The theatrical version of Good Night, and Good Luck, adapted by George Clooney from the film he directed 20 years ago, was broadcast Saturday on CNN, marking the first time in history that a Broadway play has been shown live on television. The play’s a dramatic and creative triumph, well-acted and staged with a couple of exceptions. But as an implicit allegory for modern times? It comes up short.
The 2005 movie version of Good Night and Good Luck was the second film Clooney directed, and it showed a talent and promise that’s been mostly missing from the majority of movies that he’s directed in the years since. The ’05 movie is one of the two great movies about CBS News (and the other, Michael Mann’s The Insider, could be made into a great play, especially if Al Pacino agreed to star in it).
Clooney portrayed CBS producer Fred Friendly in the movie, but now steps into the lead role of Edward R. Murrow, who David Strathairn played in the movie. The switch is a concession both to the actor having reached the right age and the economic realities of modern Broadway, when the presence of a movie star is often required to put butts in the seats and recoup investors’ money.
The play, very faithful plot-wise to the movie, is about the moment in 1953 when CBS News’ Murrow went after Joseph McCarthy at the height of the Red Scare, against the resistance of his bosses at CBS as well as their sponsors.
The play and the movie take us into the offices of CBS News, as Murrow and his colleagues plot how to take on McCarthy at his height, while also trying to avoid McCarthyite inquests into their own lives and histories, as many of them appear to have had minor leftist ties at one point or another.
It’s compelling and dramatic, once again portraying McCarthy only in archival footage. While the movie was in black and white, the play still looks and feels a lot like the 1950s, with lots of cigarettes and scotch.
But just as the 2005 movie was meant as an allegory about the post-9/11 era, the Iraq War, and the suppression of dissent in the Bush-Cheney era, the Broadway version’s meant as a commentary on the Trump era, and especially its assault on the news media. Like Cabaret, or Fiddler on the Roof, it’s one of those stories that’ll we be relevant at every time it’s staged, for a different reason.
Don Hollenbeck (Clark Gregg), the doomed CBS news anchor, has a line about feeling like he fell asleep four years ago, and all the smart people moved to Europe, which led to an extended applause break from the Broadway audience, as did just about every monologue by Murrow.
At a moment near the end, when Murrow delivers a speech at a dinner, the screen behind him flashes forward to a montage of world events that would take place over the next 70 or so years, everything from the Kennedy Assassination to the Iraq War to Biden advisers attesting to his sharpness. This is unnecessary. It turns the subtext into text in a way that takes one out of the moment. The 30-plus seconds of thunderous applause that follows was unearned.
I get that this appeals to wealthy liberals who go to see the most expensive Broadway shows (and also, for that matter, those who watch CNN). But that’s obvious to anyone watching it. That message doesn’t need to be spoon-fed to the audience, as I imagine it was during both the pre-show and post-show on CNN. The entire implication of this project is… why won’t anyone in the media do what Murrow did, with Trump in the McCarthy spot in the analogy?
The idea put forward by Good Night, and Good Luck is one that sits at the foundation of The West Wing and pretty much all politically-adjacent writing that Aaron Sorkin has ever done: That the solution to all political questions is for a middle-aged man of stature to go on television and give an eloquent speech.
The truth is, people in the media do that all the time, in the Trump era and just about every other. And it doesn’t usually work. Keith Olbermann did it, on a nightly basis, throughout the Bush Administration, even borrowing Murrow’s signoff of “Good Night and Good Luck.”
McCarthy was a buffoon, who later crashed out for unrelated reasons, and didn’t have Trump’s staying power. Trump isn’t someone who can be definitively defeated with One Great Speech from a journalist. Though ironically, George Clooney’s intervention in the 2024 presidential election, when he wrote an op-ed exposing that Joe Biden appeared infirm and didn’t recognize him at a Clooney-hosted fundraiser, was against a Democrat. Also, it was also likely the only action by a celebrity that made any difference in the race.