“All the President’s Men” and “Lou Grant” inspired countless young men and women to become newspaper reporters in the 1970s and ’80s, and all the movies and TV shows about newspapers since then have been turning them off.
Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth Perkins as cutesy-pie dueling columnists in the movie “He Said, She Said.” Ick. Ted Danson as an “acerbic” columnist in the TV show “Ink.” Double ick. Drew Barrymore as a drippy Sun-Times reporter who goes undercover at a high school in the movie “Never Been Kissed,” and Robin Wright Penn chasing Kevin Costner from the Tribune newsroom to the Carolina coast in “Message in a Bottle.” Icky ick ick.
Collectively, they’ve been almost enough to make law look like an attractive profession.
The latest in this continuing series of anti-recruiting posters is the new NBC drama “Deadline” (8 p.m., WMAQ-Ch. 5). Who would possibly be interested in a line of work in which a heavy-handed schmo like Wallace Benton, the columnist/crime-solver/journalism prof played by Oliver Platt, could be a star? Benton is a rogue without a charm bracelet, and his show gives him so many foils, between his newspaper colleagues and his students, that no one has the heft or screen time to act as a balance.
Interestingly, a parlor game of sorts has arisen as people try to guess which real-life journalist the Benton character is based on. Northwestern University journalism professor David Protess is, perhaps, the front-runner, since he and his students have gathered evidence clearing several condemned killers, a la Benton. Protess is not happy about the character’s resemblance to him. Others who have been cited as possible prototypes: New York columnist Jimmy Breslin, who is also said to be miffed, and the late Tribiune columnist Mike Royko. The show denies that any one individual was a model. But even if there was a prototype, “Deadline” departs so much from life that the point seems moot.
TV and moviemakers will tell you they are not filming documentaries here, that, yes, some of the details will strike real newspaper types as wrong, but that’s the way it has to be for the sake of the story.
But does it? Is it any coincidence that “All the President’s Men” and “Lou Grant,” the two most enduring newspaper-based entertainments in recent history, are the two that most vividly got the mores and the milieu right?
It is condescension to suggest audiences don’t need realism, because what you are really saying is that they aren’t smart enough to smell a rat. It’s one thing to ask a national audience to accept Billy Crystal heading the wrong way out of town on Lake Shore Drive for the sake of a pretty picture in “When Harry Met Sally,” quite another to ask it to identify with characters who behave in ways that don’t make sense.
Even when people don’t know the ins and outs of a profession being portrayed on a screen, they do know when something feels contrived.
How else do you explain the squandering of all the free publicity these shows invariably get? Newspaper writers have access to printing presses, and they invariably take advantage of that when another paper-based work comes out. A lot of the publicity is negative, true, on the order of that-ain’t-the-way-it-really-is columns such as this one, but the first step to building an audience is building an awareness. After that, it’s up to the work in question to be worth anybody’s time, and nothing has caught the popular imagination.
Part of it, admittedly, is the public doesn’t much like newspaper reporters. We are seen as disrespectful, intrusive and negative, all of which is, by definition, true, and we tend, as individuals, to be both full of ourselves and insecurities. It goes with the territory of having your work out there for public judgment every day.
In response to the inevitable outcry over “Deadline,” Dick Wolf, the producer of it and “Law & Order,” said he thinks journalists are fascinating characters but also perpetually ticked off, because they’re smart enough to be making more money but are sacrificing that for job satisfaction. Fair enough.
But more likely, what’s been holding these movies and TV shows back is not ambivalent-to-antagonistic feelings about reporters, but the lack of verisimilitude, the sense that this guy whom viewers see writing a column at a paper is exactly as false as that thinly rendered and illogically behaving cop they saw last year.
Every reporter learns, from Day One, that facts are key. In its first two episodes, here’s where “Deadline,” setting aside its softness as drama or the question of whether the central character is or isn’t based on Protess, Royko, Breslin or some combination thereof, goes wrong on the facts:
– The overwork thing. Nobody who writes a good, regularly appearing column also has the time, like Wallace Benton seems to, to teach journalism classes and solve crimes. Many of us are lucky just to get our columns done in time to avoid white space or pink slips.
– The bad writing thing. It is usually true — not always, but usually — that your columnists tend to be selected from among your better writers. It is also usually true that your better writers tend to be the ones who win Pulitzer Prizes, journalism’s Emmys. Benton is a star columnist and has a Pulitzer, yet here are the phrases from his columns that we are offered: “Kill and be killed.” “They did the crime, now do the time.” “Bradford and Washington sat with their mouthpieces, like mad dogs tethered to their hates.” The first two are just cliches, the third an attempt at “writing” gone awry. Collectively, they demonstrate that Wallace Benton is a hack. A dandified, bow-tie-wearing, prize-winning hack.
– The bow tie thing. Maybe a George Will can get away with it, somebody paid to flaunt their erudition. But a metro columnist for a New York tabloid?
– The tabloid headline thing. A few of them offered here are sharp, like “Toxic Tots.” But then, for the sake of advancing the story, the show’s writers have Benton’s fictional New York Ledger run a headline like “Good man does wrong thing for right reasons.” I’m guessing street sales were down that day.
– The columnist still working at the same paper with his ex-wife thing. Wouldn’t one of them have wised up and taken another job?
– The Chicago cop yielding to out-of-town reporter thing. In Episode 1, Benton follows the trail of a murder case to Chicago. A suspect is being interrogated, with Benton in the room, and when he says to the cop, “You guys mind if I talk to this gent alone,” the cop says, “Knock yourself out.” It works as comedy, but there’s no way any journalist gets in that room without the cop knocking him out. Benton gets his confession, which the show wants viewers to see as a great thing, but which anybody with half a brain knows is tantamount to giving the guy a get-out-of-jail-free card.
– The not taking notes thing. In an amazing coincidence that drives real reporters nuts, just about every journalist ever on a TV show or in the movies is part of that tiny fraction of the population that possesses photographic memory. Benton is, apparently, another of them.
– The ethical violations thing. Impersonating a party thrower to get in to talk to a catering company employee. Growling out, as a threat, that if he writes it, it becomes true. Telling a source “there ain’t no off the record.” Not charming. Not rogue-ish. Just dumb.
On the other hand, the show does get some of the smaller details right. There’s Benton, on deadline, banging his computer and yelling, “Fix it, fix it, fix it!” There’s the nutrition derived from a vending machine, which may have something to do with his belly and harried look being just right for a metro columnist. There’s also his apparent chronic lateness; newspaper people love deadlines because that’s the only way they produce and the only way to know when they have 10 more minutes to file a story.
In general, the give-and-take between Benton and his newspaper colleagues is vital and believable, but there just isn’t enough of it to salvage this show.
“Deadline” is a flaccid, implausible piece of work. And thank goodness for newspapers — TV shows about the online world would have been even worse.
Local Emmys
The nominations for 1999-2000 local news Emmys came out last week. They were highlighted by Bob Sirott getting a couple, including one for anchoring “excellence,” in the very week WFLD-Ch. 32 canned him to make its morning show more like every other morning show. The ceremony is Oct. 28.
