Escape From The Newsroom
CBC October 28
Ken Finkleman’s Newsroom was a barbed portrayal of the underbelly of Canadian news. His format was that preceded and equaled by the Larry Sanders Show and since succeeded by numerous other, lesser performers.
There’s a certain attitude about the Canadian news, in particular that of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, this attitude that it is the most reliable, honest, truthful, pure, and untainted source of information in the world. Finkleman takes great pleasure in not only cracking that image, but shattering it into a world of shallowness and pettiness rivaled only by, perhaps, Hollywood.
The original Newsroom episodes were a scathing indictment of the w’s 5 production of the news. The who’s only matter if it’s a celebrity while the what’s only matter if it’s shocking or exploitative (or exploitable). The where never matters. The when matters only if you’re on the story first. And the why is best left to someone else to figure out.
In Escape From The Newsroom, Finkleman’s thinly veiled alter-ego George is back in the domain of public broadcasting, back in his old role as producer of the 6:00 news, and back as the pre-eminent neurotic man in denial. Unlike, say, a George Costanza from Seinfeld or a Woody Allen of your choice, Finkleman’s George is completely unfamiliar his neuroses, and avoids anything that relates directly to him thinking about himself in any other fashion than superficially. George takes great pains to be as shallow as possible to avoid having any feelings at all, be it joy or pain.
The other characters in the Newsroom are really peripheral to Finkleman’s George, as is noticed by the casting shift from the series to this movie. Some characters are back, some are missing, some are new, but really, they all serve the same role: to act as set up to George’s folly.
Escape From The Newsroom Comes at a time when sentimentality for older shows reappearing as television specials or tv movies is at its highest, yet, unlike a Carol Burnette special or an LA Law revival, Escape acts as much a parody to this trend as it is to the “newsmaking” process itself.
Finkleman, you can tell is taking pot-shots at his audience, those who want to see the moronic news anchor Jim back (even though he was shot in the head, and last seen flatlining at the series’ end) are being laughed at and not pandered to by his appearance, when it seems, unbelievably, the bullet in his brain has made him ever-more inept. Also, the obligatory references to the old series are evident, especially in a scene where George relives the suicide guy episode, and pitches suicide guy’s movie to Atom Egoyan (here hilariously spoofing himself as the high-art, snobby-ass director we’d all expect him to be… the Scary Movie 2 line is killer).
What also makes Escape different from other TV revival-of-the-week movies (like the Beachcombers maybe… where’s our “Learning the Ropes” or “Check It Out” revival huh???) is that it is so… so… Finkleman.
Finkleman writes with his inner monologue set to “verbose” and it shows, as three-quarters of the way through a thoroughly enjoyable if not entirely groundbreaking film, the fourth wall is broken. If you don’t know the fourth wall, that’s basically the television term for the camera (ie. on camera you see three walls and the camera’s on the fourth wall), or coming outside of the production and witnessing the production itself.
Finkleman’s toyed with the fourth wall before, mostly a 3rd and a half wall, wherein his character blurs the line with the real him. But here he literally comes outside the production and looks at the whole silliness of revisiting a past glory for sentimentality, and not art’s sake.
There’s a whole fictional fourth wall story that parallels some of the production story that is even funnier than the scenes that came before it. There’s a scene in which Finkleman and his P.A. sit in a meeting with CBC head honchos who begin with saying that they would never think to compromise one of their artists’ works. That said, there’s a few changes in the script we’d like to see…
Then we break into a completely over-the-top “give-them-what-they-want” restart to the movie that quickly bursts into one of Finkleman’s trademark self-exploration fantasies which are both incredibly deep and incredibly odd at the same time (kind of Lynch-esque).
Finkleman has said that he didn’t really want to revisit the Newsroom, but did it anyway, if only for the exercise, but quickly found himself bored with the idea of treading familiar ground, so he decided to take off on a more… interesting journey. By the end, however, Finkleman found himself engaged enough by the process that he’s planning a second Newsroom series, which, depending on your affinity (or lack thereof) for the man, is definitely news of some kind worth reporting.