michaelcarraher

The early episodes are excellent. Well paced. Fast moving. Interesting stories. Great characters, Then, the pacing is slower. They take longer to tell the story and longer to get to the point. Plus the episodes are padded with "flashbacks" from previous episodes and the percentage of time devoted to flashbacks keeps increasing. Plus later episodes get really preachy and the characters are two dimensional white and black hats. Story lines get predictable and repetitive. The final episode is unwatchable. Start watching and feel free to bail out when you get bored. If you are hoping it will pick up again, it won't.

A good biopic about Murrow could have been made. Actually, it was made already. By HBO in 1986. This movie is too narrowly focused and lacks depth. We learn nothing about the Murrow-Paley relationship which would help us to understand the actions of either in this film. Clooney spends far too much time on old film clips of Joe McCarthy and on extraneous and irrelevant clips of a jazz singer. (If he had to use music to set the tone of the 50s, he'd have done better with clips of his aunt.) The film is full or errors (see goofs). This is a Hollywood pretty boy trying to be a serious film maker and instead offer self-indulgent BS, that would barely get a passing grade in film school. See "Murrow" with Daniel J. Travanti instead. And Edward Herrmann makes a much better Fred Friendly than does Clooney.

OK, the producers of this show wrote the Dick Van Dyke Show. Problem is they produced this show and didn't write for it. It's not funny. The characters are one dimensional. Carl Reiner wrote about the writing staff of a prime time comedy-variety show because that's what he knew. Apparently, nobody connected with this show had any experience working in radio (unlike WKRP, even though that experience was about 20 years out of date). The situations are dull and not believable. Amazon Prime is showing it now so we can all see how bad it was.