Aaron Sorkin knows, understands and appreciates TV history. In some instances — unerringly the right ones — he even reveres it. And that’s entirely fitting, because, by this point, he’s become an important part of it…

Sorkin’s first TV series, ABC’s Sports Night, was a playful, deliriously smart comedy about the workplace family that put together a nightly cable sports show.

His second TV series, NBC’s The West Wing, was — especially in its early seasons — a brilliant, inspirational comedy-drama about politics (and media) at the highest level. It was the last great gasp for commercially broadcast TV dramas — the last time an old-fashioned network drama dominated national conversation and exemplified the medium’s best, before HBO’s The Sopranos paved the way for this century’s cable-quality dominance.

Sorkin’s third series, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, was less successful than his first two, commercially as well as artistically. But it had its moments — including its riveting opening, which had a variety-show producer melting down on live TV, in a plot that not only echoed, but specifically mentioned, the fictional TV anchor Howard Beale’s iconic “I’m mad as hell” breakdown on Paddy Chayefsky’s Network.

Then, on Broadway, Sorkin wrote The Farnsworth Invention, a really smart, perceptive analysis of the earliest days of television — its genesis and development, and how corporate interests sabotaged part of the medium’s potential while maximizing power and profits.

Newsroom opens, as did Studio 60, with an unscheduled, unexpected emotional rant, one that disrupts the status quo and leads to a changing of the guard. Daniels, as McAvoy, is one of three panelists being questioned by a moderator at a Northwestern University speaking engagement. When a student in the audience asks the panelists to say why, in their estimation, the United States is the best country in the world, the formerly middle-of-the-road, offend-no-one McAvoy loses it.

Except that what Sorkin has in mind is the exact opposite. Will McAvoy hasn’t lost his mind, or his way. He’s found his purpose, and his direction. Right after his rant, still addressing the audience at Northwestern, McAvoy turns wistful, and talks with pride about what America once was, and what it stood for. Eventually, in a slow but sure march to a journalistic epiphany, McAvoy decides to remake his News Night newscast into a proud beacon, where truth, not ratings, is what’s being chased most aggressively.

He’s a character old enough to remember, and revere, Edward R. Murrow standing up to Communist-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy and Walter Cronkite declaring the Vietnam War essentially unwinnable. In spirit, he’s the new incarnation of Ted Koppel, under whose sober stewardship ABC’s Nightline assiduously avoided the sorts of show-biz ephemera that dominates it today.

At the time — when it premiered in 1977 — Lou Grant was such a new and foreign concept, a one-hour drama series interlaced with humor, that co-creator James L. Brooks described it as a mathematical equation, a recipe for a new type of TV hybrid: “about 70 percent drama, 30 percent comedy.” Today, most quality TV dramas are like that, including The Newsroom.

Like Lou Grant, which addressed real issues and headlines, The Newsroom confronts them, too — only in retrospect, with the objectifying distance of a few years. Just as Mad Men takes a cold and revealing look at the 1960s, The Newsroom looks at our recent past, beginning with the spring of 2010.

There’s a genius in this approach, because it allows Sorkin and company to pull from actual news footage of real events, from the BP oil spill in the gulf to the rise of the Tea Party, and juxtapose them with the news we could have gotten from TV, had there been a news organization whose employees were smart and dedicated enough, and given the chance to do their very best.

Sunday’s premiere episode is a little predictable, and even pedantic, at times — but only until a big news story breaks, at which time The Newsroom really begins to shine. HBO sent the first four episodes for preview, and each one is a little sharper, funnier, more involving and rewarding than the last. It isn’t until episode three that the new, non-pandering version of News Night takes shape officially — and as you watch that fictional broadcast, you hope and pine for its real-life equivalent. (Thank the TV gods for Moyers & Company.)

And with The Newsroom, Sorkin has cast his newest television vehicle without a single misstep.

And he’s not alone in driving this show, or making it work so well. Emily Mortimer, as the newly hired executive producer, is like the Katharine Hepburn to Daniels’ Spencer Tracy. Sam Waterston, as the old-school boss who puts them together, gets to play more comedy in one hour than he did in a decade on Law & Order — and does it wonderfully.

And there are super-strong supporting roles here, too. Early standouts include John Gallagher Jr. as young new producer Jim Harper, Alison Pill (who played Zelda Fitzgerald in Midnight in Paris) as a recently promoted intern, Dev Patel (from Slumdog Millionaire) as an initially underutilized staffer, Thomas Sadoski as a veteran News Night producer, and Olivia Munn (Attack of the Show, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart) as an economics reporter for ACN who catches the eye of the new team.

They’re all very good, and given enough room to breathe so that you start to know and like them all — like the gang in those first shows on The West Wing. And it seems absurd to have waited this long to mention it, but the corporate boss of ACN shows up in episode three… and is played, with all cylinders firing, by Jane Fonda.

In The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin is imagining a TV news show that could be better. I suppose I could imagine an even better Newsroom as well — but I’ve very happy with the one I have.