'The Newsroom' delivers

“The Newsroom” is back. The world once again has reason to rejoice.

That’s right. Aaron Sorkin’s HBO drama “The Newsroom” featuring Jeff Daniels as the lead anchor, Will McAvoy, at a fictional national news network steered by executive producer MacKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer) returned this past Sunday in the premier of the show’s second season.

In this season’s opener, we return to the normal ensemble of characters in their hectic news-gathering.

This time however, Sorkin has us jumping through time, flashbacks to and from a deposition MacKenzie is giving to ACN’s defense attorney about a major on-air flub the team committed: the false reporting of an operation they believed to be real, codenamed “Genoa.”  

According to the report, the U.S. military used nerve gas. It’s safe to assume this aspect of the plot will ultimately change the structure of the season, making the time between the flashforwards and the present smaller and smaller until “Genoa” is the climax.

In these flashforwards, we also discover Maggie has changed, now looking, well, punk, after a trip to Africa went awry.

In the present, Maggie and Don break up after Don has been tipped off to the YouTube video of Maggie screaming her famous “Sex and the City” tirade.

Jim decides he can no longer be around Maggie and so decides to take a trip on the Romney campaign bus, one that doesn’t take kindly to him because of Will’s “American Taliban” comment, for which Charlie took him off the 9/11 anniversary report.

Of all the subplots opened in this episode, however, the most promising seems to be the lovable Dev discovering the very beginning dividing cells of a movement called “Occupy Wall Street.” In Sorkin’s impeccable trademark style, he makes it fun for us to watch the roots of something we’ve already seen grow and flourish. This will be a winner.

This isn’t a new show, but it is slightly different. Structure and opening sequence aside, the feeling of this episode was slightly lethargic.

Don’t get me wrong: overall, this episode maintained and upheld the amazing lineage of “The Newsroom,” it’s just that it lacked some of the show’s characteristic explosiveness and fire under its belly.

Sorkin drops us in the middle of things, but then overexplains the hell out of everything for the first bit of the episode, dumbing it down as if he’s presenting to an audience far less intelligent than the crowd “The Newsroom” draws.

Aside from that, this is a very solid opening to what is bound to be yet another amazing season. The fun is all back — I was audibly cheering for MacKenzie patching in her source live on-air.

The sharp dialogue, while not here in full, rears its beautiful head, and the acting from the entire ensemble is once again nearly flawless.

If Sorkin keeps doing what he does best in this show, and that’s exactly what he did in the last season, we’re in for a hell of a ride.