2. Real News
While most fictional shows have their own universe in which they operate, Sorkin has elected to build his stories around real life events. From the BP oil spill to the death of Bin Laden, the topics and stories that are covered in the series are all drawn from the real news of the last few years. This is a unique device and it allows the audience, who have already lived through the events, to invest more than they may if the plot saw a fictional country starting a fictional war. For some events it does remove tension as we know how it ends, but the point is to observe how the news team decide to present the situation on air. This is a show about the news reporters, not the news itself.