Breaking news, or fixing it

Emily Mortimer and Jeff Daniels in HBO's 'The Newsroom'. (John Russo/MCT)
Emily Mortimer and Jeff Daniels in HBO's 'The Newsroom'. (John Russo/MCT)
I have a distant relative who works in television news.

Whenever I see him, I bemoan the state of the medium.

I spurt forth with ill-informed and intolerant judgemental utterances about how things used to be so much better in the old days.

I start yelling at him, demanding to know why people don't talk like Eton-educated 40-year-old bachelors from the 1930s who totter from one gentleman's club to another with one too many whiskies under their belt, stuttering through diatribes about the loss of the collective spirit the working classes had during wartime, dribbling slightly while they try but fail to brush dissected coconut and a small but noticeable smear of chocolate from the last lamington they tried to eat off the lapel of their dinner jacket.

"What about all these fancy job titles?" I splutter.

"Team leader this, team leader that, no Sir or Madam or how's your father or by-your-leave Sir.

''What happened to Mr J. P. Henderson, Town Clerk, or Mr T. G. Nightgroper from the Ministry of Works?"

Yes.

Next Sunday at 8.30pm, a new SoHo series begins - a series about television news.

The Newsroom is the work of Aaron Sorkin, the man behind The West Wing and The Social Network.

I never warmed to the former, and never saw the latter.

The Newsroom stars Jeff Daniels (Terms of Endearment) as television news anchor Will McAvoy, and Emily Mortimer as executive producer MacKenzie McHale.

Mortimer has been in Midsomer Murders, Notting Hill and Silent Witness, and you will recognise her.

Episode 1 of the HBO series begins with McAvoy daring to admit the United States is not the greatest country in the world, at some sort of university debate.

When he returns to his newsroom, he finds most of his staff have resigned, mainly because he yells at them.

The show gets bogged down in a series of personal background stories, and prolonged attempts at clever topical writing.

But The Newsroom uses stories taken from real life - the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico hits in the middle of everything - and suddenly the show gets interesting as staff gear up to chase the story.

It slides from that mid-episode high to get lost again in love stories, overlaid by the music of string quartets and the like.

Its strength is some good drama; its weakness, a series of pious lectures about the fine institution of news media way-back-when-it-was-grand and the world was a better place.

Perhaps Sorkin got that out of the way in episode 1, and the rest will just be the good stuff.

Probably worth sticking around to see.


- Charles Loughrey.

 

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