The problem was not the soapboxing or the unbelievably rapid-fire way that McAvoy lists statistics. At this point, you either accept that the world Sorkin creates is one where people are approximately three percent better than actual human beings, or you don't. I will never argue about Sorkin's genius or complain about his style. I am completely and unapologetically on board. No, I think the room-wide eyeroll came when Mortimer, sitting in the audience of the college auditorium, held up a sign that read, "But it can be."

We have all phrases we repeat, devices we use, and Sorkin is no different. In fact, famously so. This opening scene, where we see McAvoy yell at a doe-eyed girl about how America is slipping, took me right back to Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, where I remember watching a frustrated Tom Jeter, played by Nate Corddry, yell at his sweet Midwestern parents about the differences between sketch comedy and "skits." I loved that scene and I still do, even though the reasons have changed. I devoured comedy albums as a kid. Couldn't get enough of The Kids in the Hall, SNL, or The State. Watching this little 30-second rant about the proper term seemed like a personal victory to me somehow.

"We don't do skits, Mom. Skits are when the football players dress up as the cheerleaders and think it's wit. Sketches are when some of the best minds in comedy come together and put together a national comedy show that's watched and talked about by millions of people!"

It wasn't until years later that I realized this guy was yelling at his parents for using the wrong word while their other son was fighting in Afghanistan, which I assume is how most people saw it. And watching that opening scene from The Newsroom where our hero is hurling perspicacious abuse at this undeserving 20-year-old, I couldn't help but see parallels. But I wondered who exactly I was supposed to be cheering on. The elite informing the ignorant quickly became a theme of The Newsroom, and it was not apologetic about it nor should it have been: Television news and the government in 2010 were dominated by Tea Party hysterics, a bleak economy, and a seemingly unending war in the Middle East. News Night, had it actually existed, would have been a much-needed haven from the demands to see the president's birth certificate. But even when you agree with every word that McAvoy is saying, he is never challenged by an intellectual equal. So while his rant in that college forum would have been refreshing at the time, you're left wishing he wasn't such a dick about it.

By the time we reached the title card, we had already lost two people from our viewing party. It became clear that this show would not be about human moments but a series of jabs at the state of our country in 2010. In an interview with Vulture, Sorkin explained the setting: "So the idea to set the show in the recent past happened out of necessity. But then it became a kind of creative gift. For one thing, the audience knows more than the characters do, which is kind of fun. And it gives me the chance to have the characters be smarter than we were, which is always nice." It's nice in the way that is cheating. While Sorkin continues on to say that reporting on fictional news would have made the show harder to believe, the clarity that two years gives does quite the opposite: The characters always make the right choice both morally and strategically, which of course isn't believable. For example, the new floppy-haired executive producer Jim Harper, played by John Gallagher Jr. (who's like The Office character Jim Halpert only in name, looks, and mannerisms), within minutes of stepping into the ACN newsroom receives a news alert about a fire at BP's Deepwater Horizon oil well--and immediately recognizes the huge importance of it.