• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, November 6, 2014

"The Newsroom” is as infuriating as ever. 

Returning to HBO this Sunday night (Nov. 9) for its third and final season (really a half-season consisting of just six episodes), “The Newsroom” is verbose, clichéd and, at times, over-dramatized. 

Having said all that, I couldn’t look away when I watched the first two episodes on a preview DVD provided by HBO. It was kind of like watching cable news itself. You find yourself nitpicking about what you’re seeing (or at least I do), and yet you keep watching anyway.

For me, the experience of watching “The Newsroom” is darn near interactive, as I found myself muttering my criticisms aloud at various points during the show (please be unconcerned about my mental health; critics often mutter to themselves, or so I’ve heard).

Two-and-a-half years ago when “The Newsroom” premiered (in June 2012), I found this show’s long sermons about journalism to be nearly impossible to sit through without tearing my hair out (not literally). Today, however, as the show prepares to send itself off, I have to respect creator/producer Aaron Sorkin (who is chiefly responsible for writing this show) for his defiance in the face of the criticism this show has received. Most notably, critics have long decried the obvious way this show puts its points across -- using a verbal bludgeoning technique to find fault with the way news is gathered and disseminated today at the intersection of TV and social media. 

On “The Newsroom,” this particular intersection is like the one in the middle of a busy city where the traffic lights have suddenly ceased to work and the cars are colliding all over the place.

“The Newsroom” is about a fictional cable news channel based in New York called ACN (Atlantis Cable News) that competes with CNN, Fox News Channel and presumably MSNBC (although I cannot remember any references to MSNBC in the episodes I watched).

Jeff Daniels stars as ACN’s star anchorman, Emily Mortimer plays his executive producer and fiancée, and Sam Waterston plays the “old school” boss. The rest of “The Newsroom” is populated with young people -- some earnest, some not -- with whom many in this show’s viewing audience will identify.

In fact, that was often my reaction to this show while I was watching it -- that “The Newsroom” is designed primarily for younger viewers as a kind of journalism civics lesson, whereas older, skeptical viewers (okay, me) might find its “lessons” to be old hat.

What are the lessons?  Basically, that TV news is an ultra-competitive business in which it is possible to throw news on the air, in an effort to beat a competitor to the air with a hot story, that might not be fully sourced and, heaven forbid, might even be wrong.

In “The Newsroom,” this situation is portrayed as being more fraught with pitfalls than ever before because of the intrusion of social media and “citizen” journalists into the news-gathering process. Thus, on “The Newsroom,” you have some of the younger newsroom staffers appearing to be all-too willing to put news on the air based only on Tweets they’re reading from ordinary people they don’t know.

On the other hand, this particular newsroom adheres religiously to a rule that every news story must be corroborated by at least two legitimate sources -- which means ACN often comes in last when it comes to breaking news.  As a result, the network is losing viewers and money.

It’s a conflict that appears to be coming to a head in this new, final, half-season of “The Newsroom.”  Oh, and there are also at least two storylines in which behind-the-scenes producers might face criminal charges -- one for seeming to participate in the theft of classified government documents, and the other for insider trading.

With staffers rushing quickly through scenes and reciting dialogue on the fly, and cameras bobbing and weaving to follow them, “The Newsroom” is every inch an Aaron Sorkin TV show. You can love it or you can hate it, but you can’t ignore it.

 The final season of “The Newsroom” premieres  Sunday night (Nov. 9) at 9/8c on HBO.