The Loudest Voice review – portrait of a monster that misses the bigger story

Another day, another programme about a mighty man hoist on the petard of his own misogyny as the #MeToo era dawns. This time it’s a dramatised account rather than a documentary – The Loudest Voice (Sky Atlantic) is a seven-part miniseries starring Russell Crowe as Roger Ailes, the former Republican strategist who was hired by Rupert Murdoch in 1995 and a year later gave television Fox News, the truth-mauling ratings monster that would end up eating the world.

We first meet Ailes as he is fired from CNN as a result of the sexual harassment allegations piling up against him. It will come as no surprise to learn that his behaviour does not markedly change once he has his own news network to run. As he gathers his team about him, men are recruited on the basis of their killer instincts and ethical detachment, women on the basis of whether they look good in skirts and don’t kick up a fuss when he makes his predatory moves on them.

The problems that The Loudest Voice faces are several – some inherent to the subject, some of its own making. Among the former (leaving aside the additional difficulties presented by a UK audience nowhere near as steeped in Fox lore as the production’s native one) is the fact that Ailes remains throughout such a deeply unpleasant, one-dimensional character (as megalomaniacs tend to be). Without much in the way of a developmental – let alone redemptive – arc, the viewer tires of him almost as quickly as his beleaguered crew does; the great difference being that we have the option to walk away without consequence and enjoy the rest of our lives without him.

More challenging, at least dramatically speaking, is the fact that Fox News is now old news. We are so steeped in its results and ramifications that it is hard even to see Ailes as the visionary he undoubtedly was. The political strategist in him knew early on that his success would again lie in “turning out the base” – in this case, the half of the country that didn’t recognise itself in the liberal media or messages and were ripe for the picking by someone who gave them a non-mealy-mouthed alternative. Thus the news channel engineered to create precisely that, with the chutzpah of sporting the motto “Fair and balanced” obscuring the deliberate uncoupling from any journalistic or professional standards that might have made it so.

The problems of The Loudest Voice’s own making are simply that, from the prosthetics used to turn Crowe into the fat, balding Ailes and Sienna Miller into a facsimile of his wife, Beth, to the script, it’s not good enough. Not in a landscape dominated by excoriating documentaries on similar subjects and by stylish and sophisticated limited series such as Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story anthology that manage to reconstruct real-life events compellingly while using them to scrutinise American history and illuminate current affairs in new, important and broadly appealing ways. The Loudest Voice is a straightforward retelling of an essentially straightforward story, and it won’t do. This goes double for the prosthetics. Crowe’s bald head is barely one step up from a beige swimming cap with wire wool stuck around the edges.

There is so much gone to waste here. It could have been an unsettlingly detailed look at how the big players widened – then smashed – the Overton window, making any and all ideas, however hateful, not just tolerable in public but eventually unchallengeable by any civilised means. It could have been a forensic dismantling of the fake news phenomenon and its co-option by increasingly malevolent forces, or an interrogation of the neglect of people in American heartlands that left them so desperate for representation and a saviour. It could have been any number of things, but it has settled for being a study of one man and the showcase for Crowe’s bid for an Emmy – which he may deserve, if only for trying to do so much with so little.

It has – at least in the few episodes made available late in the day in the UK (in the interests of fairness and balance, I should note that I have heard rumours of improvement in the latter half of the series) – about as much light and shade as the thunderously arrogant and relentlessly ambitious Ailes did himself.