One of the most compelling ideas fuelling Billy Ray’s Shattered Glass (2003) – based on the life of disgraced journalist Stephen Glass – is how the vocation of journalism relies on transactional relationships. Ray’s film offers shrewd observations on the culture around newsrooms, where Glass brings cappuccinos for colleagues, helps them rewrite ledes and offers to go through their piece. This generous spirit makes him popular and one of the youngest associate editors at The New Republic, thereby allowing him to cook false stories during his stint of almost three years at the magazine. Glass knows something most of his colleagues don’t: as much as tenacity and curiosity are foundational values for a career in journalism, being a ‘people person’ also goes a long way.It’s something Hansal Mehta and Mrunmayee Lagoo Waikul’s Scoop understands only too well.Adapted from former Asian Age reporter Jigna Vora’s memoir, Behind Bars in Byculla: My Days in Prison, the six-episode series follows star reporter Jagruti Pathak (Karishma Tanna) and her editor Imran Siddiqui (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, modelled on Hussain Zaidi). As Pathak chases “page-one exclusives” day after day, she gets dangerously close to the people she’s reporting on and ends up getting sucked into a vortex of inconvenient truths around law enforcement agencies, underworld dons, and is reminded of a nation’s notoriously convenient amnesia. Along with Lagoo Waikul, Mehta is a great person for such material – given his sobering portrayal of journalists in previous works such as Aligarh (2016) and Scam 1992 (2020), in an industry that always ends up shortchanging them and taking away their humanity. In the first episode, the duo does a good job of calibrating Pathak’s soaring ambition, her rivalry with senior colleague Jaideb Sen (Prosenjit Chatterjee), her days comprising hanging around in ‘quarter bars’ with sources or appointments with top cops at Mumbai Crime Branch, and establishing her as a single mother trying to juggle her responsibilities. Known for supporting roles in TV shows for over two decades, Tanna understands Pathak’s hunger for ‘good work’ and, therefore, leans into the part. In the initial episodes, she looks effortless as she chats up constables about their families and, at an opportune moment, gets them to open up on ongoing investigations.Scoop comes at an interesting time, when there are serious questions over the credibility of the mainstream Indian media. In a society as polarised as ours, it doesn’t matter what anyone writes. There’s a mob of comments waiting under each story with the slightest trace of an opinion (or not). Even though the show is set in the early 2010s (before the fissures in Indian society became so easily visible) we do get the sense that in a country like India, the messenger always ends up getting killed. With the advent of social media and the ‘relevance’ of journalism being questioned by a society that sees neither ‘profit’ nor ‘value’, a show about a persecuted member of the press is undeniably important. A still from ‘Scoop’.However, there’s a gap between the show runners’ noble intentions and the show itself. What starts off as an intoxicating tale of ambition in maximum city, settles into the template of an all-too-familiar courtroom drama.She is accused of being a co-conspirator in Jaideb Sen’s murder months after she interviews underworld gangster Chhota Rajan. Rajan claims that Pathak coaxed him to order a hit on Sen because of their professional rivalry. Co-incidentally, this happens days after Sen is rumoured to be working on a story he unsubtly calls “Smoking Gun”. The system ganging up on Pathak to cover up a conspiracy is not a novel premise, even if it remains depressingly topical. In the latter three episodes, I kept searching for a distinct point-of-view in the way Mehta and Lagoo Waikul depict her struggles in jail and in court. Alas, there’s very little that is entirely unexpected.The confusion around a civilian being jailed, the intimidating legalese thrown at helpless family members, and that knowing look on a lawyer’s face bracing themselves for a long, uphill battle – there’s a sense of deja vu through all this. A surprising choice on Mehta and Lagoo Waikul’s part is how much of the struggle of her family members’ echoes a ‘90s film. