Trivia / The Newsroom

• Actor Allusion:
  • Jane Fonda, cast as the owner of a cable news network, who was married for ten years to Ted Turner, founder of CNN. It's probably no coincidence that it's called Atlantis Cable News (owned by Atlantis World Media), an homage to Ted Turner's Atlanta-based cable network.
  • Mac is deeply upset when her Wikipedia page says she went to Oxford rather than Cambridge. Emily Mortimer went to Oxford.
  • When Sloan first meets Lonny, she asks if she can tap his chest. One of the sight gags in the Old Spice commercials Terry Crews starred in was Crews flexing his sweaty pecs.
• Actor-Shared Background: Hallie Shea went to Vassar. So did her actress, Grace Gummer.
• Casting Gag: Thomas Matthews, who plays a News Night staffer, is the son of MSNBC news anchor and political commentator, Chris Matthews.
• Cast the Expert: Margaret Judson, who plays Tess, worked at MSNBC and was shadowed by Aaron Sorkin as he was developing the show. She later auditioned for and won a role in the series itself.
• The Cast Showoff:
  • One of the main plots of "Bullies" hinges on Sloan Sabbith's fluency in Japanese. In real life, Olivia Munn was predominantly raised in Tokyo, Japan, and later minored in Japanese.
  • In the party scene in "5/1", we see Will and Jim playing and singing a duet on guitar. Both Jeff Daniels and John Gallagher Jr. are talented musicians and have played in bands.
• Company Cross References: Equatorial Kundu is a fictional country first used in The West Wing.
• Fake American:
  • A downplayed example where MacKenzie is an American, as she was born in the US when her father was Margaret Thatcher's ambassador to the U.N., but she speaks with a crisp British accent, just like her actress, British Emily Mortimer.
  • Canadian-born Alison Pill as Margaret.
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: Aaron Sorkin considers the controversial episode "Oh Shenandoah" his favorite episode. Some critics on the other hand were put off by the episode and it was divisive among viewers.
• The Other Darrin: Jake is played by Brian Huskey in the pilot and by Charlie Weirauch for the rest of the series.
• Technology Marches On: Characters rely on Blackberries for messaging and news updates. The devices were holding on for dear life as business tools when the series was produced before being completely pushed out of the market by smartphones not long after the series ended.
• Underage Casting: Olivia Munn was 29 years old when she started shooting Season One when the character is supposed to have two PHD's and several years of real world experience beside, prior to the start of the show, making her character at least a few years older than her actual age.

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