Netflix’s Scoop is a dramatic interpretation of the infamous 2019 Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew about his relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell. This story was told more thoroughly in the excellent British miniseries, A Very Royal Scandal, but what sets Scoop apart is that it mostly follows producer Sam McAlister (Billie Piper of Doctor Who), who secured the interview.
The film is based on McAlister’s book Scoops: Behind the Scenes of the BBC’s Most Shocking Interviews, and while it’s interesting to see what goes into PR negotiations to get big talent, it just doesn’t work as a feature. Scoop is essentially an hour of McAlister working to get the Prince Andrew interview and then half an hour of the interview itself — brilliantly replicated by Rufus Sewell as the Duke of York and Gillian Anderson as Newsnight host Emily Maitlis.
Unfortunately, watching the real Newsnight special is more compelling than this dramatization, though all of the performances are very good.
Scoop begins with McAlister trying to get big interview guests. Her colleagues clearly think she’s beneath them — she’s seen as more TMZ or The Sun type of journalist, rather than one of those posh and respectable BBC employees. Ironically, this is by far the most interesting part of the movie; exploring class disparity between McAlister (a single mother who was first woman in her working-class family to attend university) and her fancy BBC surroundings.
Piper does a fantastic job here — she gets ostracized from other actors aside from Keeley Hawes playing Andrew’s private secretary Amanda Thirsk. Thirsk is an interesting character; someone who seems to really believe Andrew and care about his well-being. She’s fittingly maternal for a man who arranges stuffed animals on his bed and waits for “mummy’s” approval. The conversations between McAlister and Thirsk are probably the best parts of Peter Moffat’s script, showing two women with completely disparate socioeconomic existences coming together to negotiate something that could be beneficial for both of them. In the end, McAlister wins.
The rest of the performances in Scoop are fine. Gillian Anderson and Rufus Sewell do a lot of heavy lifting as they’re emulating this internationally known interview. They get all those real people’s quirks and tics, and use their bodies and voices to truly become them. But what for? If you’ve seen the real Newsnight interview, then you’ve seen it all before. Does swapping out the real people with famous actors make it somehow better?
Which brings us to the film’s main issue: Scoop is just superfluous. A Very Royal Scandal covered all this with much more detail, and so Philip Martin directs Scoop like a thriller, hoping to generate suspense where there absolutely is none. He films it like his work on Wallander or Agatha Christie’s Poirot; an almost laughable incongruity between form and content.
And let’s face it — the interview itself is really not as big a deal as these filmmakers seem to think it is here. Scoop is far too self-congratulatory, characters literally applauding each other and talking about standing up to power. The BBC is power though! It’s an arm of the state!
What, then, was the point of this interview? He loses his royal titles — a fact that only matters to the diehards who still support the monarchy, and even then only a little. He paid $3.15 million to settle with one of his accusers out of court; so far $550 million has been paid in settlements by those convicted or implicated in abusing girls alongside Epstein and Maxwell, with no admission of liability let alone accountability from any rich or powerful men involved. Newsnight made some memes and not much else happened.
All of Jeffrey Epstein’s secrets died with him, and the system will never let people like Bill Clinton, Donald Trump or Alan Dershowitz be held accountable for their alleged role on ‘the Lolita Express’ or within a global sex trafficking ring. If anything it is just depressing because it shows that even an absolutely enormous TV exposé about raping children with a prince does not change anything at all about how power works around this stuff — Sadder still: everyone can pat themselves on the back but they are all completely useless like this movie.
