When the “visuals” consist of Farrow sitting at a microphone talking to a source, Catch and Kill is fine. The story that Farrow was reporting and the story of Farrow’s challenges reporting that story are so good and so essential that it’s possible, if not always easy, to ignore how thoroughly any sense of differentiation between the two has been lost through various recountings, and how Bailey and Barbato’s attempts to expand the podcast visually in the transition to television range from negligible to borderline laughable.
There’s a whole episode primarily dedicated to the fact-checking process at The New Yorker, meaning that not only is Catch and Kill a Hollywood story, a love letter to investigative journalism and an espionage thriller, but it’s also a modern update on Bright Lights, Big City. Subsequent installments focus on the travails of other reporters trying to crack the Weinstein story ( The Hollywood Reporter‘s Kim Masters is the star of the second episode), NBC News’ compromised decision to kill Farrow’s story, and the shady covert forces allegedly employed by Weinstein to threaten reporters and quash various exposés.
The series starts with Filipina-Italian model Ambra Gutierrez, whose recording of a scary encounter with Weinstein should have been a smoking gun years before the actual smoking guns. "He Had a Preternatural Ability to Detect People's Vanities": An Excerpt From Harvey Weinstein Biography 'Hollywood Ending'īut if the podcast was basically the audiobook, only with people besides Farrow doing voices, and the audiobook was basically the book with Farrow doing voices, and the book was basically an extended footnote for Farrow’s reporting … it’s easy to be interested, somewhat easy to be entertained, and very difficult to quite see the purpose of this HBO incarnation.ĭirectors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato take us through the Ronan Farrow basics again, bringing in many key figures who will be familiar from every previous step of this story.