The Newsroom, for those who spent the last TV season reading books or in solitary confinement, was a CBC series almost revolutionary in execution. Besides being both cynical and urbane, historically a no-no at the Corp., it was also very funny. Funny at least if your taste runs to satire of the inverted value judgments that predominate in television newsrooms, where image is everything and substance is determined after the fact by success in the overnight ratings.

The Newsroom was the creation of Ken Finkleman, a 50-something veteran of second-rate Hollywood movies, who wrote, produced, directed, and starred in the 13 episodes that aired last season to huge critical acclaim and are slated to be repeated this year. Given the cult following that his series attracted, the publication of his collected scripts is probably a sound business move, but it is also a useful reality check for those who want to see how the brilliance of the spoken word survives in book form.

The strength of The Newsroom in retrospect was as much in the tight editing of hours of improvised conversations, the intense documentary-style camera work, and the convincing casting (especially in the first group of six episodes) as it was in Finkleman’s scripts, which here take all the credit. Those who never saw the show will have to call on a powerful imagination to read a dialogue about a potential news anchor (“…74% of her audience in Saskatoon actually thought she was white. It’s a very subtle ethnicity”) and envision the casual hypocrisies that the jumpy cuts of the TV version make so apparent.

The satire lacks bite on paper, and what seemed a comedy to viewers becomes something sadder and more mindless without the tip-offs that the hand-held camera provided. The ramblings of the high-haired, airhead news anchor Jim Walcott (concerning what Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel may get up to after hours or how his personal encounter with an underage prostitute may help Cynthia Dale as she prepares a film role) are merely inane on the page. On camera, they managed to be dumb enough to be satirical of the news business but ended up being hilarious through the character’s determination to hold the stage in the face of his companion’s anguished squirmings.

These are quibbles, because it is hard to imagine anyone buying the book who hadn’t watched the series faithfully. For devotees, it is almost as essential as the Monty Python scripts that adorn the shelves of every serious fan of comedy: They will take great pleasure in patiently committing to memory any of the lines that may have escaped them on video and staging family recreations of “Suicide TV – Day Three.”

But even fans will sense a flatness that came over the writing in the later episodes, particularly the homage to Fellini’s 8 1/2 called “The Meltdown,” in which Finkleman strained to make his satire more obvious and ended up with something too introverted to hold a reader’s interest. Visually it had its Fellini-esque charms, but they fade fast on the austere page, and what’s left is more nostalgic than meaningful.