Good Night and Good Luck

 Good Night and Good Luck is a Broadway play, presented on June 7, 2025 on CNN.  It's a vanity project for George Clooney who directs and stars as Edward R. Murrow.  Clooney presents Murrow as a saint, an unambiguously virtuous crusader for truth and justice.  The ostensible subject of the play is Murrow's clash with Senator Joe McCarthy around 1954 in the context of the HUAC hearings on Communist infiltration of American institutions.  The play shows Murrow, an anchorman and reporter for CBS, attacking McCarthy as a proto-fascist demagogue notwithstanding resistance from the head of the network, Bill Paley.  In the end, Paley does the right thing, supporting Murrow's advocacy of the rule of law, although he does exile Murrow from prime-time to a Saturday afternoon slot.  A married couple -- the wife has a questionable background with Leftist causes -- has to pretend that they are not married; the wife reminds her husband to remove his wedding ring before going to work.  Everyone, however, knows that the couple are married and, when McCarthy is somehow vanquished at the end of the two-hour play, they can admit their relationship.  One journalist persecuted by McCarthy kills himself -- exactly why this fellow resorted to suicide is not explained.  McCarthy's demise is also never really explained. Clooney as Murrow makes a speech that constitutes a ringing endorsement of the free press and the show ends with a montage of events covered by news services from '54 to yesterday that doesn't really make sense -- I think Clooney means the montage to show that broadcast journalism has broken and reported-on many important stories to the benefit of our Republic, but the exact gist of the montage is unclear and mainly intended to enforce parallels between Joe McCarthy's reign of terror and our current plight during the second Trump administration.  (This is an elliptical way of making a point about the fact that Joe McCarthy's depredations should educate us as to President Trump's evil intentions -- in fact, I think that the montage is a cowardly way of drawing parallels that could be much more explicitly made.  In other words, Clooney's play evidences the exact sort of self-censorship that the show otherwise decries).  The show features musical interludes, a female jazz singer performing tunes that are only vaguely relevant to the story -- I think these interludes are intended to provide cover for scene changes.  

There are a number of things wrong with the production.  First, the over-declamatory and exuberant sort of delivery favored by Broadway actors (and people on the so-called "legitimate" stage) doesn't work well on TV.  Lines are spoken in a way intended to play to the back rows of the 1200 seat Winter Garden theater on Broadway where the play is running.  This means that the TV audience first has to acclimate themselves to a style of acting that makes perfect sense in a theater but no sense at all when filmed from a variety of angles in close-up -- it took me a half-hour to get used to the prosody and diction.  Second, the show is heavily dependent on newsreel footage of the HUAC committee hearings and TV interviews with the sinister and bullying McCarthy.  By contrast, Murrow is never shown in documentary footage, although, of course, he was a famous broadcast journalist and well-known to everyone.  Since much of the dialogue and speechifying in the play comes directly from Edward Murrow's interviews and broadcasts, this begs the question as to why not just show Murrow in contemporary footage as well and dispense entirely with Clooney's very good, but tendentious, impersonation of the man.  Third, the HUAC footage is often strangely undramatic -- in the climactic moment a questioner (Joseph Welch, counsel for the Army) denounces McCarthy for having no shame:  "Senator, have you no decency?"  You might imagine this as a thunderous moment, an epic climax to the battle in the Senate, and a highlight in American history.  But the interlocutor who pronounces those famous words has a high nasal voice, speaks in a sort of whine, and, appears on camera, as a stooped, wizened old man.  (Welch was, in fact, something of a performer -- he later was in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder in which he played the Trial Judge.)  In other words, the transcript of this confrontation is better than the actual footage.  Finally, the show is completely lacking in any real tension, suspense, or conflict.  Murrow never doubts himself; his side-kick Fred Friendly doesn't doubt the integrity of their stance against McCarthy.  Everything proceeds to a climax that is never in doubt and a fait accompli. Murrow is a plaster saint, a TV news Jesus who can do no wrong and Clooney plays the part in a smug, sanctimonious way.

The most dispiriting aspect of the show, however, relates to the parallels between the McCarthy era and Trump's kleptomaniacal and lawless regime.  McCarthy was a creature of the institutions that formed him and relatively easily discredited.  Trump controls all the levers of power and is infinitely more dangerous -- he is backed by an entire political party that has formed as a cult around him.  Further, he advances a culture war that doesn't seem to have been part of McCarthy's agenda.  Until this week, Trump enjoyed the support of the world's richest man. Simply stated, Trump is vastly more dangerous than McCarthy, poses a much more serious risk of damage to the United States, and enjoys far more support than the Junior Senator from Wisconsin.  On the evidence of Good night and Good Luck we are in a far more desperate moment right now than anything involving Joe McCarthy.  In fact, there are almost no parallels to much of what Trump is doing -- McCarthy didn't control the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, didn't have a private army of pardoned thugs to do his bidding, wasn't deporting people to foreign concentration camps, and didn't enjoy the support of a majority of the Supreme Court and much of House of Representatives and Senate. If, in this perilous moment, we must place our trust in resistance mounted by George Clooney and his like in the form of a mildly controversial Broadway play, we are in desperate straits indeed.  

(Good Night and Good Luck is a revival of a 2005 movie written and directed by Clooney.  Clearly, it's resemblance to events of today are purely coincidental.)