keep up.” Scores of journalists clearly felt the same way, which is why it received so much attention in proportion to its quality.
Do I miss this? Not actively, but enough that a little flicker of joy ran through me after reading the reboot rumors. Those rumors may be slightly overblown, since Sorkin denied them directly. (The initial reports emerged from Olivia Munn, who starred on the original show as tough-talking business reporter Sloan Sabbith, and said she’d discussed its possible revival with Sorkin himself. So, someone is not telling the truth here.) And there are so many shows, many of which provide the specific dramatic or comedic experience I’m craving; my free time, and yours, will easily be wasted by something else.
The great thing about THE NEWSROOM was that one out of every ten people loved it, two were like "it's ok, I like the characters and I'm a Sorkin fan from way back so I kinda have to" and everyone else equated it with literal Biblical plagues
— Danny Bowes (@bybowes) February 18, 2019
Still, I would not be upset if the reboot was formally announced tomorrow. Is it stupid to crave the return of something I and many others can intellectually recognize is “bad”? Sure, but life is stupid. What other shows allow me to commiserate with my peers about how screwed journalism is, in the guise of critiquing a dumbly entertaining fictional show? None. When push comes to shove, I’d rather watch a “bad” show that a lot of people I know care about, than a “good” show that nobody I know even knows exists.
Every day brings dozens of degradations that only diminish our capacity for perceiving the world in a joyful way. Uniting to be flabbergasted at Sorkin’s bullshit: That is joyful, in a way. An entire season about Fake News, smugly considered with the benefit of hindsight, will surely fan the flames for days. And maybe divert attention from reality while allowing me to dunk on reality, which is all I can really ask for in a television show.
