HBO’s The Newsroom has a complicated legacy. Set in the recent past and following fictional, near-perfect journalists as they covered real-world events, the show trod a fine line between fact and fiction. This approach gave The Newsroom a controversial legacy, as it alienated much of its audience, leaving journalists feeling like they were being told how they should have reported breaking news.
This sentiment was so strong that creator and writer Aaron Sorkin actually apologized for the show, acknowledging that viewers’ discontent was not unfounded. Yet despite being considered by many to be “preachy” in the way it used its built-in advantage of hindsight, The Newsroom remains one of HBO’s most talked-about series.
In fact, The Newsroom‘s opening scene went viral and is still considered among the most influential moments in American television, boasting dialogue that has inspired even the likes of Quentin Tarantino. The Newsroom made a fiery first impression, thanks in large part to Jeff Daniels’ pitch-perfect monologue explaining why, exactly, America is not the greatest country in the world.
The Newsroom’s Pilot Episode Monologue Is One Of Aaron Sorkin’s Best
The Newsroom came six years after The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin’s considerably more beloved and long-lived political drama. With The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin established his dialogue-heavy writing style, becoming known for his “walk and talks” in which characters have fast-paced conversations while walking down long hallways, giving their urgency and professionalism a visual underscore.
Throughout his career, Sorkin’s verbose, borderline poetic dialogue has become his identifiable staple in every project from A Few Good Men to The Social Network. Yet Jeff Daniels’ career-saving delivery in The Newsroom‘s opening scene is a highlight of even Sorkin’s storied body of work.
In the lengthy monologue, Daniels’ famous news anchor Will McAvoy was lulled out of his status quo of giving crowd-pleasing non-answers while sitting on a moderated panel at Northwestern University. When a student asked the panel to describe “what makes America the greatest country in the world,” McAvoy instead responded with, “I don’t know what the f*** you’re talking about. Yosemite?“
He backed up his bold claim by dismantling the claims of both the left- and right-wing panelists, and then launching into a statistic-filled speech in which he explained that “we lead the world in only three categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of whom are allies.“
Daniels’ delivery had a musicality to it that is still memorable today, 14 years after it aired, a service to the incredible writing behind the scene. The lengthy monologue had a compelling balance of confident facts and more casual, conversational lines, making the speech both powerfully persuasive and genuinely entertaining to watch.
Lines such as the moments when McAvoy sarcastically referred to America as “so star-spangled awesome” and to the student who asked the question as a member of the “worst period generation period ever period” broke up the laundry list of statistics he had at the ready, making the entire speech a provocative feat of acting and writing that captivated The Newsroom‘s audience when the episode aired.
The Newsroom Changed In Later Seasons
Though this was the pilot’s most memorable scene, the episode as a whole is largely considered one of TV’s best pilots. Unfortunately, it is also The Newsroom‘s best episode, as the show soon attempted to walk back the very unapologetic power that made this scene so famous.
While the opening monologue was and is largely revered, later episodes that dealt directly with real-life events and their reporting are what began to draw complaints from journalists and earn the show its controversial status.
In the wake of this criticism, later seasons of The Newsroom shifted to a more self-deprecating tone, focusing largely on one completely fictional breaking news report that the News Night team got wrong and the fallout of their mistake.
As each season of The Newsroom attempted to reinvent itself and correct the flaws of the one before, the show grew increasingly melodramatic, losing the steadfast rebellious patriot feel that made its first episode so charming.
Yet even as The Newsroom‘s reputation and quality grew murkier, Jeff Daniels’ historic monologue remained beloved, a testament to the impact a single scene can have in the history of American television.
- Release Date
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2012 – 2014-00-00
- Network
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HBO Max
- Directors
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Alan Poul, Greg Mottola, Anthony Hemingway, Lesli Linka Glatter, Jeremy Podeswa
