Newsroom season III

For all their Emmy-winning, plaudit-gushing awesomeness, most TV shows have a fatal flaw: they never know when to quit.

Former fan favourite turned hair commercial Grey's Anatomy has stumbled into an 11th season, and Two and a Half Men took 12 seasons to go from a show about a lovable drunk living with his broke brother to diverse experiments in scriptwriting.

In open defiance of TV's tendency to flog a dying horse, Aaron Sorkin, creator of Emmy-winning The Newsroom, has opted to give us a third and final six-episode season before leading it out behind the stables.

The show follows the lives of TV news anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) and his talented albeit dysfunctional team on the show News Night. The team previously followed a ratings-driven formula, but now McAvoy is goaded by his new executive producer and former flame, MacKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer) into a crusade to do news the ''right" way.

Beset by the gnashing teeth of Tea Party Republicans, commercial interests and FBI scrutiny, the team does battle for the soul of news.

In season three, the news team tries to regain credibility as the chaos of the Boston Marathon bombing swirls around them, and business anchor Sloane Sabbath (Olivia Munn) finds that News Night's parent company is the target of a hostile takeover.

As an exercise in idealism, The Newsroom is as good as journalism gets. But having so many bastions battling against the forces of evil means the show is strongly sanctimonious. Its greatest strength is also its greatest weakness.

• The season 3 DVD of 'The Newsroom' can be pre-ordered on Amazon.com