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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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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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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