I like The Newsroom.

There, I said it.

I know most critics seem to dislike it, even if Dan Rather and the general public do not. I know it’s preachy and dumbed-down (though that may be a self-referential snipe). I know Aaron Sorkin’s worn a loose misogynist label ever since his interview with Sarah Nicole Prickett, and I know he radiates full-on malice (see what I did there?) against the internet, and specifically blogs.

But the show had me pretty much from this scene…which, by the way, is how the series opens. So yeah.

I shouldn’t be surprised that I like it, I suppose. I loved The West Wing (the first few seasons, anyway) and The Social Network. I liked Moneyball just fine. Sports Night is one of my all-time favourite series, and The Newsroom is a fuzzy photocopy of the character list: Will McAvoy is an amalgam of Dan and Casey; Mac is Dana; Charlie is Isaac; Leona is Luther; Maggie is Natalie; Jim is Jeremy. And I’m so sorry for that last sentence; really, only people very familiar with both shows will understand what just happened.

But let’s be clear: the show mostly appeals to the preachy liberal in me, even as Sorkin writes his disdain for preachy liberals — see title of blog post. I want to believe that someone in the American news media recognizes the morass into which their industry has sunk and wants to climb out of it, that someone really would step up and — as Sorkin writes it — speak truth to stupid. But it doesn’t really look like that’s happening.

Back to The Daily Show for me, then.

.:.

Photo (of a newsroom, not The Newsroom, obviously) by Alan Cleaver, used under Creative Commons license