MacKenzie (Mac) Morgan McHale is the daughter of the Margaret Thatcher's British Ambassador to the United States, thus born in Washington D.C. As such she has dual British and US citizenship. She enthusiastically embraces the latter with the idealist's passion. She grew up in Britain, but spent enough time in US schools, to develop a love for the underlying optimism and can-do approach Americans had brought to the global scene in the 20th century. She attended Cambridge University where she further honed her speaking skills by joining and eventually leading the Cambridge Union debate society.Mac pursues a career in the news based on the desire to reclaim journalism as both an honorable profession and to provide a forum where critical issues can be discussed rationally and logically by all sides. By 2003, she is the executive producer for Atlantis Cable Network's (ACN) highly respected prime time show News Night With Will McAvoy , which has an audience demographic that appreciates the show's quality of reporting and journalistic investigation. At the time, she started dating Will after her old flame, magazine writer Brian Brenner, breaks up with her. However, Brian gets jealous and seduces Mac into a four month affair, even as she starts falling for Will and he for her. Eventually, she breaks it off with Brian and introduces Will to her visiting parents as her serious boyfriend. However, guilt eats at her and she confesses her four month affair with Brian to Will, who is very hurt by this revelation and refuses to forgive her.With her professional situation intolerable, Mac quits her job with ACN and becomes a foreign war correspondent, embedded with various Army and Marine units in Afghanistan, Iraq, and unofficially, Pakistan. Over the next three years, Mac earns three Peabody awards for her reports from the war fronts, and a scar over her stomach from a stab wound while hiding from the Taliban in a cave with her assigned Marine unit.In 2010, MacKenzie returned to the US to find a less stressful job with a major television news operation. While still searching for a position, she attends a panel interview at Northwestern University where Will is a panelist, representing neutral journalists, sitting between to two others who represent conservative and liberal groups. During the final Q&A section, a student asks the panelists to summarize why America is the greatest nation in the world. After Will refuses to provide a firm answer, MacKenzie falls back into her old role of Executive Producer, and writes down some prompts that she knows reflects his views. His resulting rant gets recorded and uploaded, quickly going viral, and forcing Will to take a three week vacation.While Will is on vacation, Charlie Skinner (the head of ACN news) tracks Mac down and hires her to be the new Executive Producer of the now bland but still popular News Night With Will MacAvoy - much to Will's fury. He manages to change her new contract, giving him the right to fire her at end of every week. Mac manages to convince Will to give the staffers she will bring along a solid chance to prove themselves. The two discuss the direction News Night should take (Cervantes, anyone?): Mac for the higher road of quality informative journalism and Will for continuing the status quo.But today is the day that BP Deepwater Horizon blows up and starts spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Still angry at his old producer, Don, who jumped ship for the 10 PM slot, Will shifts Don aside and asks MacKenzie to start right now. She accepts the challenge, and with her trusty Senior Producer, Jim, pulls off a seat of the pants major scoop on the systemic failures that will make this spill the largest environmental disaster. She proves her mettle to the old news room staff with this one production. The now heavyweight news broadcast is a huge success, and earned News Night the highest ratings in many years. This is enough to allow MacKenzie to set the new criteria that future new stories must follow, with Charlie's enthusiastic blessing, .Professionally, MacKenzie is turning News Night into a respected prime time news magazine show - cheered on by Charlie and assisted by Will's reluctant support. Personally, she is still dealing with the not-so-subtle punishments Will inflicts on her, including his claim that he was about to propose four years earlier.After 18 months of journalistic successes, Will chooses Brian to write a magazine piece about the new News Night approach. Will tells Mac he chose Brian to make her extremely uncomfortable, right as they are preparing to audition for the Republican presidential debates. Brian wants to resume their affair. Mac rejects and rebuffs his attempts, revealing that she is still very much in love with Will. Brian ends up writing a scathing article that mocks their idealistic approach. Mac gets to pick up the pieces afterwards, scoring one major victory after Charlie forces the ACN management to allow MacKenzie and Will to continue on their new News Night path, despite loosing the political and financial support of various conservative Republican groups and politicians. Show less «