McAvoy: I Can't Endorse The Hour

There are some who will be taken in by The Hour for its polished performances, its careful production design, and its BBC pedigree. Indeed, many in my own orbit assumed that these factors -- as well as its setting, a pioneering TV newsmagazine in 1956 England -- would make it an automatic hit with your commentator, one of the pioneering newsmen of his own time (and, as some say, of all time). Alas, I cannot give The Hour the greatest boon a new TV series could hope for: an endorsement from Will McAvoy.

The problem is not with the people involved. As followers of my own somewhat illustrious career will have guessed, I watched the interplay between the handsome, elegant anchor Hector Madden (Dominic West) and his girl producer Bel Rowley (Romola Garai) with interest, comparing it to my own completely professional relationship with Mackenzie McHale, who continues to serve as the Executive Producer of my own NewsNight, at least for as long as she continues to please me in that capacity, since she serves at my pleasure and I could fire her at literally any moment. Do Bel and Hector have a romantic history...or future? Is it quite believable that an on-camera anchor like Hector should be less competent than a relatively low-level producer like Freddie Lyon (Ben Whishaw)? Not to me, but as you apparently say on the internet, "your mileage may vary."

No, my problem with The Hour is in its very premise. By setting a series about news reporting in the known past, The Hour takes a very convenient position: from its privileged perch in the present day, both the characters on The Hour and its viewers will know not only which stories are most important when they're debated in the newsroom, but also how they ended. The effect, surely, will be to make the show seem very smug, and leave its audience chortling smugly about this ignorant producer, or that short-sighted anchor. I realize that the whole enterprise is fictional, but can we not still accuse even a fictional series of intellectual dishonesty? We can and, as Americans and patriots, we should. Nay: we must.

If you liked it, hey: maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I just can't separate my experience of watching a TV show from my training as a prosecutor, meaning that I unconsciously "cross-examine" even series that are meant to be purely entertaining. Perhaps it would be pleasurable to watch a show the way you do, without bringing my own intellectual rigor to it. I can't say, of course: I'm just an ordinary TV personality with an extraordinarily extensive depth of education and erudition, and if you were able to turn off that part of your brain and just settle into The Hour the way you might a nice hot bath, more power to you. But from my specific perspective, setting a fictional TV series in the world of journalism and pulling story elements from real events is a very risky proposition -- one that, maybe, should be undertaken only by the very greatest, most unequivocally gifted TV-writing talents...or not at all.