“The idea of a televised investigative proceeding maybe feels a little obsolete when so many people already had so much access to what happened,” said Rebecca Adelman, professor and chair of media and communication studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Designed as a riveting legislative docudrama about an event that most of the country saw live 18 months ago, it tried mightily to break new narrative ground in a nation of short attention spans and endless distractions.īut did it? Can it? Even with gripping, violent video and the integrity of American democracy potentially at stake, can a shiny, weeks-long production that prosecutes with yesterday’s news - news that has been watched, processed and argued over ad nauseam - punch through the static and make a difference today? 6 hearings was, in essence, a summer rerun. Presented in prime time and carefully calibrated for a TV-viewing audience (itself increasingly an anachronism), the debut of the Jan.
on the East Coast, once a plum spot for the most significant television programming in the land. Hired to package it all for the airwaves: A former network news president. New and damning revelations designed to eliminate all doubt.