This six-parter on Sky Documentaries is the latest iteration of Ronan Farrow’s work on exposing Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein as a serial sexual predator. Farrow began his investigation as a reporter for NBC. When that network refused to air his reporting (they claimed it wasn’t in a fit state, but the suspicion has always been that they too became one of the many institutions unwilling or unable to withstand Weinstein’s intimidatory tactics), Farrow took his story to the New Yorker who published his exposé in October 2017. In 2019, his book Catch and Kill was published, which detailed not only Weinstein’s crimes but the astonishing lengths he had gone to to try to stop Farrow’s investigation, including having the reporter trailed by members of the Israeli security firm Black Cube. That became a podcast, and the podcast has now become an HBO docuseries about the film producer who – for decades – used his power and influence to sexually harass, assault and rape women.
Except it hasn’t, really. It’s become a filmed podcast. You could close your eyes for the entirety of the three episodes made available for review – and I imagine the remainder – without losing anything of note from the experience. It is mainly interviews with the people involved in the investigation, be they survivors of Weinstein’s predations, such as Rowena Chiu – whom he attempted to rape in 1998 when she was a 24-year-old assistant at Miramax – or fellow journalists who helped Farrow build his case, like Ken Auletta and Kim Masters, who had both come frustratingly close to unmasking him years before. Visuals tend towards transliteration – a closeup of the buttons on a receiver when people are speaking about a phone call; a police badge when a woman reports her experience to the NYPD; swirling ink in water when someone settles down to write. None of it illuminates or adds anything to the story.
But what a story it remains. The size of Weinstein’s ego, influence and malevolence, the extent to which every young woman who crossed his path seemed to appear to him as fair game, the raging entitlement – which turned to entitled rage whenever a quarry managed to elude the grotesque’s clutches without slaking his desires – remains breathtaking. As does the number of enablers, blind eyes, deaf ears, legal interventions, secret payouts and non-disclosure agreements that were required over the years to keep Weinstein free to roam.
On the flipside, the diligence and the dogged, painstaking work done by Farrow to uncover the contours of the story, and then to prove it, is a reminder of what good investigative journalism can do and the power of the press to help right wrongs. We see Farrow accumulate and cultivate contacts, and witness the support offered to women who then felt able to go on the record about their sufferings. All of this proves uplifting, inspiring, and occasionally high-stakes. The part played by Ambra Gutierrez – a model who was assaulted as a 22-year-old in 2015 by Weinstein, and who agreed to wear a wire for the police, thinking fast in the most fraught of circumstances – could be the basis for a Hollywood thriller all by itself.
Oddities and oversights, however, remain. There is no attempt, for example, to give the material a fresh spin by contextualising it within current events. The story still ends where the book and podcast ends, without reflection on what has happened with, to, or because of the #MeToo movement in the years since.
And, more importantly, Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor are conspicuous by their absence. Yes, of course, the subject of Farrow’s show is his investigation but it was the two New York Times reporters who actually broke the story – after their own painstaking inquiries, building detail, pulling threads together over months – five days before Farrow’s New Yorker article appeared. In a story all about finally acknowledging and listening to women’s experiences and voices, the decision to leave these two (to whose work, it should be noted, Farrow contributed, as Auletta did to his) out of the picture is a jarring one.
As a primer for newcomers, or a recap for those who want one, Catch and Kill: The TV Series of the Podcast of the Book of the Article works fine. But there is a sense of missed opportunity – whether to show what has changed since, or how far we still have to go – that makes it slightly less than the sum of its reused parts.
