Aaron Sorkin Is Sorry About 'The Newsroom'

The Newsroom is entering its final season this summer on HBO, but creator Aaron Sorkin isn't even letting the show ride off into the sunset before he begins offering his apologies for it.

In an interview at the Tribeca Film Festival, Aaron Sorkin admitted that The Newsroom didn't exactly turn out the way he'd hoped it would.

“I’m going to let you all stand in for everyone in the world, if you don’t mind. I think you and I got off on the wrong foot with The Newsroom and I apologize and I’d like to start over,” Sorkin said to the audience after interviewer Jon Favreau asked about what he’s learned about news media through doing the series. “I think that there’s been a terrible misunderstanding. I did not set the show in the recent past in order to show the pros how it should have been done. That was and remains the furthest thing from my mind. I set the show in the recent past because I didn’t want to make up fake news. It was going to be weird if the world that these people were living in did not in any way resemble the world that you were living in… Also, I wanted the option of having a terrific dynamic that you can get when the audience knows more than the characters do… So, I wasn’t trying to and I’m not capable of teaching a professional journalist a lesson. That wasn’t my intent and it’s never my intent to teach you a lesson or try to persuade you or anything.”

Credit: HBO

Of course, he undermines this apology a bit by revealing that the upcoming season will deal with the Boston Marathon bombing -- an episode filming in California. Sorkin claimed it was the first time he's ever not been on set for the filming of something he's written (really? He was there for every shooting day on Sports Night?).

“I haven’t become an expert in anything. I’m not sophisticated when it comes to politics, when it comes to journalism. I’m not as smart as the characters are or, as you can see, as articulate,” he said, a bit flummoxed. “I want to make it clear: I don’t know nothin’,” the Oscar winner declared.

Honestly, I've never disliked The Newsroom, but I can see how the show might have annoyed some people due to the Captain Hindsight nature of having the series take place in the recent past. But even that doesn't seem all that egregious a miss, really. I mean, I'm not exactly sad the show is ending, but it's not like I wanted to see it ushered off the air ASAP, you know? Ah well, I guess we'll see how Sorkin sticks the landing when the final season of The Newsroom premieres this summer on HBO.

Via: Uproxx