West Wing's' Aaron Sorkin pens the new series about a TV newsman (Jeff Daniels) trying to tell it like it is while boosting ratings for his cable news show. The drama is weighted too heavily toward sermonizing diatribes.

 

If you ask a smart, talented, prolific, highly opinionated and possibly overextended writer to create a series for you whenever he gets the chance, you might get a terrific television show. Or you might get "The Newsroom,"which is what HBO got when they approached Aaron Sorkin with just such a request.

Sorkin, of course, is the man behind "Sports Night" and "The West Wing," two of the truly great workplace shows of our time, as well as the short-lived "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" which was not. He has also written a fistful of admirable screenplays, including last year's Oscar-winning "The Social Network."

"The Newsroom" fits neatly into his TV oeuvre, revolving around "News Night," a fictional cable news show helmed by Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), an anchor who once dreamed of being a real journalist like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite before the nattering nabobs of numbers-crunching, the gossipification of news and his own fear of rejection apparently turned him into a media milquetoast.

But behind that placid exterior lurks a true Sorkinian hero, another Great White Hope rising to talk, Talk, TALK some sense into the American public. It begins almost instantly when McAvoy, trapped onstage at a journalism school panel between two nitwits of each party, suddenly goes ballistic, answering the question "What makes America the greatest country in the world?" with the scathing announcement that it's not, and here's why.

And we're off, into a statistic-studded, fury-fueled and occasionally amusing diatribe that could just as easily have come from the mouth of Martin Sheen or Bradley Whitfordon "The West Wing."

Indeed, "The Newsroom" is, essentially,"The West Wing"by way of "Broadcast News." It's not necessarily a bad idea, although clearing one extremely high bar is difficult enough, never mind two. For the first hour, the show seems promising, especially for Sorkin fans. After that, things go into a baffling free-fall in which plot exists almost solely to support the political and cultural points Sorkin wants to make, often in non sequitur monologues.

After his meltdown sends him into corporate-imposed hiatus, McAvoy returns to discover that news division head Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston, delivering the show's most interesting performance, as usual) has brought in a new producer for "News Night," the indomitable MacKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer), who just happens to be Will's ex. Aside from the inevitable tension (he's angry and wounded, she's wary and apologetic), Mackenzie is there to remind Will that there once was a fleeting wisp of glory known as … well, she uses "Don Quixote," rather than Camelot as a reference point — the couple's quixotic journey is to produce a news program that delivers sobering truths and big ratings.

Now, it's hard to argue against the observation that, in the face of obstacles both economic and cultural, media outlets have squandered opportunities to disperse vital information in favor of pandering. Nor would many take issue with "The Newsroom's" second great insight — that the political and social divisions between left and right have been exploited by certain forces, many of them television personalities, to create an endless cycle of predictable arguments that are both absurd and extremely dangerous.

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