Zoren: TV tales a new focus for entertainment in the media
Television, and its cult of personality, is the subject of a current TV series, a current movie, and a recently closed Broadway play.
All three deal with changes in presentation, particularly in the last four decades — 1980 is about to be 40 years ago; who’d a thunk it? — and the importance of guiding figures on both sides of the camera.
The best of the three was a theater adaptation of the 1976 movie, “Network.” Exciting as theater and boasting a towering Tony-earning performance by Bryan Cranston (“Breaking Bad’s” Walter White), “Network” chronicled the history of television and the shift from news as a loss leader that would adhere to strict journalistic principles to another kind of entertainment broadcast meant to bring viewers to the screen by creating drama, germane to a story or not.
On television, Showtime’s “The Loudest Voice,” is the first of two pieces finding light in 2019 that deals with the career of Roger Ailes, known locally for being a primary producer on the nationally aired but Phillyproduced “Mike Douglas Show” but etched in television history as the creator and main guru of the Fox News Channel and CNBC and nascent NBC cable operations before it. Ailes also played major promotional roles in the successful campaigns of Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush.
No one could doubt Ailes’s genius, drive, and knack for getting innovations from his mind to TV’s airwaves. Perhaps, if he had remained at NBC and continued as an architect of its Microsoft news partnership, MSNBC, and MSNBC took the liberal bent it retains to this day, Ailes, who died in 2017, would be hailed as a champion of bringing progressive notions to American homes. Perhaps if he could keep from being intimate with women who eschewed such attention, he may have perished while heading Fox News instead of in a forced retirement.
“Perhaps” is a loaded word. Neither of the situations mentioned above became the case. NBC jettisoned Ailes who, conceivably, would have made MSNBC the conservative entity he made Fox. Ailes’s unwanted touches, kisses, and proposals, in dispute when he died, stand on the record as his reason for being bumped from a Fox Network he turned into the most watched news station in the United States.
“The Loudest Voice” is a Hollywood product. Therefore, Ailes’s masterminding of Fox News and his inclusion in the #metoo purges take precedence over his acknowledged skills as a communicator and maker of television.
The series has assets. Chief among them is the dynamic performance of Russell Crowe as Ailes.
Crowe captures the energy and passion of the man while letting you see the his more serious and tactical side. His work on “The Loudest Voice” is tantamount to Christian Bale’s as Dick Cheney is last year’s movie, “Vice.”
Crowe makes Ailes a force of nature who can think faster and foxier — forgive the unintended pun — than anyone in his vicinity, including Rupert Murdoch, and has the appetites, culinary and sexual, often associated with people of action.
“The Loudest Voice” is willing to give credit to Ailes for his creative gifts, but in our politically correct time, it cannot reward him for his achievements. From early one, he is cast as the evil genius, one who uses his prowess to foster what the newday Puritan would consider a current-day Frankenstein, whether in politics or broadcasting. Showtime is putting Ailes’s accomplishments and personal style on the screen, but it does so with a gasp rather than a nod to greatness that transforms an industry, and in a way that would be unexpected from the television networks he charges with purposely advancing a leftish agenda.
It is a flaw of the series that it cannot be neutral. It would be refreshing if this entertainment program could do what news once did, present facts and let the viewer decide rather than providing an editorial tinge that makes the filmmaker’s judgment of good and evil abundant clear.
Perhaps — another perhaps, Showtime considered it was giving Ailes a taste of his own medicine.
Though I don’t consider Fox News Channel any worse than MSNBC or CNN in presenting a barrage of doctrinaire bias, it does not live up to what I regard as journalistic standards. The divergence from “the facts, ma’am, just the facts,” is part of the station’s DNA from its conception, so maybe Showtime finds its only fair to let the chips of political partiality fall where they may.
Facts do come through, but remember facts these days are mere bases for interpretation, fair or not. Sean Hannity isn’t going to see matters as Rachel Maddow does, even if faced with the same bit of information.
Ailes used a lapse in NBC’s noncompete wording to go to Murdoch to vie for Fox News. He did comprehend that cable television, which he would distinguish from broadcasting, is a niche market that can cater to specific audiences that will show up regularly to have its ideas reinforced and, possibly, supplied. He understood a confrontational approach to storytelling may have a greater effect than straight reporting. So, cable news is in many ways, the child of Roger Ailes, whichever station you may prefer. Or in my case, prefer to ignore in favor of print outlets I trust more, e.g. The Economist.
Call me a dinosaur in that. Ailes would while arguing that television, at least at the turn of this century, was the place most Americans turned for news, not to print, which would be almost without audience 20 years into that century.
What’s lost is that as a business model and a communications outlet, Fox News Channel is wildly successful. There is evidence that the political leanings of Americans are split in thirds. Two of those thirds combine to be conservative or independent. Fox plays to those audiences, with heavy concentration to what it helps define a kneejerk conservative to be.
Ailes calculated and built on this. Brand him as you like, he will always be one who made something important from an idea, a genius at getting information, skewed or not, to a general audience successfully. He will be forever an icon in the Pantheon of television. “The Loudest Voice” needs to accent that more. You don’t have to like Ailes to admire him, and many did both.
The current movie, “Late Night,” about a successful woman talk host, played by the marvelous Emma Thompson, one of the best line crafters in the business.
Considering that Joan Rivers is the closest a woman has come to being important in late-night talk, and her foray was brief and inconsequential, making “Late Night’s” lead female (Katherine Newbury) creates a fiction from the outset.
Writer and co-star Mindy Kaling (“The Mindy Project,” “The Office”) isn’t dwelling on that. Man or woman, Thompson’s character is a rigid person, mired in an era of television that served her well but passed, and foundering in ratings opposite rivals such as Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, and Stephen Colbert.
Worse, Newbury, is a powerful woman who doesn’t like working with women and has none on her writing staff. That staff lacks diversity in general.
Diversity, therefore becomes “Late Night’s” actual subject. Kaling is Thompson’s co-star, a young man who works in a chemical plant but who, cynically, is named the winner of a contest that puts her in Newbury’s writers’ room for at least 13 weeks.
The movie manages to be interesting in spite of its obvious end. Kaling is writer and comedian enough to furnish some funny lines. She and Thompson deliver them perfectly.
Beyond that, “Late Night” like “Network” and “The Loudest Voice” speaks to the history of television, which one once dominated by voices that belonged only to men and primarily to white men. When you consider Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Carl Reiner, Sid Caesar, Steve Allen, Jackie Gleason, George Burns, Jack Benny, Groucho Marx, Steve Bochco, Rod Serling, Paddy Chayefksy, Norman Lear, and Grant Tinker to be among that group, the harm doesn’t seem that egregious.
It isn’t modern. “Late Night” leads exactly where you expect it to go, and its last scene is a bit thick in political correctness, but Kaling never throws there purpose in her audience’s face. She keeps “Late Night” a good story and a good comment on television. And she makes it worth seeing, with help from Thompson, John Lithgow (who later this year plays Roger Ailes in a feature film), Amy Ryan, and others.