Aaron Sorkin has been one of the world’s most respected dramatic screenwriters for as long as anyone can remember, and yet he will only be remembered for one thing. One work that stands head and shoulders above all else; a timely, gripping work that bewitched an entire nation when it needed it most. That work, of course, was The West Wing, so it’s only natural that Sorkin is thinking about reviving The Newsroom.
Oh, come on. You remember The Newsroom. It ran for three series on HBO between 2012 and 2014 and it was about a newsroom. Oh, come on, you do remember it. It had exactly the same first scene as everything else Sorkin has written, where a middle-aged figure of white authority loses his cool and has a Howard Beale-style meltdown in public. The only people who watched it were journalists, and they all hated it, the same way that the only people who watched Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip were comedy writers, who also hated it.
OK, fine, you don’t remember The Newsroom. But it might be coming back anyway. Olivia Munn, who starred on the show, has told Entertainment Tonight that she’s discussing a revival with Sorkin. “There’s been so much that has happened in the news and in media that we could really speak on, and it’d really be interesting to see what his take would be on it and what The Newsroom would do today,” she said.
Essentially, Munn seems to be saying that she wants a new Newsroom series about Donald Trump. However, no change of focus would alter the show’s central conceit. If you watched The Newsroom – and, unless you were a journalist looking to whine about something on Twitter, you didn’t – you’ll remember that The Newsroom was set in the recent past, so it was able to show us how the media should have covered events that happened in real life, such as the Deepwater Horizon spill or the death of Osama bin Laden. This meant that every single episode came off as preachy and didactic and smug, and the last thing anybody wants from the media in 2019 is more smugly didactic preaching. Now, imagine an entire series where characters retrospectively corrected existing coverage of everything Trump has ever done. Why would anyone on Earth watch that, unless they hated themselves with a violent passion?
Now, a word of happy caution: The Newsroom probably isn’t getting revived. In January, The West Wing’s Richard Schiff revealed that he had been having similar discussions with Sorkin about a revival of that show, and given the choice between rebooting a seminal work credited with elevating the entire medium of television or rebooting some dumb half-forgotten cack about a few journalists nobody cared about, chances are you’d also pick the former.
In fact, Sorkin has tangible plans about how to bring back The West Wing. Last year he described a vision where Sterling K Brown plays the president and “there’s some kind of jam, an emergency, a very delicate situation involving the threat of war or something, and Bartlet, long since retired, is consulted in the way that Bill Clinton used to consult with Nixon”.
Sorkin hasn’t gone public with any plans he may or may not have had about how to bring back The Newsroom, but unless those plans are “Just use an hour to broadcast two repeated episodes of Great News”, hopefully he won’t bother.
