The Loudest Voice is more sledgehammer than scalpel

Loads of people are excited about Stan’s big new miniseries starring Russell Crowe and Naomi Watts. Will they be disappointed?

“I’m a multifaceted man,” Roger Ailes declares in an early episode of The Loudest Voice, the new series about the man who founded Fox News.

Ailes (Russell Crowe in heavy prosthetics) is the media whiz who launched Fox News* in 1996 from nothing and took it to become the most watched cable news channel in the world, a mighty influence in US politics and beyond.

For a lot of people, that makes Ailes one of the great villains of our modern times, and ripe for the miniseries treatment: the rise and eventual fall of a huge personality whose power had real effect on most people’s lives around the world.

For better or worse, that’s not hyperbolic.

But is the Ailes as presented by The Loudest Voice actually multifaceted? Or is he a one-note TV monster?

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Maybe the real-life Roger Ailes didn’t have any layers?

The series starts in the months before Fox News’ launch and time jumps each episode to a big moment — the second episode is centred on September 11 while the third is Obama’s election.

The Loudest Voice wants to dissect this man’s motivations, his personality and what drives him. But like the Dick Cheney we saw in Vice, it’s really just a play-by-play of what he did, not who he is.

To Crowe’s credit, he’s doing a great job as Ailes, but the deeper characterisation The Loudest Voice needs isn’t in the writing.

Sometimes Ailes is a conservative warrior, an ideological stalwart spewing nationalistic jingoism. Other times he’s a corporate snake, the glint of dollar signs in his eyes.

You could take that as “multifaceted” but the series, at least in the first three episodes made available for review, doesn’t frame these characteristics in a coherent personality.

The Loudest Voice does more telling than showing, although, at least, it shows it pretty well because the directing is very good even if its washed-out colour palette tires quickly.

Sienna Miller also packed on the prosthetics as Beth Ailes

The Ailes as depicted is undoubtedly racist — he calls Wendi Deng a concubine, Obama an affirmative action hire, tells a former BBC presenter of Indian descent that she speaks very good English and instructs Fox News presenters to always refer to Obama as “Barack Hussein Obama”, until intervention comes from above.

He’s also disgustingly sexist — he calls a female journalist “hysterical” when she challenges him, he grabs at women’s bodies and their faces, instructs them to “give a little twirl” and asks how they get on with their dads.

He makes the sacking of his own wife Beth (Sienna Miller) from a rival network all about him.

Which brings us to the key question around The Loudest Voice: Can you actually stomach watching seven episodes of Ailes’ poor behaviour?

Can you stick around for that long just to see him get his comeuppance when he was finally sacked over mounting sexual harassment allegations from Gretchen Carlson (Naomi Watts) and other women?

Is all the grotesquerie worth it for that small moment of retribution?

Naomi Watts as Gretchen Carlson, one of the women who accused Roger Ailes of sexual harassment

At the end of the third episode, Ailes bundles his family back to his hometown of Warren, Ohio and addresses a sea of aggrieved white faces at a veteran’s gathering. He talks about the death of American manufacturing, of a certain way of life, and he blames the “elites” and immigrants.

It’s the same speechbook Donald Trump would later use. And if it’s not clear The Loudest Voice is drawing a direct line from Ailes to Trump’s ascendancy, he finishes that speech with “Let’s make America great again”.

The Loudest Voice is not a scalpel, it’s a sledgehammer.

The Loudest Voice starts streaming today on Stan

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*Fox News is owned by News Corp, the publisher of this website

Originally published as The Loudest Voice is more sledgehammer than scalpel