Series Description

The Newsroom is a 60 minute drama series on HBO about a highly popular network news anchor who is suddenly faced with a new producer who insists on totally changing the direction of his very successful program. Instead of being the nice guy who takes it easy on those he's interviewing and covers the stories that get good ratings, he now has to cover stories that tell the public what they need to hear whether they like it or not. In order to do that he also has to ask tough, often harrassing questions of his guests. To make matters worse, his new producer is a lady with whom he previously had a relationship gone horribly wrong! Eventually she convinces him that he's a journalist, not an entertainer and he goes along with the change to doing "hard" news. But when ratings fall, how will his staff and he be able to convince them that the change is the right thing to do?

The Newsroom Cast

Jeff Daniels .... Will McAvoy
Emily Mortimer .... Mackenzie MacHale
John Gallagher Jr. .... Jim Harper
Alison Pill .... Maggie Jordan
Thomas Sadoski .... Don Keefer
Dev Patel .... Neal Sampat
Sam Waterston .... Charlie Skinner
Olivia Munn .... Sloan Sabbith
Adina Porter .... Kendra James
Margaret Judson .... Tess Westin
Chris Chalk .... Gary Cooper
Thomas Matthews .... Martin Stallworth
Trieu Tran .... Joey Phan
John F. Carpenter .... Herb Wilson
Charlie Weirauch .... Jake Watson
Wynn Everett .... Tamara Hart

The Newsroom Trivia

Series creator Aaron Sorkin is also the creator of two other TV series that show the off-camera events in the lives of the cast and crew of fictional TV programs. Those series are, "Sports Night" and "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" Of course, his best known creation to date is the 26 Emmy-winning series, "The West Wing".

Sorkin actually began developing a series that would become "The Newsroom" in 2009. He researched the subject matter by seeing what took place on and off the set of several real-life cable news shows.

The Newroom's fictional network call letters are "ACN" which stands for "Atlantis Cable Network". There is a real company in Canada named "ACN" that provides telephone and web connection services. There was a TV home shopping network named "ACN (America's Collectibles Network)" in the U.S. until 2000 when they changed their name to Jewelry Television.

The news stories covered on the show are real-life past news stories.

Ironically, Jane Fonda plays the CEO of ACN with a hard-nosed personality very close to that of Ted Turner, the creator of CNN and Fonda's third husband! In episode #3, "The 112th Congress", there is a conversation about the similarities between the Tea Party's tactics of today and the radical leftists of the 1960s in which one of the characters mentions that "Hayden" is one of the 60s leftists. That was a reference to Tom Hayden who was Jane Fonda's second husband.