Huffington Magazine Issue 1 | Page 24

A 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.