Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Loudest Voice’ On Showtime, Where Russell Crowe Plays The Man That Made Fox News A Powerhouse

Roger Ailes’ life and death, especially in the two decades he led Fox News Channel to the top of the cable heap, influencing the direction of our country’s political discourse, is pretty well documented. And Gabriel Sherman was one of the people who was close as any outside journalist could be to what was going on behind the scenes. Showtime is adapting his book The Loudest Voice In The Room, along with articles on the harassment charges leveled against him, in a new miniseries. And who did they get to play the bombastic Ailes? None other than Russell Crowe. Read on for more…

THE LOUDEST VOICE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: In 2017, we see Roger Ailes (Russell Crowe) splayed out on the floor of his home, with radio reports in the background talking about the death of the recently-removed head of the Fox News Channel.

The Gist: We go back to 1995. Ailes knows that GE is about to can him from his position as the president of CNBC after an HR investigation. He goes to the sprawling mansion of GE CEO Jack Welch (John Finn) to negotiate his exit. Welch wants the exit to be easy, as Microsoft and NBC are about to launch MSNBC and he wants no difficulties. Ailes just wants the non-compete clause changed to a list of all existing news organizations instead of a blanket non-complete.

Ailes has something up his sleeve; he knows Rupert Murdoch (Simon McBurney) wants to hire him to start a Fox-branded news channel. So he joyfully leaves CNBC, leaving behind his girlfriend Elizabeth Tilson (Sienna Miller), PR maven Brian Lewis (Seth MacFarlane), and several other allies. He thinks CNBC is a sinking ship and MSNBC “sounds like something you should be raising money for.”

On his first day at the network, a year before its scheduled launch, he immediately dismisses the research and business plan presented by Murdoch’s right-hand man Ian Rae (Jamie Jackson). He thinks, in a crowded cable news field, that FNC should play directly to the conservative base in the country, the ones not served by what the former media adviser to presidents like Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush thinks is a left-leaning news media. He wants FNC to be “fair and balanced,” but he also has a plan to load the station with opinion shows that don’t have to be anything but catnip to the vastly underserved conservative working class.

When he learns that Disney is looking to launch a news channel before Fox, he moves up the launch to six months, which Rae thinks is impossible. Ailes, though, says, he knows what he’s doing; “just get me on the air.” He calls in favors; he hires Lewis, ace news writer Bill Shine (Josh Stamberg), and executive/former flame Laurie Luhn (Annabelle Wallis). He makes sure he hires attractive female on-air anchors that don’t dress like “bull dykes” (i.e. in pantsuits) and decides to bring in an inexperienced, right-wing radio personality named Sean Hannity (Patch Darragh) because he likes how passionate he is in arguing his opinions.

Our Take: When Showtime adapted Gabriel Sherman’s 2014 book about Ailes, The Loudest Voice In The Room, they didn’t just get anyone to do it; they got Tom McCarthy, who won an Oscar for his screenplay for Spotlight. So he has an excellent pedigree of writing about media in an honest way. This adaptation could have been much more cartoonish than it ended up being, but it’s pretty damn cartoonish, largely because of Russell Crowe.

We’re not saying that Crowe doesn’t do a fine job disappearing into the bald cap, fat suit and massive aviator glasses he needed to wear to play Ailes. At a certain point during the premiere, you stop seeing Crowe in that fat suit and start thinking of him as some version of Ailes, albeit one that’s mocked one second and heroic the next. And we give McCarthy and his writers credit for showing that Ailes made FNC a success by identifying an underserved market, when the execs at News Corp just wanted to do the same things CNN was doing and MSNBC was going to do.

But it feels like there are one too many moments where we see Ailes as nothing but a cackling villain or a hero and not much in between. We see how he suffers as a hemophiliac (a condition which led to his death after a fall in 2017), and we see how he deals with Beth, who would eventually marry him after he dismisses her from FNC. There are times where it looks like the show will portray some of Ailes’ human frailties. But when he’s pawing at an interviewee for an on-air position, or vainly getting makeup put on before a 4 AM pre-launch meeting where he screams Rae out of the room, or making speeches about who he’s trying to serve with this channel, it feels less like Crowe is portraying Ailes as a person and more as a guy in a fat suit.

Sex and Skin: Aside from Ailes’ lasciviousness with Luhn and the anchor candidate, and his desire for all of his female anchors to wear short skirts, there’s no actual sex in the first episode, thank goodness.

Parting Shot: Despite stumbles and doubts from Murdoch, FNC launches on October 7, 1996. As the network goes live for the first time, all the executives gathered in the control booth cheer, Bob Dylan’s “Living In A Political World” plays in the background. Monitors playing the channel pan out into the form of an American flag.

Sleeper Star: Simon McBurney looks so much like Rupert Murdoch that we kept thinking that somehow they hired Rupert to play himself.

Most Pilot-y Line: “The only reason why you’re here is that you and Rupert used to bugger each other in grade school!” – Ailes to Rae in that 4 AM meeting. Even if that line is real, it’s still a bit on the nose as to how Ailes dealt with people. Oh, and there’s a reference to Bill O’Reilly firing an assistant because he didn’t get the right kind of sparkling water, but he’s going to be like the Maris Crane of this miniseries; talked about but never seen. Feels like a missed opportunity.

Our Call: STREAM IT, mostly for Crowe’s performance as Ailes. The Loudest Voice likely won’t tell you anything you don’t already know, especially after the allegations of sexual harassment against him came out (Naomi Watts will appear as Gretchen Carlson at some point as the series skips around to key years like 2001 and 2008), but it’s at least entertaining to watch Crowe embody the early 21st century’s most divisive media figure.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream The Loudest Voice on Showtime