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Series / The Newsroom (1996)

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The Newsroom (no, not that one) is a CBC Sitcom created by and starring Ken Finkleman, running for three seasons between 1996 and 2005, which included the fourth-wall breaking Made-for-TV Movie Escape from the Newsroom (2002). It was screened briefly on PBS in the mid-2000s.

The series centers around an unnamed Toronto television station (strongly implied to be a fictionalized version of the CBC's own CBLT) and its self-centered news director, George Findlay (Finkleman), who generally cares more about how he looks to the corporate higher-ups or which woman he wants to sleep with than about practicing good journalism. Jim Walcott (Peter Keleghan), the anchor for the program City Hour, is equally shallow but far less intelligent, while Karen Mitchell (Karen Hines), one of Findlay's segment producers, is the Only Sane Woman who calls out the foibles and ignorant prejudices of the rest of the cast.

Shares a similar premise to the American Lateline and the Australian Frontline, but is otherwise unrelated. Not to be confused with the HBO series of the same name.


The Newsroom (1996) provides examples of:

  • The Alleged Car: George's BMW, which frequently has deficiencies or damage that he constantly phones his car dealer about.
  • As Himself: Several real-life figures appear when they are interviewed on the newscast, including David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, and Noam Chomsky, among others.
  • Black Comedy: Season 1 ends with the cast celebrating Jim's victory in the provincial election, even though Jim is still comatose from an assassination attempt and he flatlines in the room with them just as the election is called.
  • Deadpan Snarker: Most of the cast.
  • Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: In Season 1, George deliberately gets Jim hooked on prescription drugs in order to force him out of his job as anchor so that his new co-host, Lindsay Ward, can take over the show. Then when Lindsay gets George barred from the newsroom, he uses deceptively-edited video of Lindsay consuming wine to portray her to the corporate brass as an alcoholic, which leads to her getting shipped off to Winnipeg.
  • Kent Brockman News: Jim Walcott is an ample source of this due to his ineptness:
    • Jim puts on an act of being a born-again Christian and gives a one-sided interview to an ultraconservative, homophobic MPP in exchange for that MPP not releasing video of Jim soliciting a prostitute.
    • Jim's brief career in the U.S. has him inundating his morning show segments with jingoistic and borderline-Islamophobic commentary.
  • Role-Ending Misdemeanor: In-Universe. Jim loses his morning show gig in the U.S. after he is caught soliciting an underage prostitute.

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