There’s one thing holding back this real-life Murdoch media drama

The Hack ★★★½

This seven-part series, which tells the story of perhaps the biggest media scandal of the century, is eminently watchable and mostly compelling, but it suffers from a serious case of split personality that ultimately makes it a little hard to buy into.

If you watched just the first episode in isolation, you’d say this was an arch telling of the investigation by Nick Davies (David Tennant), a freelance investigative journalist working for The Guardian, into the way Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World employed private investigators to illegally hack the phones of thousands of people in the UK – celebrities, sports stars, politicians and regular folk – to generate scoops.

There are lots of jokes, fanciful sequences, raised eyebrows, and breaking of the fourth wall – all of which suggests that perhaps writer Jack Thorne (Adolescence) and director Lewis Arnold (the Yorkshire Ripper series The Long Shadow) didn’t quite trust that the audience would be able to follow the admittedly complex plot without the help of some big cues.

But if you watched the second episode on its own, you’d have an entirely different take. Here Robert Carlyle stars as police detective Dave Cook, a man we first meet as he is being arrested for alleged breaches of the Privacy Act. From there we travel back in time to his investigation of a cold case murder, which is where his troubles begin. This narrative thread unfolds as a standard mystery thriller, fascinating and entirely without gimmicks.

The two strands interweave occasionally, and towards the end substantially, but the effect is strangely disorienting. I can’t help feel that The Hack would have been a more successful production if it had ditched the trickery and played a much straighter bat altogether.

That said, there are good reasons to want to bring a little pizzazz to the Nick Davies strand. Journalism is a wonderful profession when supported by adequate resources and a strong editorial culture, but it largely consists of sitting at a keyboard and staring at a screen, typically alone. It can be fascinating to do, but to watch? Not so much.

Davies has lots of interactions – with his editor Alan Rusbridger (played by Toby Jones with a shockingly bad wig); a lawyer for the hacked, Charlotte Harris (Rose Leslie); and The Guardian’s in-house lawyer Gill Phillips (Nadia Albina) – but it’s mostly talk-talk-talk.

The Cook strand is far more dynamic, with the policeman and his wife Jacqui (Eve Myles) – a police officer-turned-Crimewatch-presenter dealing with PTSD from a particularly challenging incident – coming under scrutiny from gangsters, private eyes, media and finally cops.

At the heart of everything is the massive betrayal of trust committed by Murdoch’s notorious, and now-defunct, Sunday tabloid. It was initially passed off by his News International as an isolated incident, but was in fact systemic in the way the company did business – and not just at NOTW. Collusion with and corruption of cosy politicians and compliant coppers were core to the operation.

It’s an important story, and Davies’ pursuit of it dogged. Some change, and not a lot of charges, followed. But sadly, as a post-script makes clear, 13 years on from the inquiry the scandal prompted, it would be a very bold act of wilful optimism to claim that the media is in better shape now than it was when all this unfolded.

The Hack is streaming on Stan* now.

*Stan is owned by Nine, the publisher of this masthead.

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