Netflix's 'Scoop' is Unenlightening Entertainment

Scoop tries hard to convince you it has something important to say about Newsnight’s Prince Andrew interview. In November 2019, the flagship BBC news and current affairs program interviewed Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, about his well-documented connection to convicted sex offender and alleged mass trafficker of underaged woman Jeffrey Epstein. (By this point, Epstein had avoided prosecution by committing suicide in his cell.)

The Netflix dramatization of the events leading up to and the immediate aftermath of the interview, titled Scoop, is deeply aware of how scandal-hungry and exploitative it might look to be bankrolled less than five years after the interview. As a result, the film works overtime to stress Newsnight’s journalistic rigor; Scoop extols the noble nature of state-supported British journalism and is definitely not a voyeuristic rehash of when we gawped at the royal pedophile! Scoop acknowledges the slight anxiety from a true-crime-eager streaming audience that, you know, this is all a bit crass, and instead of implicating that desire for scandal, insists that it’s a Very Important Film about journalistic practice.

It’s clearly not the case – Scoop is as investigative a creative exercise as a single Tweet and more than once veers into exceedingly poor taste. In terms of post-Spotlight news reporting movies, it’s a couple of notches below She Said and The Post and miles away from the heights of The Insider, Zodiac, or Shattered Glass. It’s an excuse to get celebrated actors and proven Netflix darlings (in this case, Gillian Anderson as interviewer Emily Maitlis and Rufus Sewell as Prince Andrew) to act out all the insane bits from the Newsnight interview, giving a prestige sheen to a laborious and incurious film.