Why Did Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom” Disappoint?

Aaron Sorkin is in the tiny club of screenwriters who are household names. His TV show The West Wingmade him beloved by critics and viewers. Then The Social Network, his movie about the founding of Facebook, won threeOscars. So when Sorkin returned to television with The Newsroom, on HBO, expectations were very high. The show starred Jeff Daniels as Will McAvoy, a heroic TV news anchor determined to tell it like it is and un-dumb-down the news. Supporting characters played by Emily Mortimer, Olivia Munn, and Sam Waterston fought alongside McAvoy for his idealistic vision of the news business.

But something went very wrong. From its beginning in 2012 to its end last week, the show was ridiculed by serious critics and by viewers on Twitter. For many, it became appointment hate-watching. Given its all-star pedigree, what made The Newsroom such a disappointment?

Willa Paskin, Slate‘s television critic, saw the problems from the beginning. She says Sorkin’s trademark witty dialogue clicked, but it too often served to underline the show’s self-satisfaction. “I think the dialogue is what’s interesting about it, and everything else is a huge mess,” Paskin tells Kurt Andersen. As originally conceived, The Newsroom offered a do-over of the coverage of events that had happened years earlier. That meant that in 2012, McAvoy and his team were reporting on the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill — with the benefit of two years’ hindsight. “There was something very smug and correcting about it,” Paskin says.

Even as it adopted fictional storylines in subsequent seasons, The Newsroom often sounded a sour note. In its second-to-last episode, the show addressed the subject of rape on campuses in a way that incensed viewers. A producer, played by Thomas Sadoski, meets with a rape survivor but refuses to air her story out of high-minded principle: “I’m obligated to believe the sketchy guy” accused of the crime, he explains, since he has not been convicted. “Sorkin can do anything he wants” on the subject of rape, Paskin points out, “and this is what he was interested in — to defend the rights of the accused.”

From the opening credits of its first episode, The Newsroom tried to evoke the heroes of a past era of journalism, when Murrow and Cronkite combined high principles with high ratings. Sorkin’s scripts fretted about the evils of the internet and citizen journalism, but “there was something anachronistic about the anxieties about the show,” Paskin thinks. “It glorified some moment 50 years ago, that may or may not even have been quite real, at the expense of thinking more deeply about how a news anchor should operate now.”

In its speechifying and devotion to liberal ideals, The Newsroom bears more resemblance to the beloved West Wing, of the late 1990s and early 2000s, but that show “just worked,” Paskin thinks. In her wrap-up review, she suggested that Sorkin lost track of how to tell a compelling story in weekly instalments. But our expectations of television have surely changed in the last decade, as cable shows have reinvented the medium. “I think that there has been a raising of the bar of what we expect from good TV,” Paskin says. “It’s not just the sound of intelligence, which Sorkin has said he’s interested in; it’s actually being nuanced and intelligent.”

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated thatThe Social Networkwon an Oscar for Best Picture. The film won three Oscars, but none of them were for Best Picture.