Until a friend in China asked me about The Newsroom, I didn't pay much attention to the show. Yes, it is a new cable TV series by the Oscar-winning writer of The Social Network and the much-beloved The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin.

Yes, it stars Jeff Daniels, Emily Mortimer and even Jane Fonda. And yes, its June premiere was eagerly anticipated. But I stopped watching after the first episode and wish I had spent the precious hour counting sheep instead.

This is not only me. My husband and I, most of our friends and some of our neighbors work in all sorts of newsrooms in the real world, and some for major TV channels like the fictional one in the show. Yet no one I know talked about it in a positive tone.

The reviews also confirmed that I didn't miss much. "The Newsroom gets so bad so quickly that I found my jaw dropping," said The New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum, her words echoed by others. On Metacritic, a website that aggregates reviews from critics, it gets a lousy 57 percent.

But the friend in China is also a journalist. She talked about the show in the way Westerners of a certain generation talk about the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. She said some of her colleagues were so touched that they had tears in their eyes.

And this is not only her either.

A quick Internet research led me to a surprise finding: The Newsroom does have a lot of fans, but most of them are in China. On Douban, a Chinese audience reviewing website, The Newsroom gets a stunningly high 9.1 out of 10.

In sharp contrast is Girls, another new US cable TV series that debuted two months before The Newsroom. Written, directed and starring the brilliant young Lena Dunham and based on her own life, the show is highly rated by US critics. I've watched the 10 episodes of the first season twice and I am waiting impatiently for the second season.

But when the same friend in China watched an episode of Girls after my strong recommendation, she said she was confused and lost in the logic of the plots and conversations and couldn't wait to go back to The Newsroom.

On Metacritic, Girls gets 87, one of the highest ratings among current TV shows. And on Douban, it only gets 7.4.

Compared to the dynamic young adult world of Girls where there isn't a particular right and wrong, but only the messy encounters of fresh college grads with the complexities of life and relationships, The Newsroom carries a crystal clear message that is easier understood by a Chinese audience.

The chilly corporate culture, the faith in journalistic truth, and the courage to stand up under commercial pressure are already dramatic enough, especially to people who are frustrated by the current status of the Chinese media. 

But these are the exact things that make The Newsroom disappointing in the US.

The heroism and the flickering romantic hangover between the protagonists can be found in almost all Hollywood products.

While Girls catches the audience off guard by its loyalty to reality, even those who take journalism as religion cannot help but laugh at the dramas that could only happen in the fictional newsroom. 

In the same way, Chinese movies that find a broad audience in the US may not be the same ones that win over the Chinese audience. And the popular stories about life in China written by overseas Chinese writers may not get as enthusiastic a reception from readers in China either.

We all know that the big screen is not a mirror of our life. It only tries to mimick life. Sometimes this is successful, and other times not. But it is easier to draw the line when we watch a life that we are familiar with than not.

And in the latter situation, we may even tend to stop trying and just take everything delivered to us as reality, especially when it sharply contrasts with the world we know. 

But if Sorkin is going to create a generation of young journalists around the world who are more idealists than cynics, then who are we to argue?

The author is a New York-based journalist. rong_xiaoqing@hotmail.com