SummaryThe seven-part miniseries based on Gabriel Sherman's non-fiction book The Loudest Voice in the Room takes a look at the rise and ultimate fall of Fox News founder Roger Ailes (Russell Crowe).
SummaryThe seven-part miniseries based on Gabriel Sherman's non-fiction book The Loudest Voice in the Room takes a look at the rise and ultimate fall of Fox News founder Roger Ailes (Russell Crowe).
Riveting at the start and somewhat less so as time marches on. Crowe’s portrayal of Ailes of course is the major drawing card, and he is nothing if not fully immersed. The characters around him can’t help but pale in comparison, but it would help if some of the supporting roles were more vividly acted.
The series begins as full-steam-ahead entertainment, an Aaron Sorkin–ish explication of history, in which the past plays out with the buzzwords of the future. ... It’s packaged as a biopic and not some larger condemnation of “our times.” As I watched it, I kept wondering if something so relatively understated that aspires—unlike Ailes—to come across as relatively unbiased was too subtle for the world that Ailes created.
The Loudest Voice seems more intent on probing the political and sociological impact of Fox News than the ferociously complicated psychology of the man who created it. It’s a worthy mission, but it leaves the character at the center of the series at something of a distance.
It cannot reconcile a well-honed expertise on the nuts and bolts of news with its rudimentary understanding of personality and behavior. Sketches of actual people have been inserted into an environment more realistic and detailed than they are, a contrast unflattering to Crowe’s floundering performance.
The Loudest Voice is a liberal bedtime story; it doesn’t argue a point or even particularly inform so much as blandly recreate the heinous actions of a Republican bogeyman. In doing so, it merely pacifies, assuring us that the world functions exactly as we expected while leaving us safe and secure in the knowledge that the monsters are exactly where we always knew they were.