Time July 8, 2019CHERNOBYL
LEAVING
NEVERLAND
SURVIVING
R. KELLY
WHEN THEY
SEE US
TimeOff Opener
TELEVISION
In Fox News’ America,
seeing is believing
By Judy Berman
M
osT people who waTch showTime’s new
miniseries The Loudest Voice will go in know-
ing quite a bit about its protagonist. Though
he started in daytime TV, Roger Ailes made his
name as a ruthlessly effective media strategist for Richard
Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. In 1996, after
a bad breakup with NBC, he joined forces with Rupert Mur-
doch to found Fox News. Over the next two decades, Ailes
became a household name—not just because of the success
of his startlingly partisan network, but also because he was
exiled from his empire in 2016 amid multiple allegations of
sexual misconduct. He died at home the following spring.
It’s a Shakespearean tale that, as Ailes would have
sensed, makes for captivating TV: a man who rode base
urges to unparalleled political influence was ultimately de-
stroyed by those same appetites. Based on Gabriel Sher-
man’s 2014 biography The Loudest Voice in the Room: How
the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News—and Di-
vided a Country, the adaptation opens at the beginning of
Ailes’ reign. Each of the seven episodes covers a critical year
for Fox News and its increasingly powerful—and paranoid—
leader, played by Russell Crowe in a fat suit and pounds of
latex makeup. Even the casting was a gimmick, given that
Crowe’s anger problem is at least as notorious as Ailes’.
But there’s nothing cheap about the show. A premiere
scripted by Spotlight writer- director Tom McCarthy (also
an executive producer) sets a talky, thoughtful tone for
a saga that needs no embellishment. Without glossing
over Ailes’ slimiest deeds, a roster of directors includ-
ing prestige-TV standbys Kari Skogland (The Handmaid’s
Tale) and Jeremy Podeswa (Game of Thrones) exercises
enough restraint to avoid silliness. Crowe, a world-class
bellower, only occasionally flips the switch from whis-
pery, methodical creepiness to full-on scenery chomping.
The result is an elegant mix of character study, workplace
drama and political thriller.
Does The Loudest Voice offer revelations about Fox
News that we couldn’t have gleaned from Sherman’s work
or absorbed simply by living for decades in a world where
Ailes both made news and shaped it? Not really. And that
lack of new information has some critics dismissing the
miniseries as pointless. (“The Loudest Voice really sticks it
to Roger Ailes, who is still dead and doesn’t care what any-
one thinks,” a Washington Post headline cracked.)
Yet this reaction ignores the unique power of visual
story telling. Knowing the facts isn’t the same as watching
one man oscillate from political kingmaker to brutal boss
to devoted husband to sexual predator; the latter forces
you, with every frame, to consider how those Wikipedia
headings add up to a life. The Loudest Voice is thorough in
its efforts to make every facet of Ailes’ personality make
sense in the context of his biography.
It isn’t the only high-profile show
this year to take on real, difficult history
in ways that push our collective under-
standing of them forward. As non fiction
and docudrama proliferate on TV, mini-
series as different as Lifetime’s Surviv-
ing R. Kelly and HBO’s Chernobyl are
putting faces to previously unseen vic-
tims and forcing public reckonings with
tragedies that have been in the news for
decades. Viewers, for their part, seem
more eager than ever before to have
those conversations.For as long as each has existed,
TV and film have excelled at turning
the cultural conversation to under-
discussed historical events and con-
temporary issues. Alex Haley’s novel
Roots was a best seller before it came to
television in 1977, but it was the mini-
series that fueled a national dialogue
about black history. Documentaries
have changed harmful corporate poli-
cies (Bowling for Columbine, Blackfish)
and standards of mental-health care
(Titicut Follies). It was Spotlight, and
its Oscar win, that inscribed the Boston
Globe team that uncovered the Catholic
Church sex-abuse scandal in the canon
of American heroes. On the other hand:
the Ku Klux Klan had been defunct for
decades before D.W. Griffith’s racist
1915 Civil War epic The Birth of a Nation
revived it. In the realm of nonfiction,
Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will
helped sell the Nazi agenda.
But TV viewers’ insatiable appetites
for serious, politically engaged and po-
tentially actionable retellings of familiar
true stories feels like something new.
Surviving R. Kelly, along with Leaving
Neverland’s profile of a pair of Michael
Jackson accusers, are extensions of the
#MeToo movement and the true-crime
trend. Accusations that R. Kelly sexually
abused underage girls had followed the
R&B star for the better part of two de-
cades, yet it took a miniseries that inter-
viewed many of his alleged victims toRECENT
HISTORY,
REVISITED
A spate of series
have shifted the
way we think
about the news