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but as a show like Prashant Nair’s Trial By Fire (2023) has shown, it’s possible to invoke tropes of a bygone era with insights from our times. Even though Nair’s show is about the legal battle against the Ansals – a classic David vs Goliath filmy battle – the show gets its identity from the righteous rage of Shekhar and Neelam Krishnamoorthy (especially Neelam’s, played superbly by Rajshri Deshpande). A still from ‘Trial by Fire’.Comparatively, in Scoop, the character of Jagruti Pathak’s uncle (played by Deven Bhojani) doesn’t have any personality. None of the family characters are badly performed, but the show runners keep exploiting them for tears. A recurring melodramatic score featuring a sarangi plays each time they appear on screen, almost resulting in the show resembling a soap opera. Some of the blandness of the latter episodes taking place in the jail and courthouse, also have to do with Karishma Tanna’s performance. She hits her mark in a scene that would make any director ‘okay’ a take, but Tanna is rarely able to provoke a visceral reaction. As days turn to weeks, weeks turn to months, we can see the toll on Jagruti Pathak’s face. But I never felt the weight of the tragedy being inflicted on Pathak and her family, most of which feels largely cosmetic. Even though we see Pathak considering overstepping lines of ethics, there are no real flaws for the audience to suspect her. It’s a distressingly straight-forward character, often making her look like a “protagonist”, more than a flesh-and-blood person who was wronged.Scoop is at its finest in the early episodes, when it trains its eyes on the gaze towards Jagruti Pathak’s meteoric rise at her workplace and then her freefall in the public eye. Both situations seem to unduly focus on her gender. When she’s sourcing exclusive stories from top cops, male colleagues casually remark how she must be ‘sleeping with them’. In prison, she’s referred to as Chhota Rajan’s mistress. It’s a telling detail about the underlying sexism of our society, where if you’re an Indian woman trying to make your place in it, you’re always on trial.There’s a fair bit of media policing in the show. Characters throw jargon like ‘fluff piece’ in one scene, and an editor accuses a reporter of becoming a ‘mouthpiece’ in another. In one scene, Siddiqui tells two TV reporters to leave a hospital corridor after they somehow make their way in for ‘exclusive images’ of Jaideb Sen’s family. When he tells them to respect the privacy of a senior colleague, the reporters shoot back, “We’re just doing our job.” It’s a phrase many characters throw at different points in the show, prompting Siddiqui to clunkily go about invoking Jonathan Foster’s lines – “If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. It’s your job to look out of the window and find out which is true.”At a time when access to powerful individuals is equated with “competent journalism”, Mehta and Lagoo Waikul make their most stinging point by underlining the chasm between the two. We see this clearly spelled out in a subplot around a misguided cub reporter called Deepa Chandra (Inayat Sood), who goes from being a quiet junior around Pathak, to learning all the wrong things about a successful journalism career. We see her quit her job when Siddiqui refuses to run a speculative story by her, and then, in a different scene, we see her quit another job – grumbling how print media often attracts “holier-than-thou” types and that TV news might be the ‘right place’ for her. It’s an indication of how we’ve probably reached this age of primetime mockery. A still from ‘Scoop’.Apart from Tanna, the show features an intriguing bunch of actors. Ayyub as Siddiqui is fierce as the only character who doesn’t lose his marbles even when things get nasty. It’s a role that could’ve become boring in the hands of a lesser actor, but Ayyub radiates integrity even during some of the show’s weakest scenes. Harman Baweja as JCP Shroff is an interesting piece of casting – playing a slimy cop propositioning Pathak every instance he can, even though she rebuffs him repeatedly. He’s also a sincere father and an unheroic cog-in-the-wheel character, who notes the injustice meted out to someone innocent, but won’t risk his own career for it. Tannishtha Chatterjee and Tanmay Dhanania are solid actors wasted in poorly-written roles as the morally flexible journalists, but who also have a conscience buried somewhere deep within.By the end, it becomes impossible to look at Scoop and not think of Scam 1992 – given the phenomenal run of the latter. One can practically imagine a Netflix executive meeting Mehta in its aftermath, with the simple brief of “something like Scam 1992”. One might be tempted to confront the executive and tell them how filmmakers like Mehta do their best work when they’re not bound by diktats. But one can also already guess their response – they were just doing their job.
