When Louise Cousineau or Réjean Tremblay showed up in the newsroom of The Pressher smoking, him with his motorcycle helmet, we always felt a current of agitation among the journalists, a sort of excitement mixed with admiration and a little jealousy, yes.
These flamboyant news stars, like Nathalie Petrowski and Pierre Foglia, showed up and spoke loudly (especially Réjean on the cell phone), got into shock (Nathalie, of course!), railed against rival colleagues (all guilty!), recounted juicy gossip (hello, Louise!) and commanded attention from ten meters around.
It impressed me all the time. Seeing that I was breathing the same air as Nathalie, Pierre, Réjean and Louise whom I had been reading for so many years. Impossible !
The media star system has changed since the passage of these legends of current affairs commentary. And such larger-than-life characters no longer exist, except perhaps Patrick Lagacé, whose face covers the enormous posters of 98.5 FM along the highways.
Much more numerous than at the time when the Internet did not exist, today’s columnists drink artisan wines, no longer smoke cigarettes and run marathons all over North America (hello, Yves !).
Observation: the profession has become calmer, healthier and leans towards multi-platform hyperperformance: who has the time to set out on the brush with warm tavern beer, on a weekday evening, when there are three columns to write, two shows to co-host and a green juice to squeeze?
On Apple TV+, The Morning Show – The morningin French – presents a type of journalism star that doesn’t exist here, the multimillionaire journalist, always super busy and healthy, who carries an entire news channel on his shoulders.
Despite its flaws, I swallowed in one sitting the ten episodes of the third chapter of The Morning Show, the privilege of a columnist who likes natural wines that aren’t too funky, but who doesn’t obsess over his statistics on Strava. This is the best season of the three, with a touch of Succession not unpleasant at all.
Still located at the heart of the news department of the fictional channel UBA, the great intrigue of The Morning Show 3 concerns an Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos type techno billionaire, played by Jon Hamm, who tries to buy a TV network, between two trips in a penis-shaped rocket. A speaking image.
At the same time, a computer attack on the servers of the UBA station exposes all the emails and text messages of its employees, including those, very compromising, of the star presenter Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon), who is bathing in the hot water of the big cup serving as a setting for the fictional show The Morning Show.
My two favorite characters remain the slobbering, ranting boss Cory (Billy Crudup, who steals the show) as well as the news director Stella (Greta Lee), whose air time was finally increased, what a fascinating woman.
Now a host on the UBA+ platform, Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston) is (finally) emerging from the #metoo turmoil, but will fall into another controversy about media ownership and the independence of newsrooms, issues that this scintillating series is more thrilling than an FPJQ convention, let’s say.
A scandal of racial discrimination, where black employees earn less than their white colleagues, will also reach the board of directors, still led by the imperial Cybil (Holland Taylor), who hides skeletons in her email box, well, hold.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY RADIO-CANADA
Journalists Isabelle Richer, Marie-Maude Denis and Patrice Roy
Still in journalistic TV, RDI presents the first episode of its docuseries on Thursday October 5 at 8 p.m. The internswhich follows six reporters learning the profession from Céline Galipeau and Sophie Thibault.
At the helm of the eight one-hour episodes, Marie-Maude Denis fromInvestigation embodies the ideal mentor: caring, invested, funny, brilliant, this role suits her perfectly.
Same thing for the judge-evaluators Isabelle Richer and Patrice Roy, never mean, but fair and relevant in their remarks, we like to see them in a less formal setting than a news bulletin.
That said, the first episode of Interns, which shows the rookie selection camp, is long and focuses on candidates who we will not see again all season. We should have jumped onto the field more quickly.
And unlike Featured Or On call 24/7 at Télé-Québec, The interns stays too much in theory and does not put its reporters to the test of fire enough. Yes, the new kids are simulating a miniTV news by the sixth episode, the fact remains that this exercise does not recreate the intense pressure of producing a real television bulletin. Everything they produced was never broadcast or posted online by Radio-Canada.
Also, we often tell these trainees the importance of rigor! accuracy! impartiality! conciseness! and balance! which sounds, in the long run, preachi-preacha.
The best moments of Interns happen when reporters experiment with super concrete things. Like: how to shorten a text by 15 seconds, how to get around a controlling publicist, how to control your body language on camera or how to adjust your smile depending on the seriousness of the news you read on the teleprompter.
That, and the advice of Patrice Roy and Isabelle Richer, I would have taken more. A little more practical, a little less theoretical course, thank you.