Aaron Sorkin has been busy of late, whether it’s adapting To Kill a Mockingbird into the highest-grossing American play in Broadway history or threatening to write a sequel to The Social Network or getting schooled by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. So maybe he’ll never find time for another project: Rebooting The Newsroom, his divisive HBO drama which ran for three seasons from 2012 to 2014 and starred Jeff Daniels as an anchor with lots of, as we now call them, “takes.”
Talk of a possible revival was reported by ET, and it’s frankly incredible Sorkin hasn’t revived it already, given that we’re two years into the presidency of Donald Trump, a person who has provided a wealth of material for a navel-gazing journalism drama set in the not-too-distant past.
You see, The Newsroom wasn’t merely a behind-the-scenes look at a prime time news organization (whatever those are in 2019). Each episode was set about a year prior to their air, allowin g the ever-opinionated Sorkin to weigh in on recent-ish events like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill or the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Daniels, as Sorkin’s on-screen surrogate, would then get on his soapbox and rant one of those Sorkinesque rants that can either be gorgeous and stirring or heavy-handed and embarrassing.
Who knows if Sorkin can summon back that incredible cast, which also included such busy talents as Emily Mortimer, John Gallagher Jr., Alison Pill, Dev Patel, Sam Waterston, and Olivia Munn, who was the one who spilled the beans, saying she and alum Thomas Sadoski have been in “conversation” with Sorkin about it.
“Tom and I are working hard and Sorkin loves it, and obviously it’s his creation and I had such an amazing time on it,” Munn, who played economic journalist Sloan Sabbith, said. “There’s been so much that has happened in the news and in media that we could really speak on, and it’d really be interesting to see what his take would be on it and what The Newsroom would do today.”
And who knows what Sorkin will have to say about [deep, weary sigh] all that we’ve been through? Will he have anything to say that hasn’t been tirelessly uttered a billion times? Will he occasionally slip up and accidentally go after someone like AOC, as we already mentioned?
And will he include that time a Trump super-fan mailed a bunch of bombs to some of the commander-in-chief’s most high-profile “enemies” — a harrowing event that we seem to have already forgotten, all because Trump has given us all goldfish brains? We may or may not ever find out. Or maybe Sorkin will reboot The West Wing instead.
(via ET Online)
