- Network: SHOWTIME
- Series Premiere Date: Jun 30, 2019
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Critic Reviews
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The seven-episode miniseries, four episodes of which were made available to critics, is steadily entertaining, as it tracks Ailes from 1995 to the end of his life in 2017. ... But “The Loudest Voice” becomes a simplistic and obvious anatomy of Fox News. Too much of the dialogue in the script, whose writers include “Spotlight” director Tom McCarthy, doubles as fuel on the fire, with little dramatic purpose.
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As someone who is interested in how the xenophobic sausage is made, "The Loudest Voice" held my attention, but its bland approach can be more frustrating than it is fascinating.
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Crowe is good to a point, but "The Loudest Voice" can be root canal.
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The Loudest Voice seems more intent on probing the political and sociological impact of Fox News than the ferociously complicated psychology of the man who created it. It’s a worthy mission, but it leaves the character at the center of the series at something of a distance.
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[The Loudest Voice] is so focused on the who, what, when, and where of that story that it neglects to dig sufficiently into the why and how. The Loudest Voice is most interested in the surface of things ... Crowe certainly tackles the part with zeal and shows us sides of the man — including his occasional gentleness and his wiseass sense of humor — that make him something more complicated than a Republican villain. ... He does have to engage in another kind of battle, one between himself and the prosthetics applied to his face to make it appear more jowly.
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If the idea is to glean lessons and drama from Ailes’ story, The Loudest Voice is a bust. If the idea is to eventually win Crowe an Emmy, however, consider this a fair and balanced success.
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When it's specific and detailed, capturing the depth of Sherman's reporting, it's perceptive and entertaining. ... Less successful are the grandstanding beats where Ailes walks into a situation controlled by some thinly written snowflake duck and makes a big speech dominated by Fox News talking points and then everybody claps at his insight and magnetism. Those are clunky and on-the-nose.
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Engrossing but flawed. ...“The Loudest Voice” feels as though it has come way too late or much too soon. As a piece of current contextual storytelling, it struggles to provide the thematic platform that would make it more than a stylized Wikipedia entry. As a hit job, it comes on too strong, given that its subject is dead and gone.
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It cannot reconcile a well-honed expertise on the nuts and bolts of news with its rudimentary understanding of personality and behavior. Sketches of actual people have been inserted into an environment more realistic and detailed than they are, a contrast unflattering to Crowe’s floundering performance.
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View Ailes' life as an exercise in personal and political villainy, if you will; but it's a fascinating one. The Loudest Voice is merely repellent.
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That the script can’t find an angle in on the “why” of Ailes and thus keeps on stating, more forcefully each time, the “what” holds Crowe back yet more. Small moments — as when, say, he tells his son about a moment of abuse in his childhood — come to feel like they must be “Rosebud” clues to crack the case of this Citizen Kane figure, if only because otherwise, his story has no dramatic energy, with endless indulgence replacing an arc.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 12 out of 20
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Mixed: 2 out of 20
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Negative: 6 out of 20
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Jul 11, 2019
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Nov 13, 2020
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Jun 30, 2019