My full review of HBO’s The Newsroom can be found at The Michigan View, but here’s a snippet:

HBO’s new series, The Newsroom, begins promisingly enough with nods to both Alfred Hitchcock and Paddy Chayefsky. Hey, if you’re gonna set the bar high you might as well place it at such a lofty level the viewer requires a gravity belt, right?

But from clever allusions to Vertigo and Network, the series pilot on Sunday night quickly succumbs to the weight of its own pretensions, violations of the show’s own internal logic, and a tired recycling of writer Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing, platitude-spewing themes.