‘Gossip’ on Showtime doesn’t dish enough dirt
Gossip, we’re told many times in the four-part Showtime documentary series of the same name, is addictive. “Gossip,” the show itself, not so much. Unless you’re Cindy Adams, the legendary “Page Six” gossip columnist for the New York Post. The series is really about her and how she came to define a certain type of celebrity journalism. It’s not all flattering, but there’s also not a lot of pushback on her methods and choices.
Which is fine. Adams definitely falls into the “as long as they spell my name right” category of attention seekers.
Of course, everyone likes a juicy celebrity rumor, confirmed or not. That’s human nature – not necessarily the best part of it, but undeniably so.
But this series, directed by Jenny Carchman, doesn’t much get at what drives society’s need for digging dirt on the rich and famous (and infamous, though the line between famous and infamous is squishy in a lot of cases).
Gossip in the era of Bill Clinton and, of course, Donald Trump
Mostly it focuses on the go-go 1990s, when tabloid “news” was building to a kind of crescendo – think Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, Leona Helmsley, the ever-present Donald Trump – until the internet came along and changed the game for everyone.
Several gossip columnists show up to talk about, well, gossip, but also about Adams, along with Liz Smith and others who were big fish in a big and murky pond. Trump figures prominently in the series, and in the lives of all the people who wrote about him, then and now.
None more so than Adams, who repeatedly says, “Donald is my friend” when she talks about why she so often protected Trump, or at least, went easy on him. After her husband died, Trump had a security system installed in her apartment, Adams said. Conflict? What conflict?
The story of Rupert Murdoch and the New York Post
The better segments deal with Rupert Murdoch, who bought the Post in 1976, and how he transformed a once-liberal newspaper into a sort of house organ for conservatives, scandalous headlines blaring from the front page the whole way. Murdoch didn’t care as much about profit as power, we’re told, and having the goods on the rich and famous helped him secure plenty of it.
Gossip, in other words, is currency. Who knows what about who becomes important; who does what with that information even more so.
Along the way, Murdoch also started a little network called Fox News that took a few pages from the slash-and-burn tactics of his newspapers.
In fairness, Adams is a fascinating figure, an artifact of an earlier time. She’s still going at 91, and just as opinionated and unapologetic as she was when she started nearly 40 years ago.