Six great films that show the dark side of the TV industry

Anto­nio Cam­pos’ Chris­tine is a real-life dra­ma about Flori­da reporter Chris­tine Chub­buck (Rebec­ca Hall), who briefly became infa­mous in the 1970s for killing her­self live on air. The small­town TV news sta­tion she works at doesn’t come off too well in the film, with its sex­ist envi­ron­ment and pop­ulist ideals sug­gest­ed as a con­tribut­ing fac­tor in Chubbuck’s trag­ic demise. Of course, it’s not the first film to expose the ugly side of the tele­vi­sion indus­try. Here are six of our favourites, each of which would make a fas­ci­nat­ing com­pan­ion piece to Christine.

Hit­ting cin­e­mas just two years after Chubbuck’s on-air sui­cide, Net­work echoes the trag­ic events sur­round­ing her death. Upon dis­cov­er­ing he is about to lose his job, anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch) promis­es to kill him­self live on air. Any link to Chubbuck’s sto­ry is pure­ly coin­ci­den­tal, but it’s no mis­take that Oscar-win­ning writer Pad­dy Chayef­sky tapped into the industry’s seedy under­bel­ly. Net­work is the first and last word in the argu­ment that news pro­grammes will do any­thing for rat­ings, as the men­tal­ly unsta­ble Beale is giv­en his very own show on which to rant at will. It leads to the famous ​“mad as hell” speech and a fero­cious cri­tique of exec­u­tive greed as scathing as it is hysterical.

Spike Lee’s mas­ter­piece updates Network’s themes for a mod­ern audi­ence and adds a vital racial twist. TV writer Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) finds his ideas for shows fea­tur­ing well-round­ed, real­is­tic black char­ac­ters reject­ed by his boss and in a fit of frus­tra­tion pitch­es the most racist show he can think of: lit­er­al­ly a mod­ern min­strel show. Chill­ing­ly, it not only gets made, but becomes a run­away hit. Cri­tiquing both black per­form­ers will­ing to play stereo­types for main­stream suc­cess and the white exec­u­tives more will­ing to broad­cast a pop­u­lar lie than an hon­est medi­oc­rity, Bam­boo­zled places racial pol­i­tics front and cen­tre in the rat­ings war.

While most of the films men­tioned here use dark satire to cri­tique the tele­vi­sion indus­try, David Cronenberg’s Video­drome presents a phys­i­cal man­i­fes­ta­tion of those ills. Unlike the news anchors in Broad­cast News or Net­work, TV exec Max Renn (James Woods) doesn’t pre­tend to any high moral­i­ty or noble pur­pose. His sta­tion instead broad­casts soft­core porn and sen­sa­tion­al vio­lence, appeal­ing to view­ers’ base instincts. The tit­u­lar Video­drome tapes lead to vivid hal­lu­ci­na­tions, with both the cas­sette and the tele­vi­sion set com­ing alive as sick­en­ing liv­ing organ­isms. The metaphor is clear enough: they appear and behave like a can­cer. Most dis­turbing­ly, tele­vi­sion is framed as not just a dam­ag­ing, desen­si­tis­ing cre­ation, but an addic­tive one too, with home­less peo­ple being tak­en into the ​‘Cath­ode Ray Mis­sion’ and hooked up to TV sets as if they were as vital as food or water.

Broad­cast News is a film about ethics in jour­nal­ism, but cru­cial­ly it adopts a far more rea­soned tone than the oth­er films list­ed here. Writer/​director James L Brooks grounds the dra­ma in some­thing more akin to a work­place rom-com. The love tri­an­gle between Hol­ly Hunter’s tena­cious pro­duc­er, Albert Brooks’ expe­ri­enced reporter and William Hurt’s aspir­ing anchor is used to com­ment on the way news jour­nal­ism works, with image and pre­sen­ta­tion becom­ing more impor­tant than knowl­edge and skill. Its views on news are summed up by Brooks’ speech sug­gest­ing Hurt is emblem­at­ic of the entire indus­try: ​“He will just bit by lit­tle bit low­er our stan­dards where they are impor­tant. Just a tiny lit­tle bit. Just coax along, flash over substance.”

Land­ing in 1998, a time before real­i­ty TV dom­i­nat­ed the small screen, The Tru­man Show is a bril­liant exper­i­ment in tak­ing the for­mat to its most extreme end. You may con­sid­er today’s real­i­ty TV to be exploita­tive and trashy, but noth­ing has come close to the idea of a pro­gramme cre­at­ed around one man’s life, from cra­dle to grave. TV as a for­mat inter­acts with its audi­ence in a more con­ver­sa­tion­al way than film, fea­tur­ing ordi­nary peo­ple and real-life sto­ries as opposed to con­struct­ed art. There is more scope for push­ing the form itself, and The Tru­man Show shows why that might not be such a great thing.

There’s lit­tle moral­i­ty to be found in most films about TV, and Night­crawler is no excep­tion. In a mem­o­rable turn as video reporter Louis Bloom, Jake Gyl­len­haal is a dis­turb­ing cen­tral pres­ence, epit­o­mis­ing the very worst impuls­es of our rat­ings-hun­gry media. Chas­ing ambu­lances around Los Ange­les in a bid to cap­ture gory footage is a low start­ing point, but Bloom only sinks fur­ther, active­ly engi­neer­ing hor­rif­ic inci­dents so he can then sell the exclu­sive footage to the high­est bid­der. Night­crawler is the kind of film that makes you want to take a show­er afterwards.