Stories set in newsrooms are a classic of fiction. The adrenaline of current events, the tension of personal relationships, the boiling news. From the classic “Lou Grant” to the current “The Morning Show”, “The Hour”, “Press” or “Spanish Periodistas”, the list is long between the series alone. Australian screenwriter Michael Lucas loved stories like Edge of News, the 1987 film starring Holly Hunter and William Hurt. Or the series “The Newsroom” signed by Aaron Sorkin and starring Jeff Daniels. Even the comedy “The Reporter: The Legend of Ron Burgundy” with Will Ferrell leading the cast. “Whether it’s comedy, drama or children’s television, a newsroom is a very exciting place to tell a story,” says the screenwriter. This love for a world so often idealized on screen and his relationship with news and television since childhood were the reasons that led him to create the series “The Newsreader”, the second season of which COSMO airs on Mondays at 22 :00 (it will also be available on Filmin on December 12th.
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Anna Torv (Mindhunter, Fringe) and Sam Reid (Interview with the Vampire) play Helen and Dale, key anchors for an Australian news channel in the 1980s. In the first season he is a newbie reporter who suddenly finds himself at the table with the star presenter, with whom he also begins a complicated love affair while hiding his true sexual orientation. In the editorial team, she is described as problematic simply because she is a woman with ambitions. In his case, his impenetrable, confident façade masks his struggles with mental health issues. The second season of the series, which covers relevant events of the time through the coverage of the news program in which the action takes place, is set in 1987, begins with a hectic election night and deals with further episodes of the world crisis on the stock market, the visit of Karl of England and Diana of Wales in Australia and the great heroin epidemic, among others.
An image from the fourth episode of the second season of “The Newsreader.”
“I’ve always been completely obsessed with the news,” says series creator Michael Lucas in a video interview in early November. “There was a time when I wanted to be a journalist, but the desire came to me at a young age. My whole family was obsessed with the news. In the 1980s, when I was a child, there was an AIDS epidemic and my father, who was a doctor, was often interviewed. I remember watching my father on TV explaining HIV and AIDS. And since his job was to give health advice every night, he had to stay informed. I knew that every day at six in the afternoon the whole family was watching TV and sometimes he would come out. From the age of seven, following current events became a routine for me,” he recalls.
Although Lucas’ memory of the 1980s occurs “through the eyes of a child,” the inner dramas of his protagonists allowed him to locate the plot of his series in this period. “He has a very complicated relationship with his sexuality and she has mental health problems. The discussion of these two topics was much more interesting in the eighties. Although these are still very complicated issues in today’s world, they are being treated more openly,” says Lucas. In his role as producer, setting the story in the 1980s required more work to ensure the period was represented as accurately as possible. “It was a lot of research, talking to people who worked in newsrooms in the ’80s, reading the scripts and checking the sets to make sure nothing was wrong. It takes a lot more time than a series set in modern times.”
One of the topics covered in the second season of The Newsreader is the protests against Australia’s Bicentenary.
One of Lucas’s concerns with his series was that it adequately reflected the journalistic world and newswriting environment. He documented himself in detail by speaking to many journalists, some of whom were well-known in Australia. He promised everyone that he would remain anonymous and not see what he reflected to them on the screen so that their names would be revealed. In this way, he managed to get them to open up and tell anecdotes that he used to give authenticity to his characters and the work environment in which they operate. To select the real news stories that the protagonists would cover in their chapters, Lucas read all the newspapers of the year in which each season takes place and made notes about what caught his attention the most. To this selection were added very relevant global news that was unavoidable, such as the Chernobyl nuclear accident in the first season, set in 1986, or in the second episode, the stock market crash of October 19, 1987, Black Monday.
Anna Torv, in the second season of “The Newsreader.”
If we set the story four decades ago, we can see how society has changed and in what aspects it is still anchored. The creator of “The Newsreader” believes that Dale will no longer experience all the torments he endures related to his sexuality in the same way in 2023. However, the sexism that Helen suffers from is still present in a society where image is still at the forefront on many occasions. “I know that women who are in the public eye and in the media still face a lot of judgment today,” she remembers. “We haven’t changed enough in this regard. There are more women on screen and more women in positions of power, but I still believe there is a double standard [respecto a sus homólogos masculinos]. If you’re talking about female journalists on TV, you only have to look at social media. Helen is defined as “too aggressive” in the series, and that still happens today. When a woman journalist asks complicated questions of political leaders, she is usually labeled as aggressive, but when a man does that, he is seen as just a good journalist,” she concludes.
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