Sequel, Prequel, Limited Series, or All-Black Remake
Already made as The Newsroom; Sports Night is the closest show to the film
In the discussion (4)
Approx. transcript time · 01:21:09Read transcript
- Asked whether it could be a ten-episode Netflix series, the answer is that it has already been made as The Newsroom, a Sorkin show about what if the news were the most important thing in the world; it was heavy-handed, though Broadcast News is heavy-handed too, and Olivia Munn's high-strung producer was hilarious.
- The Newsroom is called one of the funniest shows of the last ten years, unintentionally, every episode funnier than the last until it got good at the end, which made it worse; Sorkin, on one host's podcast, said he had a pebble in his shoe writing it and never got an episode right, a line his own characters would say; the reason it should not be a show is that Broadcast News is three people in a room while Newsroom had ten with ABC plots, checking in on Alison Pill and Sam Watterson (as transcribed).
- Death Patel (as transcribed) and Chris Messina get laughs just by being named in a wild cast; one host would still watch it every Sunday for twenty years without claiming it taught him anything about being human, the distinction between enjoying and good; it crammed Holly Hunter's character into nine or eleven minutes of Emily Mortimer, and the mistake was making Jeff Daniels, the William Hurt figure, the star rather than the Hunter figure.
- The hosts wish more shows were that polarizing, recalling that two of them died on Vinyl Island; Sports Night is the show closest to Broadcast News, more modest with more space; Goodnight Beantown, a Boston show with Bill Bixby and the woman from The Incredible Hulk, did not work.