SMALL PRINT:THIS WEEK, details of The West Wing writer Aaron Sorkin's new HBO programme The Newsroom was released, with a trailer previewing the 10-episode series set to premiere in the US in June. With Sorkin and HBO on board, will this be the best newsroom drama ever? And what else in recent TV history does Sorkin have to live up to?
‘The Wire’: Season 5 (2008)
The fifth series of The Wire focused on a fictionalised version of the Baltimore Sun, although it was often hard to detach fact from fiction considering The Wire’s creator David Simon worked as a reporter at the paper for 13 years.
‘Drop The Dead Donkey’ (1990-1998)
This Channel 4 sitcom about a fictional TV newsroom called GlobeLink News focused on conflict between the station’s editor George Dent and Gus Hedges, the right-hand man of a barely fictional media mogul Sir Roysten Merchant, who acquires the station at the start of the first series.
‘Early Edition’ (1996-2000)
A CBS quasi-fantasy series about a man who for some reason received a copy of the Chicago Sun-Times the day before it was published, and had to set about preventing bad events that made the news.
Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993-1997)
More newsroom-heavy than other versions of Superman before it, Teri Hatcher and Dean Cain filled a cast of clichéd newsroomisms, complete with the bolshie editor of Metropolis’s Daily Planet.
