10 TV Shows Where The First Episode Was The Best
9. The Newsroom
On the strength of The Newsroom's first episode, it truly seemed like Aaron Sorkin had bottled the brilliance of The West Wing at its very best, aided by an incredible cast, led by a never-better Jeff Daniels.
The show chronicles the production of a cable news channel, led by surly anchor Will McAvoy (Daniels), and wastes no time at all charging out of the gate with one of the best scenes that Sorkin has ever written - and that's really saying something.
The savage opening scene, where McAvoy is asked why America is the greatest country in the world and responds with a tirade explaining why it isn't, achieves a dramatic high that the rest of the show's truncated three-season run kept chasing - but never caught.
The rest of the episode does a magnificent job covering the fallout of McAvoy's rant while offering an inside baseball look at how the news is reported, and also introducing us to the top-drawer cast.
But The Newsroom is probably best remembered for its maddening inconsistency - its messy soapbox politics, smugly overwritten dialogue, and that infamous Bin Laden scene.
It certainly had moments of greatness throughout the rest of its tenure, but the show was never again as intoxicatingly, compulsively compelling as that first episode.