Last year, we quickly watched through the first two seasons of The Newsroom on Amazon Prime. It was on HBO a few years before. The show was widely known indirectly for one of the first scenes in the series, where Jeff Daniels' character goes on a rant about how the US is not the greatest country in the world to a bunch of college kids. Considering he plays a news anchor, his assessment about what we suck at made for a fantastic alternate reality, where some news agency actually wanted to be about... the news. The third season went Prime, and we just finished it.
I'm a big fan of Aaron Sorkin, and especially for those of us that worked in TV in some capacity, his show Sports Night was an effort that we didn't get enough of with only two seasons. Of course, I also dig things like A Few Good Men, The Social Network and The West Wing seasons that he wrote. But for him to revisit TV, and specifically news, was a welcome endeavor. We're in an age where actual news on TV is scarce, and the public at large isn't that interested in truth. Imagine then, a news organization, led by a Republican news anchor, that believes the public can handle something better, call out political bullshit, and above all, embrace the importance of bona fide, professional news gathering and reporting.
The show explores those ideas in the context of actual news events, and I think that's brilliant. It also includes plenty of the interpersonal drama that you would expect, and every character is so incredibly well written and developed, it's hard to dislike any of them. (The most surprising is easily Olivia Munn.) But the thing that I couldn't help but smile about at the end of most episodes was the idea, the hope, that real news and a society that wasn't willfully ignorant could be a thing. Maybe it's naive, but it's a good dream.
Highly recommended, watch all three seasons.
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