The Newsroom is a Canadian television comedy-drama series which ran on CBC Television in the 1996–97, 2003–04 and 2004–05 seasons. A two-hour television movie, Escape from the Newsroom, was broadcast in 2002.
The show is set in the newsroom of a television station which is never officially named, but is generally understood to be based on CBC's own Toronto affiliate CBLT. Inspired by American series The Larry Sanders Show and similar to such earlier series as the British Drop the Dead Donkey and the Australian Frontline, the series mines a dark vein of comedy from the political machinations and the sheer incompetence of the people involved in producing the fictional City Hour, the station's nightly newscast.
History
Season 1
The Newsroom was not originally intended to be an ongoing series. Its first season of thirteen episodes, broadcast in 1996–97, led to critical acclaim but no immediate follow-up commissioning. Following the end of The Newsroom, creator Ken Finkleman produced three different short-run series for the CBC, More Tears, Foolish Heart and Foreign Objects, all of which included George Findlay, the central character of The Newsroom, as a linking character. A Findlay-like character with a different surname had also appeared in Finkleman's pre-Newsroom series Married Life. Findlay was also revived in the later HBO Canada series Good Dog and Good God. In an interview with The Daily Beast following the Sorkin show's premiere, Finkleman revealed that HBO did contact him for permission to reuse the title, which he granted as he had no further plans to revive his series.