Every season it seems like the networks premiere a new hospital drama. When ER debuted a decade ago, it had to compete with Chicago Hope and Medicine Ball. Now we've got House and Grey's Anatomy and Scrubs and that other one starring Treat Williams. Hospital dramas, cop dramas, legal dramas: they're the fallbacks of corporate television's limited imagination.

However, in the last few years, cable stations have broken new ground with dramas centered on marijuana plantations, plastic surgery practices, and advertising firms. Here's what I want to know: When will someone produce a fast-paced, hard-boiled newsroom drama?

I mean, your average newsroom is ripe with plot lines. The hotshot cop reporter who snorts lines off his dashboard before covering a fatal car wreck. The politics reporter who's sleeping with the underdog mayoral candidate she's supposed to be covering. The gossip columnist thrown to the litigation dogs when she libels a local philanthropist. The rookie who has to witness his first execution...

The newsroom is a hot bed of egos, stories, conflicts, and suspense. That's why All the President's Men and Shattered Glass became instant classics. So, how come television producers only seem to find the newsroom appropriate for light-hearted sitcoms, from the Mary Tyler Moore Show to Murphy Brown to Suddenly Susan? Or worse, the TV Guide Channel's reality show, Making News Texas Style. Where's the hour-long, prime time, journalism drama?

Well, I guess there's Journeyman, NBC's rip-off of the sci-fi classic Quantum Leap. Whereas Quantum Leap's scientist Sam Beckett was caught jumping from lifetime to lifetime, correcting history's mistakes, unable to return home, Journeyman's Dan Vassar is ripped out of his day-to-day life at increasingly inconvenient moments to achieve pretty much the same thing. The drama lies in Dan's struggles to hold his family together and keep his job as an investigative journalist at the San Francisco Chronicle.

As a professional journalist, allow me to enumerate what irritates me about the show.

But first, here's what Journeyman gets right about journalism:

1.) A few episodes in, Dan's editor Hugh Skillen is stuck in a tense management meeting with corporate executives, who, faced with shrinking classified ad revenue, are discussing down-sizing the paper. This is indeed a nationwide trend, and the newspapers can only blame themselves for letting sites like Craigslist get the jump on them. The Chronicle's management discusses contract buy-outs of the senior reporters (which is dead-on in the current news climate) and considers axing the non-essential staff, which would include Dan if his editor wasn't ready to protect him.

2.) A periphery character in Journeyman is a young blogger hired on to capitalize on the blog trend, who's hoping to learn the tricks of the trade sans journalism school. Again, you see more and more of these Net-rooted journalists around... But the whole point of hiring them is to drive Internet traffic, not to transfer them to the already dying print side.

Now, here's what Journeyman gets wrong about journalism:

1.) In the Journeyman premiere, Dan's character is transported to the past only to return to discover he's been gone for two full days. Let's ignore that that's a major plot hole in the story, since he never seems to disappear for that long again. But, still. Show me a journalist who disappears without notice for two days, and I'll show you a journalist denied his severance check.

2.) Dan's tracking an attorney with a gambling problem through time. In between his "travels," Dan try to look up the guy using the show's faux-Google search engine. OK, here's my beef: any investigative journalist knows that the there isn't a state bar in the union without an attorney-locater database. Here's California's such database: http://members.calbar.ca.gov/search/member.aspx.

3.) In another episode, Dan's disappearances are preventing him from scoring his interview with an anonymous whistle-blower who's got information about government grafts relating to a construction project. He passes the call on to his wife, herself a former broadcast journalist, who woos the source and scores the skinny. She emails Dan the notes: he writes it up and it goes into the paper the next day.

What's the problem? First of all, there aren't many editors who would put up with that kind of outside assistance. Second, a journalist can't go off the word of a single anonymous source. Typically you've got to back up each allegation with at least three. Dan would've had to follow up with Freedom of Information Act requests, archive searches, and calls to the supposedly guilty parties. A 24-hour turnaround for this story? Not likely.

4.) After awhile, Dan finally realizes that he might be able to use his time travels to dig up cold-case stories, like the mystery of the robbery of $100,000 on a plane in mid-air. In the end, Dan gets involved in the story, discovers the hijacker was a Vietnam vet who needed the money to rescue a Cambodian family from the genocidal Khmer Rouge. Vassar's heart gets the best of him; he kills the story and lies to his editor. That's a bit extreme. Sure, once a story becomes personal, you ought to recuse yourself... but if Dan was a true believer in journalistic ethics, he would've passed the story on to a colleague, perhaps the kid blogger who could have found the story independently.

All in all, it's not a terrible show, just insufficiently researched. I'm only a bit bothered that the writers gloss over these paradoxical problems.

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