By Melinda Houston
THE LOUDEST VOICE
The Loudest Voice
New series ****
Stan
It’s easy to forget what a great actor Russell Crowe is, so large has his personality become. But the first 30 seconds of this fabulous new series leaves us in no doubt. The scene contains maybe half a dozen words, but that’s all it takes for a whole world to be spoken about Roger Ailes, his attitude and his essence. Ailes is the television producer who, in the mid-1990s, created Fox News and in the process changed news reporting, and politics, and probably society as a whole, forever. Although he never formally faced charges, he was also widely understood to be a serial sleaze of the first order and was effectively forced out of Fox in 2016 following an avalanche of complaints from female employees past and present. The genius of this series is the way it, and Crowe, capture both those aspects of the man: his brilliance, his foresight and his insight, as well as his ruthlessness, dishonesty and reflexive sexual predation. In fact, with his twinkling eyes and wry smile (both, admittedly, buried in layers of fat) Crowe as Ailes is so charming you start to wonder if this is going to be a bit of an apology, a whitewash. But no. A fuller picture is gradually revealed, as compelling as it is appalling.
Melinda Houston