Jeff Daniels
The Newsroom returns to HBO for its sophomore season in mid-July, and the team again finds itself dealing with the fallout from unfiltered, politically incorrect statements made by hotheaded anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels).
This time, Will has likened the Tea Party to the "American Taliban," which has sparked rage among Internet commenters and earned "News Night" an official condemnation on the floor of the House.
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Newsroom
Aaron Sorkin is well aware that critics had a lot to say about The Newsroom's first season. Whether he plans to do anything differently with regard to the many complaints is a different story.
"As far as criticism goes, there was a lot, so it would be hard to address this and not that," Sorkin, the show's creator and executive producer, told TVGuide.com at Sunday's PaleyFest panel. "There are plenty of TV critics I respect, and I read them and I think about what they're saying. But when it comes time to write, you really got to go in and do your thing and not have too many voices in your head."
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Carla Gugino, Emily Mortimer
"The first rule of being a female journalist," political reporter Susan Berg (Carla Gugino) tells a younger female colleague in the third episode of USA's miniseries Political Animals, "[is] if you s--- where you eat, don't cry about it. ... You want to be taken seriously? Take yourself seriously."
This single line of dialogue makes it clear that there's a much-needed crossover episode hidden in the summer TV lineup. Could Susan please take a temporary consulting gig in New York and talk some professional sense into the women of The Newsroom?
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Newsroom
There aren't enough words. Except in the world of Aaron Sorkin, where there are always enough, maybe too many, as the Emmy- and Oscar-winning maestro of the hyper-verbal aria (The West Wing, Sports Night, The Social Network) aims his sights back on TV with the exhilarating, exasperating and often sensationally entertaining The Newsroom. (It premieres Sunday at 10/9c following summer hit True Blood.)
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The Newsroom
Jeff Daniels storms out of the glass-walled conference room for the fifth time in 25 minutes. Apparently, Nancy Grace can do that to a man. Take after take, her Southern-fried commentary on the Casey Anthony murder case has been blaring on multiple television monitors around the set of a TV newsroom, and her "Oh, God, will you look at that" attitude is more than Daniels' character, Will McAvoy, can bear.
McAvoy is a veteran anchorman unraveling before our eyes on The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin's new HBO drama about...
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Emily Mortimer, Jeff Daniels
In an early scene of HBO's new Aaron Sorkin drama The Newsroom, a college student asks the show's hero, Will McAvoy, why the U.S. is the best country in the world.
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It's a vapid question, to be sure, but Will's mean-spirited answer — he says simply that it isn't, and then rattles off a withering, Sorkinian litany of statistics about literacy, life expectancy and infant mortality that prove his point — is both electrifying and kind of depressing.
Will (Jeff Daniels, in his first TV series role) is a moderate Republican cable news anchor whose show, "News Night," has succeeded in the ratings because Will has played it safe, journalistically speaking. (One critic calls him the "Jay Leno of news anchors.") When we first meet him, he's in a rut, and his staff, none too impressed with his very public tantrum, has decided to seek other employment....
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