Take this The Newsroom Series Quiz to find out which character you are. We update the quiz regularly and it’s the most accurate among the other quizzes.
The first season of HBO’s The Newsroom has concluded its run on Sky Atlantic, but if you’ve been following the ACN team’s triumphs and misadventures over the last ten weeks, fear not: the second season has already been greenlit and will premiere in June of next year. Showrunner Aaron Sorkin intends to take an even more active role in crafting the scripts and has intimated that the show will most likely cover the US Presidential election race come November.
Meanwhile, it seems like a good time to reflect on the first season, which received harsh criticism from some commentators and great praise from others. It’s been a little polarizing, and in this recap, we’ll look back at why, as well as look forward to where we’d like to see the characters go in future seasons.
The Newsroom revolves around the production of News Night, a nightly news show on ACN, a fictitious American cable news network. Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), the program’s anchorman, delivers a passionate statement about what has gone wrong in America while moderating a political discussion at a university. Also, you must try to play The Newsroom Series Quiz.
The Newsroom Series Quiz
In the aftermath of the incident, Will’s boss, Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston), attempts to reverse News Night’s downward spiral by hiring a new executive producer, Mackenzie “Mac” McHale (Emily Mortimer). Will and Mac are old flames, and while their working relationship is strained at best, the rest of the season follows them as they build News Night 2.0, a show that refuses to chase ratings and instead tells the news by providing information that they believe is important to the electorate.
Part of Sorkin’s narrative style is to arrange the events and development of the characters and their program around recent news stories. But let’s hope you only heard about this first season, which aired between April 2010 and August 2011. This use of recent history in the news, with the advantage of hindsight, is frequently a double-edged blade, but it also provides a realistic glimpse into the newsroom and the people who work there.
The characters in The Newsroom have received a lot of criticism from critics, and even the most passionate fan of the show can see why. Crucially, Sorkin’s awareness of the characters can be traced throughout the season, and nowhere is this more evident than in the development of the show’s unmistakably Sorkin-esque hero, Will McAvoy.
About the quiz
Sorkin needed a leader who is intelligent but tortured; solitary but brilliant; and, at times, very, very American for his soapbox stance on cable news reporting to function. Will is bright, tortured, isolated, brilliant, and American, but for the first few episodes of the series, he’s also a) an arsehole and b) nearly infallible in the hearts and minds of everyone around him.
Mac continuously insists on being a decent guy, making no apologies for his bullying and self-righteousness, but it doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Will isn’t a poor character because he’s flawed; he’s a captivating character because of it. It would have been disastrous for the series if Will had been a 21st-century incarnation of Ron Burgundy’s notoriety throughout. But, just as Will’s behavior begins to irritate, the sixth episode of the season, Bullies, arrives. Sorkin directly acknowledges and atones for Will’s intellectually dominant methods in the episode, which is one of the season’s best.
This isn’t to say that the rest of Sorkin’s characters are immune to bad characterization or seemingly naive corruption for the sake of a chuckle. The other major critique leveled at this first season is its portrayal of female characters, of whom there are three main ones: Mac, Alison Pill’s Maggie, and Olivia Munn’s Sloan, all of whom are significantly more vulnerable to the show’s more egregious flaws than the men.
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