Synopsis:

This is a fairly heavy rework of Newsroom that strips out a lot of the more soap-opera type storylines and focuses on running the newsroom and the real-life storylines that ensue. It isn't entirely realistic, it's still a drama, but it's more serious with a few moments of levity, rather than the overly fictionalized original. It also does tone down the politics a bit, because the original felt a little wonky in a Democrat-writes-Republican-character sort of way. This leaves a little over 7 hours of content split into seven episodes.

Intentions:

My primary drive for doing an edit of this show was the incessant side drama with the characters romance plots. No one cares whether Maggie is breaking up with her boyfriend and cheating on him with Jim, and there is a lot of that content. I wanted more of a show about a newsroom, not the home lives of newsroom staff. The second and third seasons are also dominated by a fictional wikileaks conspiracy plot involving a lot of the show characters. It's silly drama and really gets away from the way the show launched - featuring real life news stories being covered by the newsroom in a realistic manner. There were a couple subplots I wanted to leave in, like the revenge porn plot with Sloan, since she's a great character and it was entertaining especially with the Daughters of Jihadi Excellence tie-in, but on later revisions of the edit I ended up trimming those since they didn't really match the tone or theme of the more svelte show arc.

Change List:

High-level edit list: + Keep main storylines: Deepwater Horizon, Newsnight 2.0/Casey Anthony/Election/Tea Party/Debt Ceiling, Cairo riots, Murdoch phone hacking, Osama Bin Laden, Boston Marathon + Rework the flow of the seasons, intercutting timelines a bit and changing some minor details - Cut Jim and Maggie romance, Jim and Lisa, and most of the Maggie and Don relationship drama - Cut Mac being confused at how email works, and ensuing drama - Cut some of Mac and Will going on dates and ensuing drama, keep enough to flesh out their characters - Cut security threats/bodyguard - Cut Fukushima/therapy - Cut stuck on plane silliness - Cut power outage - Cut Will in hospital - Cut the majority of season 2 and 3 just keeping an hour or two of select narratives and snippets to avoid the dominating plotlines of the occupy movement, campaign trail/blogger character, and especially the huge fictionalized wikileaks type drama