Huffington Magazine Issue 1 | Page 24

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FROM LEFT: TOUCHSTONE TELEVISION/COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION; MITCH HADDAD/WARNER BROS./
GETTY IMAGES; MITCH HAASETH / © WARNER BROS. TELEVISION / COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION

Enter

Q&A

HUFFINGTON
06.17.12

ARON SORKIN HAS returned to television. After several years
away from the tube — he was busy writing Oscar-winning
screenplays, apparently — the man behind The West Wing has
a brand new HBO series, The Newsroom. ¶ For the third time
in his career, Sorkin is making TV his subject as well as his
medium. The Newsroom relocates Sorkinville to the world of
cable news, which feels like a natural fit. Both realms, after
all, feature brilliant but tormented characters, big world
issues and everyone interrupting each other all the time.
¶ Over email, we treated Sorkin to his own cable news-style
interrogation. He gave as good as he got. 
—Jack Mirkinson

The opening credits of The Newsroom show Edward R. Murrow, Walter
Cronkite, David Brinkley and Dan Rather.
Is it fair to assume these are your news
heroes? Those are four of them —
we didn’t have enough space for
all the others.
The fact that all but one those men are
long off the scene is telling. Ever get
the sense that the show is chronicling
an industry’s death spiral? The idea
behind the main title sequence is
that the past is handing the baton
off to our characters, who, in turn,
refuse to believe that the industry
is in a death spiral.

Were you concerned with making a hyperaccurate portrayal of our current cable
landscape, or did you have broader things
in mind? Typically, when you’re
writing fiction, you’re not writing about something typical. It’s
important to me that the fictional
show, News Night, feel real but
through a romantic and idealistic
lens. It’s the opposite of Network.
This group of people are reaching
unrealistically high and so they’ll
fall down a lot but hopefully we’ll
be rooting for them to get back up.

From Left:
the cast
of Sports
Night; Allison
Janney and
Martin Sheen
on The West
Wing; Bradley
Whitford and
Matthew
Perry on
Studio 60 on
the Sunset
Strip.