Anchor Management: 10 Best Fictional TV Newsrooms

(2010)

By the time Morning Glory was released, the hard-news-vs.-infotainment battles presaged by Network were so over that the movie infotainment’s victory as a given. Rachel McAdams plays Becky Fuller, a producer who’s hired to rescue a low-rated nationwide morning show called DayBreak. Her brainstorm is to hire Mike Pomeroy (Harrison Ford), a hard-news curmudgeon, but to get him to do the show’s trademark light-and-fluffy bits (cooking segments and the like) as well as his specialty.

Most of the comedy is about the struggle by Becky and co-anchor Colleen Peck (Diane Keaton) to drag Mike kicking and screaming to the soft-news side. (If you want to read the film as a roman a clef, with DayBreak as Good Morning America, Colleen as Diane Sawyer, and Mike as Charlie Gibson, go right ahead.)

Becky finds time to date another producer, but the movie is strictly about her professional fulfillment and her successful navigation of the tricky office politics that threaten to derail her career at every step. That the workplace is a TV newsroom is almost beside the point; the movie could just as easily have been about accountants or bus drivers, though it would have been a little less glamorous.