Powerful people abusing power is hardly new. Heck, under a different label, one could call such “World History.” It seems old hat in our time because Donald Trump abuses power on a daily basis. Heck, that’s his jam – seeing what he can get away with before society finally requires pushback.
It didn’t used to be this way. Part of the problem is that some powerful people -especially Trump- have an entire media ecosystem predisposed to apologize and/or attack their accusers. Trump doesn’t even need to work to exact revenge upon opponents; a slew of unscrupulous people will do it for him. Something similar is -to a lesser extent- true of Prince Andrew, the Duke of York and Piece of Shit.
One cannot tell the story of Prince Andrew, Duke of York and Piece of Shit without mentioning Jeffrey Epstein, Ambassador of Rape. To be brief, in the case you didn’t know – Jeffrey Epstein was a very wealthy and influential star-collector and apex sexual predator. On the one hand, he hobnobbed with the rich and influential including at least two US Presidents and Prince Andrew. On the other hand, he trafficked underage girls for sexual purposes. This is where Prince Andrew comes in.
Motivated by downsizing, Newsnight producer Sam McAlister (Billie Piper) comes across a nine-year-old photo of Jeffrey Epstein and Prince Andrew (Rufus Sewell, barely recognizable here) and decides it’s time for the world to hear what Price Andrew has to say about his relationship in 2014 with then 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre. The meeting was engineered by Epstein, who sex-trafficked the latter to Prince Andrew.
In present time, Epstein was being held accountable, finally, by the US court system, which would make this interview a coup (from the perspective of Newsnight), and such was elevated ten-fold when Epstein was found dead in his prison cell. It is noteworthy that this particular interview represents the entirety of the accountability Prince Andrew would face for his lifetime of indulgence, at least some which was clearly not legal.
The other major player here is Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson), the woman tasked with interviewing Prince Andrew directly. As this interview is something Andrew had to agree to, all of BBC Newsnight -and especially Maitlis- had to walk a fine line, first convincing Andrew that his best interests 
were served by going public with his narrative, and secondly that the interview wouldn’t be a hit job. The corollary to this is nobody needs a barely apologetic puff piece where Prince Andrew looks like Trump being interviewed by Sean Hannity or Vladimir Putin being interviewed by Tucker Carlson. Neither of those interviews carry weight nor have any intrinsic value as the narrative is completely controlled by either the monster or a fanboy.
The actual interview given was among the most important and most viewed in BBC history.
Scoop feels like a film with a piece missing. We have the connection between Prince Andrew and Epstein. We have the interview about how Andrew feels about Epstein. What we don’t have is the investigation as to whether a crime has been committed. The film sort of assumes a crime has been committed and will never be resolved, thus the best we can hope for is a gotcha interview. This material, however, is not up to Frost/Nixon standards in either scope or reveal. History assures us that the interview was an extremely important marker in royal accountability, so perhaps I’m being harsh in my somewhat negative assessment. Again, here, however, it feels like the biggest pieces of this film are not on screen – the crime is missing, the investigation is missing, the aftermath is missing. What exists is women risking their careers for a not-quite-hardball interview and a remorseless powerful man essentially thinking he got away with it. The fact that he didn’t might get captured in a different film.
There was once a producer named Sam
Who feared the end of her programme
So she dug around deep
Scooped a talk with a creep
And her career was saved, hot damn!
Rated TV-14, 102 Minutes
Director: Philip Martin
Writer: Samantha McAlister, Peter Moffat, Geoff Bussetil
Genre: Famous interviews
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: BBC Newsnight employees
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: The powerful who fear being held to account
