Directed by: James L. Brooks
Starring: William Hurt, Holly Hunter, Albert Brooks, Joan Cusack, Robert Prosky, Jack Nicholson
Broadcast News covers familiar ground as a newsroom comedy with almost documentary-like authenticity about the world of TV news. The one constant is that nothing is constant. The characters are defined by their jobs and have very little time for much else, including romance. Broadcast News could be talking about any job where people are under the pressure of deadlines and once one crisis is over, another one is waiting around the corner. When we see characters talk to each other about something other than work, it is something of a minor miracle.
Broadcast News takes place at a nightly network news program. Made in 1987, this is when the competition to break the story was limited only to beating other networks and possibly the newspaper. The internet would completely change the game. Because the name of the game is to break stories faster, many network news broadcasts or "special report" coverage of an event do not even bother to check to see if a development is accurate. New "facts" scroll across the ticker on the bottom of the screen and the facts change within minutes. It doesn't matter much if they are actually true. The network of Broadcast News at least attempts to present a semblance of accuracy and truth. Nowadays, it would play second fiddle to TMZ. The nightly news is no longer the top news source for people. It is more of a recap show for events that were already presented, discussed, broken down, and dissected by other sources.
The weekend anchor is Tom Grunick (Hurt), a sports reporter for a small station hired because of his looks, deep voice, and charisma. He isn't a great reader and doesn't know much, but the audience likes him. His new co-worker is Aaron Altman (Brooks), a field reporter who looks upon Tom with equal parts fascination and envy. He thought he would get the weekend anchor spot, but we learn later he isn't exactly cut out for it. He perspires a lot and noticeably. Tom and the program producer Jane Craig (Hunter) become an item, much to Aaron's displeasure because he is in love with Jane himself.
Jane isn't necessarily adept at handling relationships. Her first love is her job, where she thrives under the pressure. When the pressure is off, she scarcely knows what to do. Hunter, Hurt, and Brooks were all nominated for Oscars for their performances and give us respectively three-dimensional portraits of people who in a lesser movie would be mere archetypes of a workaholic producer, a pretty boy on-camera talent, and an overlooked, self-important newsman who can't imagine what the producer sees in the pretty boy.
Behind the scenes is the ever-looming threat of layoffs due to declining ratings. The nightly news anchor Bill Rorish (Nicholson) is safe and laments out loud to an underling how much he hates when layoffs happen. The underling gently suggests that Bill knock a million a year off of his salary so the layoffs wouldn't be necessary. Bill simply gives the underling a "what are you, kidding me?" look and the suggestion is soon forgotten.
The romantic subplots are not as entertaining as the insiders view of the news business. We sort of know what's bound to happen with the love triangle and it doesn't quite fit. It feels shoehorned in to broaden the movie's appeal. But, the movie knows what it's talking about when it reflects on the slick, professional, highly volatile world of media. Broadcast News was made when TV was the top of the media food chain. It almost seems quaint now, which is refreshing in its own right, but in its context the pressures and the office politics were very real. They have since been replaced with different kinds of pressures, but no less intense.
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