Jennifer Aniston, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Reese Witherspoon attend the Apple TV+ "The Morning Show" ... [+]
For many people, the weekend represents a prime opportunity to catch up on bingeing your favorite TV shows and movies at the end of a busy week. But the prevalence of so many streaming options now, from established favorites like Netflix
Sometimes, you might be in the mood for a particular genre or subject matter. Journalism is one such example, whether you have a passing interest in the profession or you might describe yourself as more of a die-hard news junkie. The streamers are packed with content to serve the entire spectrum of that interest — and below, you’ll find a sampling of some of the best TV shows and movies across the major services that are all connected in some way to the Fourth Estate.
Some of the selections below present fictionalized accounts of reporters at work, while others are can’t-miss documentaries. 2020 was an especially pivotal year for the journalism profession, which brought us indispensable coverage of everything from the US presidential election to racial tension and, of course, the global coronavirus pandemic. And these streaming titles may, in fact, help viewers appreciate the profession even just a bit more than they likely already do.
Spotlight (Netflix)
Before The Washington Post’s now-retired editor Marty Baron helped whip the paper into shape and give The New York Times a run for its money during the Trump years under the ownership of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, he was the managing editor of The Boston Globe. At a time when reporters on the newspaper’s special projects “Spotlight” team had begun poking around the edges of what would come to be known as the widespread child sex abuse scandal by a number of Catholic priests. It’s all here in this feature film — the tedium of a reporter’s daily life, being harangued by editors, sources that won’t call back, the inexorable need to feed the beast, the rush of knowing this story is the big one, and the satisfaction that comes from doing big, impactful work. The kind that changes lives.
The Fourth Estate (Showtime, and video on demand)
“It’s exciting,” says New York Times executive editor Dean Banquet, who’s held that position since 2014, in the trailer for Showtime’s four-part documentary series from director Liz Garbus. He says that during a moment of reflection, about how complicated of a news figure President Trump has become for the paper of record, then catches himself, and focuses, instead, on the upside: “Great stories trump everything else, right?”
The episodes in this limited series span different chunks of time in the Trump presidency, such as the “First 100 Days” (the title of Episode 1). It gives viewers something we rarely saw over the last four chaotic years — what it was like for reporters themselves to cover the biggest show on earth. The “show,” in this case, being the made-for-TV presidency that The Fourth Estate shows us required an all-hands-on-deck moment at the Times. Maggie Haberman, the Times’ Washington correspondent who became the profession’s ultimate Trump insider, is a standout presence here, juggling the thrill of breaking news and racing to get her pieces edited and perfected in time for either a deadline or to scoop a rival — a process that’s unrelentingly tense, at times, to watch. Time, not to mention newspaper deadlines, wait for no one.
The Dissident (video on demand)
Director Bryan Fogel’s searing indictment of the Saudi officials who arranged, participated in, and covered up the 2018 murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi is a gripping piece of filmmaking that did what much of the news coverage in the aftermath of the murder could not. Words on a page can be ignored, forgotten; in The Dissident, which got a standing ovation at Sundance, this story is brought to life via the magic trick that only the best documentary films can pull off. Audiences will walk away with a profound sense of disbelief at the kinds of things that one of America’s most nettlesome yet powerful allies is allowed to get away with.
The Newsroom (HBO)
The Newsroom, from West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin, ran from 2012-2014, and introduced viewers to the reporters and managers who run a fictionalized cable TV news channel as it undergoes a dramatic remake. Producer MacKenzie McHale, played by Emily Mortimer, is brought on to shift the channel toward news that matters at the expense of a lowest-common-denominator chase for ratings. Its anchor, Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), is a centerpiece of the show, and it’s fascinating to watch the channel struggle for balance — just a few years before “fake news” would enter the general public’s lexicon and become something that we’re now all-too-familiar with.
The Morning Show (Apple TV+)
Speaking of a “newsroom,” The Morning Show was part of the splashy Apple TV+ launch slate back in November of 2019, and it’s easy to see why.
It’s loosely based on CNN chief media correspondent Brian Stelter’s book Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV. And because it was one of the first titles to launch as part of Apple’s initial push into funding Netflix-style original content, the series is jam-packed with famous faces. Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston, for example, play the hosts of a fictional daytime TV program, and The Morning Show’s inaugural season tackles everything from gender dynamics to toxic work culture and the #MeToo movement — oh, yeah, and tries to dramatize what life is like for perpetually-stressed, highly paid on-air broadcast journalists and the staffers who support them, along the way.
Collective (video on demand)
You could argue that each generation of journalists has at least one film they point to for inspiring them to become a professional reporter, a bearer of witness and recorder of truth. Perennial favorites in this category include classics like All The President’s Men, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman and which chronicles the reportage that help bring down President Richard Nixon. Collective, Romanian director Alexander Nanau’s documentary about the unflinching journalists who decided to probe the aftermath of a 2015 fire at a popular club in Bucharest, is a product of this same tradition. As of the time of this writing, it has a near-perfect critics score on the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes, and it presents what for many people — including many future journalists — is an idealized version of the profession. Reporters are shown running down leads, handling sources, pecking away at their keyboards on deadline. Making the calls. Chasing the truth, wherever that leads.
Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists (HBO)
They were the last of their kind, theses two newspapermen who could occasionally write like poets. HBO’s 2018 documentary is an elegy of sorts for Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill — who wrote for, respectively, the New York Daily News and the New York Post. And while it celebrates a moment in time that doesn’t exist anymore, when newspapers were a centerpiece of civic life in a place like New York and readers still paid to hold the finished product in their hands, there’s still something exhilarating about seeing two people who love journalism and who routinely produce journalism that means something. It’s easy to caricature Breslin and Hamill as Irish Catholic college dropouts from working-class backgrounds who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps the way white males tend to easily do so often in this profession. But they earned their stripes. They championed the poor, could turn a phrase like a novelist, and watching them in this film might even make you fall in love with journalism, if you haven’t already.
