25-Episode HBO Masterpiece Could Never Be Made Today

Published Nov 1, 2026, 1:00 AM EDT

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.

While one HBO show from 2012 was hailed as a ‘masterpiece’ throughout its brief three-season run, the drama wouldn’t make any sense if it were created in 2026. Some TV shows have a timeless, perennial appeal to them, while others are uniquely linked to the cultural moment of their original release. It’s amusing to read early reviews of the long-running animated comedy The Simpsons that call the series crude, cynical, and offensive, considering the shows that would follow.

In an era of Family Guy, Rick & Morty, Big Mouth, and the most controversial cartoon ever South Park, the thought that The Simpsons could be considered offensive was quaint by the late 2010s. However, the classic cartoon sitcom isn’t the only show to fall victim to these shifting cultural tides. The idealistic political drama The West Wing was once hailed as one of the greatest TV shows ever, alongside the likes of The Wire and The Sopranos.

However, in 2026, the show’s upbeat image of American politics is comically outdated, so it is tough to take The West Wing seriously in light of contemporary events. Even later political dramas like Netflix’s Designated Survivor and Madam Secretary feel out of touch only a decade after their premieres, although these shows aren’t the ones that were worst hit by the relentless tide of history. That achievement goes The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin’s HBO hit The Newsroom.

Debuting in 2012, The Newsroom lasted 25 episodes across three seasons. Set in the Atlantis Cable News newsroom, the show focused on Jeff Daniels’ sensible Republican news anchor Will McAvoy. After delivering a fiery condemnation of America’s state of affairs on a college campus in The Newsroom’s pilot episode, Will radically revamps his newsroom with the help of his executive producer and former love interest, Emily Mortimer’s Mac.

In a 2012 interview with The Telegraph, Sorkin admitted that the titular setting of the show was not intended to be a realistic depiction of a newsroom, but rather a “romanticized, idealized” one. Herein lay The Newsroom’s fatal flaw, and the problem that means the HBO show could never have been made after around 2016 (at the latest). The Newsroom’s entire premise hinged on the main characters taking real-life news stories from recent history and showing an idealized version of how the news media should have covered them.

While the pilot episode focused on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, later episodes covered the shooting of Gabby Giffords, the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, and Osama bin Laden’s assassination. Even when the show was first released, The Newsroom received mixed reviews, with critics complaining that its writing was “smug,” “self-serving,” and filled with “sermonizing diatribes.” Of course, in the years since The Newsroom’s 2014 series finale, the massive influence of social media algorithms has completely reshaped how the public receives and consumes news.

The Newsroom’s Premise Was Tied To The Era of Its Release

While shows like HBO’s medical drama The Pitt can take elements from earlier hits like ER and update them to reflect the current state of the US healthcare system, there is no way of updating The Newsroom’s premise in 2026. The show’s entire premise relied on major mainstream media companies being portrayed as trustworthy sources of unbiased news coverage, an image that was fading by the 2010s and seems laughably naive now.

In an era when corporate and political influences on news coverage are common knowledge, it has become increasingly common for the public to receive news via social media, often through sources that openly acknowledge their ideological bent. The era of talking about good, honest, straightforward news reporting that has no agenda is long over, and The Newsroom’s entire setup was left behind by this post-social media age.

Sources: The Telegraph