Big hair, giant phones, tangled love affairs... it’s all great news
The Newsreader BBC2, Thursday & Friday The Buccaneers Apple TV+, Wednesday
The second series of The Newsreader has arrived, finally, and all six episodes were done in one afternoon in this house. The truth is, I may be more invested in Helen and Dale than I am in anyone else I know, including my own family. It’s a superb drama, and certainly the best drama set in an Australian television newsroom during the 1980s you will have ever seen. I would bet my life on it.
At this juncture you will be expecting me to say it doesn’t matter if you haven’t watched the first series, but it does. Watch the first series first. It’s on iPlayer. It’s six hours you’ll never get back, and nor will you wish to. It’s necessary not for plot but for the characters’ trajectories. These are complex characters with complex back stories. These are characters you have to grow with. These characters are real. I even set the table for Helen and Dale now. I think I might make them a shepherd’s pie.
It stars Anna Torv (magnificent) as Helen Norville, the ‘difficult’ newsreader, who is ‘hard work’, and Sam Reid (also magnificent – assume everyone is magnificent from now on) as Dale Jennings, the bumbling yet ambitious reporter who used to call his mother whenever he was about to be on TV but whom we saw grow in confidence.
They develop a powerful bond and, in a way, this is a love story at heart. But, you guessed it, it’s complicated. He’s as much attracted to men as he is to Helen. ‘I have these feelings that won’t go away,’ he tells her at the end of series one, ‘but neither will my feelings for you.’ It was heartbreaking. Is he really attracted to Helen, or can he just not accept he is gay? (Can you believe there was a time when coming out could ruin your career? And it wasn’t long ago?) How will the two negotiate this? Can they?
Yes, it seems so. They are now co-anchors at News At Six – ‘Good evening, I’m Helen Norville’... ‘and I’m Dale Jennings’ – and a couple. They’re living together – hooray! – but might they also be living a lie? Elsewhere there is a new CEO who has it in for Helen. ‘She needs to soften herself,’ he says. If you are keeping a list of things said about women that are never said about men, perhaps you’d like to add it? Lindsay (William McInnes) the news director is still Lindsay. That is, a sexist, backstabbing bully always playing staff off each other. Helen, meanwhile, is still Helen. She is brilliant and demanding and forthright but, as we know, is given to crashing and burning in private tormented moments.
There has always been something pure and innocent about Dale. But he is ambitious, and is increasingly seduced by celebrity. How far will he go to protect himself?
Each episode cleverly weaves in a real news event – the 1987 election, a mass shooting, the financial crash – and there is no dead time at all. It’s never plodding. Something is always happening. Fax machines make those fax machine noises, corridors are raced down, deadlines are nearly missed, adrenaline flows, but it’s a show that also knows when to take its foot off the pedal. Its world building is excellent, as are the retro props – the VHS tapes, the brick-like mobile phones, the big helmet hair – but it never loses sight of the relationships at play. Noelene (Michelle Lim Davidson), the smart young producer, and Rob (Stephen Peacocke), the brash sports reporter, are now an item, even if they have yet to ‘go public’.
I love Noelene, who is a complex mix of anxiety and compassion, and also Rob, who isn’t. It’s incredibly affecting, their story.
Helen and Dale? I think you know where you have to go if you want to know where they are at. First series first, please
Apple TV+ clearly wants a slice of the Bridgerton action and I tried, really tried, with The Buccaneers, but these period dramas told with girlpower vibes aren’t modern or fresh any more. They’ve become cliches. I wanted to shake this and say, for example: putting Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo on the soundtrack isn’t anything new, you know? Sofia Coppola first did it with Marie-Antoinette in 2006. Also, having these women swigging direct from champagne bottles and lying on their backs in meadows while giggling, it’s a sign of women doing it for themselves? Of empowerment? You don’t think it makes them look like empty-headed idiots?
This is loosely, very loosely, based on Edith Wharton’s final, unfinished novel, which is set in the 1870s and is about a group of American socialites who arrive in London in search of a husband. It is sumptuous. The costumes, the floristry, the houses and castles. All sumptuous. No complaints there. But it is often cringe-makingly Mills & Boon-ish. The men are hot, but at least there is no Darcy wetshirt moment or similar. Only kidding. You get that in episode one.
This does have dead time. There’s scene after scene of Brits being snobbish, or the fact that women aren’t expected to express their opinions, which doesn’t move the action on, just repeats what’s already gone before.
Most calamitously, these women are tiresome to be around. Show them swigging champagne and jumping into lakes by all means but, I beg you, give them depth and intelligence too. I lasted two episodes. And will not be making any of them a shepherd’s pie.