While the fictional TV anchor Will McAvoy is still getting acclimated to the team he's assembled at his "News Night" program, his creator, Aaron Sorkin, (The West Wing, Sports Night) is overhauling his own staff at his HBO series, The Newsroom, The New York Times reports.
Sorkin, the Emmy and Academy Award-winning creator and executive producer of The Newsroom, is hiring an almost entirely new writing staff for a second season of the HBO drama.
A press representative for HBO said that such changes were common at many series, adding: "Every year each show reassesses the needs of its writing staffs. This process is nothing out of the ordinary."
Sorkin has taken some criticism for the first season. Reviewing the series for The New York Times, Alessandra Stanley wrote that at its best it possessed "a wit, sophistication and manic energy that recalls James L. Brooks's classic movie Broadcast News, while "at its worst, the show chokes on its own sanctimony".
That was nothing compared to Emily Nussbaum in the New Yorker: ''As Dan Rather might put it, that dog won't hunt. Sorkin's shows are the type that people who never watch TV are always claiming are better than anything else on TV. The shows' air of defiant intellectual superiority is rarely backed up by what's inside - all those Wagnerian rants, fingers poked in chests, palms slammed on desks, and so on. In fact, The Newsroom treats the audience as though we were extremely stupid.''
Viewership for The Newsroom has remained healthy, drawing about 2 million viewers for new episodes and between 6 million and 7 million viewers over multiple showings.
From: SMH
