finally make his record label drop him
and prosecutors to start building new
cases against him. Though Jackson is
dead, Neverland not only reshaped his
legacy but also disrupted plans for TV
programs, a musical and other tributes
planned to coincide with the 10th anni-
versary of his death.
It isn’t just documentary series that
have moved the needle in this way. Soon
after the May debut of Ava DuVernay’s
Netflix drama When They See Us, which
follows the five black and Latino teen-
agers wrongfully convicted in the 1989
Central Park jogger case, sex-crimes
prosecutor turned novelist Linda Fair-
stein (the show’s villain, played by
Felicity Huffman) was dropped by her
publisher and agent. Despite penning a
Wall Street Journal op-ed that called the
show an “outright fabrication,” she also
resigned from several nonprofit boards.
To further bridge the gap between fact
and fictionalization, Oprah interviewed
the real Central Park Five for the follow-
up special When They See Us Now.
This spring’s surprise hit Chernobyl
may be the best example of viewers’
newfound eagerness to reopen histori-
cal wounds. HBO buried the impres-
sive but relentlessly bleak miniseries
politics. Donald Trump played a role in
the Central Park Five saga, agitating for
the boys to get the death penalty. He’s
present in spirit throughout Chernobyl,
in the form of leaders who disregard sci-
ence. And I’m not the first to observe that
#MeToo is, in part, a way of channeling
anger at his relative immunity to allega-
tions like columnist E. Jean Carroll’s re-
cent claim that he sexually assaulted her
in a Bergdorf ’s dressing room.
Though we’ve been hearing about
their subjects in the news for years, if
not studying them in history classes,
it seems that watching these stories
unfold in a visual medium is what
nudges them into a realm of coherent
memory—whether that means protest-
ing or vacationing in a nuclear evacu-
ation zone. Beyond showing us real,
if fictionalized, people and events of
which we have only secondhand knowl-
edge, these shows engage us with them
through a narrative that makes us feel
we’re observing and drawing our own
conclusions. Even if it’s an illusion—
every creator has an agenda, after all—
that sense of independence is crucial
in an atmosphere of partisanism, fake
news and information overload. These
shows cut through the noise in the same
way cell-phone videos of police brutal-
ity do; they make us witnesses. (Which
explains why When They See
Us is such a powerful title.)
As it happens, our in-
creasing need to see before
we can believe has a lot to do
with Roger Ailes, whose pur-
poseful conflation of news,
opinion and conspiracy theo-
ries played no small part in
making Americans across
the political spectrum in-
stinctively question what the
media frames as truth. And
that’s what makes The Loudest Voice—
with its holistic, relatively understated
depiction of a personality prone to
caricature— effective. In weaving Ailes’
neuroses and the misdeeds they fueled
together with the rise of Fox News until
the network becomes a mirror of the
man, the show does more than stick it to
the dead. It demonstrates how one per-
son’s cynicism and paranoia reshaped a
nation. Seeing it happen may be the first
step in finding an antidote.
about the Soviet nuclear meltdown
on Mondays, only to watch its audi-
ence swell to 6 million, a huge num-
ber for a premium- cable show. Russia
was so rattled by its impact that a state
TV network plans to air its own ver-
sion that will apparently
implicate an American spy
in the tragedy. And audi-
ences aren’t just thinking
about Chernobyl; they’re
also visiting the real site in
droves. Whether Americans
see parallels to existential
threats like climate change
or to Russia’s potential to
cause worldwide harm, the
show’s vision of govern-
ment ignorance, incompe-
tence and malice clearly resonated.
PoPular entertainment always
serves some kind of larger societal func-
tion, even if it’s pure escapism. Among
this new crop of miniseries, some of
those preoccupations, from #MeToo to
race and the criminal- justice system, are
obvious. But on a less conscious level,
these shows channel widespread politi-
cal frustrations, at a time when so much
of the public discourse revolves around
‘There is a
tendency in
the media to
simplify me to
the point that
I am somehow
a tough guy.’
ROGER AILES,
to the New York Times,
in 1989
Annabelle
Wallis as
Laurie Luhn
Sienna
Miller as
Elizabeth
Ailes WattsNaomi as
Gretchen
Carlson
Aleksa
Palladino
as Judy
Laterza
Simon
McBurney
as Rupert
Murdoch
Russell
Crowe as
Seth Roger Ailes
MacFarlane
as Brian
Lewis
WHO’S
WHO
IN THE
LOUDEST
VOICE
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