TV's endless navel-gazing ignores the ugly truth – and it's getting old
TV creatives have never needed any encouragement to revel in navel-gazing.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
My father worked in TV and he told me this story. Once, hearing raucous guffaws in a London screening room, he found the cast and crew of a hit sitcom watching their show reels, their own chuckles becoming the canned laughter of the soundtrack. When I questioned the circular nature of this adulation, my father said only, “Never ask. It’s how the sausages are made.”
I think of this whenever a film about film-making appears, or a TV show about making TV. The latest is Apple TV+ comedy The Studio, which has Seth Rogen as frazzled chief executive Matt Remick trying to square his soulful love of movies with the soul-selling business of movie-making.
At one point, he buys a script from “Marty” Scorsese, purely so it can’t be filmed. There’s a lot of mileage in his efforts to score VIP entry to Charlize Theron’s party. Both Scorsese and Theron appear in cameo, proving they’re in on the joke. But more earnest sentiments abound, too – Remick and his colleague console themselves “a good film lasts for ever”, certainly longer than any necessary self-abasement.
TV creatives have never needed any encouragement to revel in navel-gazing. Fans of The Hour, set in the BBC of 1956, came to wallow in the vintage glamour of well-spoken producers putting down their cigarettes long enough to feed smart lines about the Suez Crisis to Dominic West’s anchorman Hector. And they stayed for Ben Whishaw’s journalist nobly holding the state to account. Honour is tested but prevails, the Reithian values jumping out of the screen.
Australian drama The Newsreader is a compelling blend of fact and fiction as its charismatic presenting duo struggle with the ethics of reporting real-life news events.
This is a narrative device that previously proved indigestible in Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom where Jeff Daniels’s anchorman, Will McAvoy, is a solitary voice making the right call on real-life stories such as the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Not hard and a tad self-righteous when you’re a made-up character judging with 2012 hindsight.
We viewers have long ceased to be impressed by peeks behind the cathode curtains, and such stories of intrigue and rivalry could sit easily in other fictional settings, so why so much TV about TV?
I think it’s less about convincing audiences and more about programme-makers reminding themselves of TV’s enduring cultural significance; that – never mind the stories of sex pests, bullies and incompetents running the show – there’s still something important and noble in pushing sound and pictures down the tube. It validates career choices and, besides, the first rule of creativity is to write about what you know.
Any earnestness in The Studio is balanced by its gag-rate, chaotic camera-work and larger-than-life characters, redolent of 30 Rock, Tina Fey’s deep dive into the chaos of creating a live comedy sketch show. But both comedies maintain an overriding fondness for the business they lampoon.
For the real vinegar in the salad, you have to go back to Extras, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s skewering of the hierarchies on production sets. Stars like Kate Winslet, Samuel L Jackson, Patrick Stewart and Ross Kemp play comically awful versions of themselves, thus proving how down to earth they really are.
Or that’s what we believe, at least until someone breaks it to us how these particular sausages were made.
The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here.
Check out more of our Comedy coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to see what's on tonight. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
