What’s more rare than Justin Bieber with his shirt on or Kim Kardashian not selling herself out?
A contrite Aaron Sorkin.
But that’s the state this producer was in last night at the Tribeca Film Festival, addressing the crowd and taking note of criticism leveled at his HBO series The Newsroom.
“I apologize and I’d like to start over,” Sorkin said of the program, which stars Jeff Daniels as a cable news anchor and which has received backlash for trying to rewrite the coverage of recent news stories.
“I did not set the show in the recent past in order to show the pros how it should have been done. That was and remains the furthest thing from my mind,” he explained.
The Newsroom has ran episodes based around such events as the Deepwater Horizon oil and the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi.
The series often seems to be taken veiled shots at how various media outlets covered those issues back in the day, depicting on a weekly basis how it should have been done.
But Sorkin reiterated here that this is a “misunderstanding” of his goals for the program and said he wanted to set his characters in real-life situations.
“Also, I wanted the option of having a terrific dynamic that you can get when the audience knows more than the characters do,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to and I’m not capable of teaching a professional journalist a less. That wasn’t my intent and it’s never my intent to teach you a lesson or try to persuade you or anything.”
The Newsroom returns this fall for its third and final season and will cover, among other topics, the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.
You can watch The Newsroom online via TV Fanatic to catch up before then.