They Report, You Decide

By James Poniewozik

It's crunch time at one of the competitors in the cable-news wars. The network is under pressure from its corporate bosses. The news execs are throwing young, nubile talent on the air in a desperate attempt to look hip. And the network's high-priced new star anchor is getting so-so ratings at best. No, it's not that network--or either of the other two. I-24 is the fictional network at the center of Breaking News (Bravo, Wednesdays, 8 p.m. E.T.), a new drama whose subject is especially relevant during the summer of the 8 p.m. joust among Bill, Phil and Connie (O'Reilly, Donahue and Chung).

Or maybe that should be "surprisingly relevant," for a series made almost two years ago. News was all set to run on tnt in January 2001 but was scuttled by new management after the merger that created AOL Time Warner (which owns TNT and TIME). This year Bravo bought all 13 episodes--at a deep discount. But despite being shot before 9/11, Ashleigh Banfield's dye job, Greta Van Susteren's eye job and Paula Zahn's "zipper" ad, News doesn't play like old news. Like E.R., whose frenzied pace it emulates, News nails the jargon and the adrenaline rush of its subject. And the series pays admirable attention to the dangers of synergy-spawned conflicts of interest and corporate meddling in today's merger-mad media.

But like many a smart, superficial journalist, News gets its details right while muffing the intangibles that add up to larger truth. The show's ethical dilemmas are genuine but predictable. (Should we report politicians' affairs? Hound grieving widows? Cover African news?) And the show is a clip reel of white-collar-drama cliches: the tracking shots of newsies speed walking down hallways to show how goldarned busy they are, the family man torn between home and office, the single woman married to her career whose eggs you can all but hear expiring one by one. The most intriguing character is star Tim Matheson's big-money anchor, because he is only half a cliche--he is a pompous prima donna but also a stand-up journalist.

In fact, for a supposedly "warts and all" show, the series romanticizes its subject. For the most part, News's professionals, like The West Wing's, are "flawed" merely by being virtuous workaholics who sometimes make pragmatic choices. They spend most of their screen time chasing major stories, not celebrity arrests and missing-persons sagas. And by focusing on shoe-leather journalists, the six episodes sent to critics ignore the real mainstays of today's cable news: the daily aneurysms of O'Reilly, Chris Matthews, James Carville and the rest of the yak pack. If the show manages to come back for a second season, the producers could better capture the state of cable news by adding a blowhard commentator with ratings as big as his mouth. They could even change the title. How does Breaking Eardrums sound? --By James Poniewozik