Time-Traveling Down Under

‘The Newsreader’ on Roku is a great ride, but is this what Netflix with commercials will be like?

Earlier this year, Netflix announced that it plans to launch an ad-supported option by the end of 2022. Other streaming platforms already offer this for subscribers who don’t want to pay higher monthly rates. But after years of commercial-free viewing, the announcement feels like a throwback.

If you want to know what that feels like, check out The Newsreader, a 6-part series currently streaming for free on Roku. It’s a period piece set in the mid-1980s when Crocodile Dundee, Margaret Thatcher, AIDS, the Challenger space-shuttle explosion, and the Dingo baby-killing were top stories.

Although set in the land Down Under, this is a milieu I recognize well.

The stories were recorded on videocassettes, which sometimes got eaten on playback VCRs. Reporters used typewriters instead of iPads.

The teleprompter had become a fixture of every broadcast, making it plain that whatever self-deluding notion you had about yourself at the so-called anchor desk, you were just a reader of the news.

Except for the teleprompter, most of that has changed with today’s technology, but the people behind those fraught daily newscasts look the same to me as ever.

The news professional

Just before the pandemic, I met a photographer in the Galapagos Islands, who slung her Nikon and leaned into her shots like someone who’d been doing it all her life.

Something about her body language told me she was not your average tourist on vacation. It turns out I was right. Working these days as an independent filmmaker, she’d been a reporter, producer, and TV news anchor for ABC and CBS.

“It is a soulless business,” she said to me as we photographed iguanas and giant tortoises during the expedition. “But then, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you about that.”

She was referring to my own time in the same business

A time when I looked like I had it all together but was tearing up inside. Not because anything was so terribly wrong. But because a successful mask becomes a kind of prison.

Like Gatsby’s series of carefully orchestrated gestures, it locks you into a persona that’s as fake as the ginned-up bonhomie of happy talk. I longed to be free of that world but was afraid to step away because I’d grown used to the money.

It’s that soulless quality that comes across in the lives of The Newsreader’s all-too-familiar characters. People whose daily struggle to process the news of the day is thwarted by concerns over ratings, office politics, and the ongoing war over whose view of the story will make it into the final edit — the reporter who covered the story first-hand, or the boss with ratings on the brain.

“There’s so much posturing,” says The Newsreader’s brawny ex-athlete turned sportscaster. “I don’t know how to (actually) talk to people.”

Now put all that into a blender

Along with the personal demons that haunt each character. Childhood trauma, doubts about one’s sexual orientation, sexism, racism, the detrimental impact of aging on one’s career, and negative self-worth. What you wind up with is a highly-rated, award-winning TV series.

Like The Morning Show on Apple TV, The Newsreader is profoundly moving. But in the Aussie version, external events become the scaffolding for the personal storylines, issues that have nothing to do with television but are exacerbated by the medium’s rough, soulless ride across the information wasteland into your living room.

But beware!

The Roku channel comes with commercials. You cannot buy your way out of their intrusions. That’s the only downside. And it’s pretty annoying since the episodes do not fade to black before going to two loud minutes of ads about electric BMWs and drugs to cure psoriasis.

If you can put up with that, you’re in for some pretty good TV. But keep the mute button on your remote handy. The ads come at you fast, furious — and loud. One hopes Netflix will do better.

©2022 Andrew ‘Jazprose’ Hill

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